Monsoons, Mountains, & Civilizations with Peter Clift
How do the largest mountains on Earth drive one of the greatest climatic events witnessed
by humans? How can studying erosion avoid the next economic collapse? Dr. Peter Clift,
professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, shares how he uses sediment samples from oceans, rivers, and land to link the development
of the Himalayas to the intensity of the Asian monsoon. (Transcript below.)
Listen to the full episode below, and subscribe to LSU Experimental on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn or anywhere you get your podcasts.
LSU Experimental is a podcast series that shares the research and the “behind the scenes” stories of LSU faculty, student, and alumni investigators across the disciplines. Listen and learn about the exciting topics of study and the individuals posing the questions. Each episode is recorded and produced in CxC Studio 151 on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU Communication across the Curriculum and LSU College of Science. LSU Experimental is hosted by Dr. Becky Carmichael and edited by Kyle Sirovy.
Transcript
Becky Carmichael
[0:00] This is Experimental, where we explore exciting research occurring at Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. today Dr. Peter Cliff professor in the Department of geology and geophysics, discusses his research on Asian monsoons and how geologic sediment records can aid and reconstructing environmental changes.
Peter Clift
[0:22] The Asian monsoon is one of the greatest climatic phenomena on planet earth today, and its history has been linked to the development of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau over long periods of geological time. These mountains are the largest known on earth since the Pan- African mountains formed 600 million years ago. The rise of the Himalaya has driven the intensification of the monsoon, while at the same time the rains themselves have sculpted the mountains and controlled their structure and the timing of their development. The monsoon is also affected by the oceanography of the Indian Ocean, as well as by global climate. And it's not clear whether the climate in East Asia, China, Japan, Korea, has evolved in quite the same way as what we see in South Asia, in Afghanistan, India and Nepal. In the present day, the majority of mankind lives under the influence of the monsoon. And so understanding what processes control the weakening or strengthening of rainfall across this region is not only of academic interest, but also of importance to society and to the global economy. How monsoons react to the gradual warming of the global climate, and the present time is unclear, and we can use the geological record to see how the rainfall has responded to periods of rapid warming and sea level rise in the geologic past in order to predict what might be happening in the near future. My research involves going into the field and collecting samples of sediment, sometimes in the ocean, sometimes in modern rivers, and sometimes on land or from rocky outcrops. We use the samples to reconstruct how erosion and chemical weathering have changed through time. And across both short that is thousand year or long millions of year timescales. We use a variety of chemical and mineral analytical methods in order to pinpoint where the sediment is coming from. And then by analyzing a series of samples, we can see how this has changed through time in order to understand the impact of changing climate. One of our favorite methods is to date the crystallization ages observed on minerals in sand, as these are particularly unique certain source areas. At the same time, we analyze claim minerals here at LSU. In order to constrain the environmental conditions, as these are generated in the soils, which are controlled by humidity and temperature. By combining a number of different mineral and chemical proxies, we get to derive a relatively robust reconstruction about how a given River Basin may have evolved through time. Although the development of plate tectonics 40 years ago resolved a lot of problems that geologists have in understanding how the solid planet has developed over long periods of time. The same theory has left open many questions about the interaction between the solid planet and the liquid and gas envelope around that. It has become clear that these interactions are not a one way street, and that if we are to understand how the world's largest mountains have developed, then we have to use the sediment record to see how changing climate has affected erosion and weathering, which in turn feedback into the tectonic evolution of planet Earth. On shorter time scales the same records can help us track how the environment has changed over hundreds or thousands of years. initial research suggests that periods of rapid environmental change have been linked to times of societal collapse. In light of our recognition of rapid environment change in the present day, it is important that we have some understanding about what controls the climate in the most densely populated part of the world. Geologists are uniquely well placed to answer these questions and extend reconstructions over longer periods of time, then can be easily tackled by climate models. It has become clear that the earliest urban societies such as the Indus Valley Civilization, in modern day Pakistan and India suffered major collapse in the wake of rapid weakening of summer monsoon rain and winds. The geological record shows us that the Asian monsoon rainfall had increased and collapsed on relatively short times intervals in the past. And we know this fluctuation is linked to times societal disturbance or even the collapse of governments.
In the context of the present changing climate, it's important that we understand
how the monsoon has changed through time. The geological record shows us that Asia's
monsoon rainfall has increased and collapsed on relatively short intervals in the
past. And we know this fluctuation is linked to times the societal disturbance, or
even the collapse of governments. In the context of the present changing climate.
It's important that we understand how the monsoon has changed through time, because
the majority of mankind rely on its regular summer rainfall in order to sustain their
cities, and agriculture. Although some of these aspects can be modeled, those models
are only as good as the data which is put into them. And that is primarily derived
from Marine sediment records that can be used to reconstruct how the environments
have changed over the past few thousand years.
Becky Carmichael
[5:44] Dr. Clift. Thank you so much for joining me today. Can you tell me a little bit about who you are? And how did you get to LSU?
Peter Clift
[5:52] Well, it's nice to be here, Becky. And yeah, I've been at LSU for about five and a half years now. I came here after a long career in academia, both in the UK and in the US. I did a PhD years ago at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where I was looking at the tectonic geology of Greece. And that was a very pleasant but, it didn't have a lot of scientific development ahead of it. And so after I was finished with that, I started working on marine geology, which seemed like a more productive field. And so I stayed a bit in in Scotland for another three years. And at that point, that was when I made my first leap across the pond, and I ended up working at Texas A&M for a few years. And then later for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who it was a pure research institute, so I didn't have to teach class. And I was there for 10 years. And then I ran away back to the UK I spent seven half years in Aberdeen, in northeast Scotland, where I was professor of geology, and in some ways similar to Louisiana, not in climate, but another oil patch sort of place. And where the folk in the geology department like to work on those sort of problems. And then I saw this advert for a job here, a friend of mine, who I'd worked with years ago, encouraged me to apply. So I came for a visit. And I guess well, here I am. It all went well.
Becky Carmichael
[7:31] That does sound like it went well. So did you pick your first site when you said you were doing your research in Greece?
Peter Clift
[7:39] Mhmm.
Becky Carmichael
[7:40] How did you pick Greece to go and do your research?
Peter Clift
[7:43] Well, I always was excited about tectonics, I had always seemed I always liked plate tectonics, this idea of all these blocks floating around and smashing into each other and causing mountains to form. And by that point, this was in the late 1980s, I guess people had worked on the really big collisions, and it seemed like smaller blocks. The more complicated geology of the Mediterranean and actually, also California was popular at that time. But I live much closer to the Mediterranean. And there was a professor in Edinburgh who needed a student to go and look at tectonics in Greece. And I thought, Oh, my favorite topic. And sounds like a nice place to work. I've had enough field workout in the rain in the UK, and I thought my life rocks, but I'm not so fond of it when it's raining all the time. So I thought that sounded good.
Becky Carmichael
[8:36] That sounds so what part of Greece were you at?
Peter Clift
[8:37] In the Peloponnesus. I. I was a lucky man. I had two of the best archaeological sites in Greece were in the area, the amphitheater at Epidaurus. And the famous Mycenaeans. At Mycenae, they're the age that is, I'm sorry, this Minoan civilization, I think he had the best, this famous lion gate is one of these classic archaeological sites, which is yea very popular. So there were lots of tourists in the area. And I got to spend six months there looking at rocks and eating moussaka and staring out at the ocean, it was very pleasant.
Becky Carmichael
[9:15] That sounds like a very pleasant experience. Peloponnese is beautiful, too.
Peter Clift
[9:19] It is. Those guys know how to cook. They were very pleasant. And at that point, it was also ridiculously cheap. My living expenses. for the whole day were about $15 a day, it was almost nothing. It was crazy. Yeah, I wish I could do work like that, again.
Becky Carmichael
[9:36] How has each place really helped shape the questions that you're addressing now?
Peter Clift
[9:43] Well, Each place has made an impact on me, although usually takes a little bit of time since getting to know people and hearing their ideas. And it's sort of like a, like an infiltration, almost like marinating in the environment. So it takes me into the wild, often to figure out what's good. So but I have drifted in my interest, partly, essentially out of tectonics and more into climate research. And that's partly because I think that a lot of the tectonic problems have been solved, and that it's fiddling with details. But it seemed to me that climate was much more problematic, and, and complicated, and that this was a worthy field of investigation. And also there was research funding associated with it. So that never hurts. And I did like the weird concept that about this sort of feedback. So it seems easy to think about how mountains poking up in the air might cause the atmosphere circulation to change that seemed easy. What I found weirder was the idea that no rainfall patterns would cause the mountains themselves to change that the location of faults, or just what the whole architecture, big mountains look like, appears to be largely driven by climate and surface processes and not by plate tectonics, after all.
Becky Carmichael
[11:08] So you and I were talking a little bit beforehand about the weathering of a mountain. And so you said that, you know, the formation of the mountain occurs and there's, you would calculate it approximately how long it takes for a mountain to completely erode away? Can you walk walk me back through that conversation?
Peter Clift
[11:32] Right. So well, I guess I'm, I'm interested in this the long term development of the earth and, you know, where does the continent? Where did the continents come from? And how do they build? Are they are they getting bigger through time? Are they steady, or what's the history of that. And so I was curious to know, not only sort of on the shorter time on the millions of years, if that is a short time, over that sort of time period, how quickly the rainfall and the erosion, change, what the architecture of the mountains like, but I was also interested in how quickly these features are removed entirely. So what we can do is essentially, you can see how much extra crust there is, if you crush two mountains together, then you thicken things up. That's why mountain stick up in the air because they have a big buoyant root on the bottom. And so there's essentially everything's much thicker under a mountain. So in order to make the mountain go away, you have to remove all that material. And so we can play, we can begin to estimate this, when we look at erosion rates, which we get from looking at marine cores and, and seismic data from ocean basins, because you can look out in the Mississippi, for example. And we can estimate, for example, how much how much sediment has arrived in the Mississippi Delta over the last 2 million years, for example, we can bet an oil company can tell you that. So we know essentially, how quickly rock is being exported out of North America and dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. Well, if I do a little back of the envelope calculation about how much extra rock is in the Rockies, I can probably tell you estimate how long it's going to take the Mississippi to dump the Rockies into the Gulf of Mexico. So we can then walk to San Francisco without having to go up hill at all. And the magic number, which kept cropping out was about 100 million years, which is quite a long period of time. But when you think the earth is 4.6 billion years old, you've got the potential for several cycles in there. So that's one of the things I'm I'm interested in using these marine records to look at that long term recycling of that crust.
Becky Carmichael
[13:45] So then thinking about that type of that type of cycle and the number of cycles that you could have, and in 4 billion years, what are some of the ideas on how those cycles have shaped the climatic conditions? Are you able to examine that from some of the cores that you're sampling yet?
Peter Clift
[14:05] Yes, we can get handle on that. So it turns out because, well, it's a virtuous cycle, because it turns out that as you erode rock from the mountain as rains fall in the Himalayas or something, so those rock particles are then washed onto the floodplains. And then they begin to break down, there's a chemical degradation, a chemical weathering, and the process of turning minerals into either dissolving them or into things like clay as a product or the breakdown of minerals. And that process essentially suck co2 out of the atmosphere. So it is believed that one of the reasons that the Earth has been cold over the last few million years for the ice ages, is a is a direct effect of the uplift of the Himalayas, driving down global climate, making it colder and colder over 50 million years or so it's not something that happens overnight. But when again, if you have 4.6 billion years, you've got plenty of time to do things like that. So that is that by looking at how the chemical weathering has changed through time, which we can do we have we have core material that we can see what what is the relationship between the mountain building the chemical weathering, and the climatic cycles, and there's so much the better of you can look at them all in one core, then you don't have any problems correlating between the two, which is rather good.
Becky Carmichael
[15:27] So what are some of the places the locations where you've been able to? Or have you been able to see that in some of your cores?
Peter Clift
[15:32] Yeah, so we've had some success. Recently looking at this in the southwest and South China Sea. Essentially the effluent coming out of the Mekong... The Mekong, it’s a nice river it trundles through some countries with very tasty cuisines, and then starts its journey up in the Tibetan Plateau. So we like the Mekong, and also I'm fond of the Mekong also, because not many other people think about the Mekong, which is a bit strange, because it's rather large. But it doesn't mean that I don't have much competition. The other place that we've looked at it, or we're beginning to look at it in more detail now is the Arabian Sea, offshore western India, and sometimes offshore Pakistan, too, near the river mouth. And that's particularly popular because there's a really good climate record that has already been established for some time in the Arabian Sea. So everything that anything that we can learn about erosion or weathering or mountain building can be immediately correlated with the monsoon record. So that's, although it's a sort of a slightly feisty part of the world have been pirates and all manner of strange things happening offshore there, offshore Somalia, and Arabia and Pakistan. But if you have the wherewithal and to get there, the rewards are pretty good.
Becky Carmichael
[16:50] And that's something I am going to, I want to ask you a little bit about because you've mentioned the food and the interesting locations that you've been. But one more, one more question that I wanted to ask you in regards to short term long term that is related to this, these monsoon seasons as well as climatic conditions. So from the records that you're able to examine in the sediment. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you are reading short term changes? So those thousand to you said 110,000 years versus the long term changes? Are you able to correlate any kind of see any kind of similarities among those changes from the regions?
Peter Clift
[17:38] Yeah, so we do see some similar processes going on at different time scales, that the short term records are in some way, a little bit humbling, because you get to realize how quickly things can change. And you do wonder, Well, if I see all this action going on in the last 12,000 years, you know, when I start to look at 30 million, how many of those complicated cycles, can there possibly be embedded in all that. So fortunately, Earth is a little bit kind to us in this respect, because this, this rapid flipping is mostly related to the ice ages, which are mostly been mostly restricted to the last couple of million years. So that means actually, before that time, the world is essentially a little bit more boring, and little bit more stable. So that makes the longer term reconstructions actually feasible. Otherwise, it would be probably very depressing to be a geologist. But we do see some similar things. I mean, essentially, to a large extent, the heavier the monsoon rains are, the stronger the erosion, the more chemical weathering, there's been the more drawdown of co2. And so we do see some commonalities, whether we're looking at 10,000 years, or whether we're looking at 5 million years.
Becky Carmichael
[18:50] And one of the other things that you mentioned in the monologue was regarding the societal effects that these monsoons have, have had. For someone who's listening is not a geologist why is what you do. crucial?
Peter Clift
[19:06] Well, we are interested in looking at how these early civilizations have responded to the changes in climate and actually that that is not a resolve this year. So there are different proxies that people have used for looking at climate. And it's not always clear, which are the most reliable and robust. And so we're always looking for sort of new, better higher resolution records that will span periods of human history so that we can directly compare one to the other. There was a very famous study about 10 years ago now where people look to the late call in China, and were able to correlate periods of heavy and weak rain. And essentially, every time the rainfall plummeted, and there was a big drought for decades of time that they mostly correlated with the end of Chinese dynasties, which was a little bit upsetting. So we'd like know a little bit more about things like that. And so that the, yeah, essentially, this is a beginning topic, really, it's a new field, really this ability of geologists and archaeologists in particular, to talk to each other and to, so that the guys who have my broken clay pots and the rock diggers can put their heads together and maybe see if there's some sort of coherent link or not, we have to be careful not to sort of make links where there aren't and And of course, you things are usually more complicated than just rainfall. But, you know, it's not always climate related, obviously. But it does impact society in the economy more than we might think. And sometimes it like is indirect. It's not simply just a question of the rains failing and people starving to death or something like that. Sometimes it's just a question of, you know, several years of bad rains result in like the grain price going up, and then people don't have enough money to feed themselves. And then they're out in the streets, rioting. So it is complicated, but that's exciting is one of the nice things about being an academic researcher is that I don't have to keep working on earthquakes, you know, I can do something new and, and this is new and exciting and gives gives me something to keep myself and my students busy for several years.
Becky Carmichael
[21:20] Well that definitely, I think leads to some interesting collaborations and some interesting discussions that you can have. The other thing that this has been interesting, and you know, I've talked about this before, is the different locations you've been able to travel? If you had to pick if you had to pick one location, what was your favorite, and why?
Peter Clift
[21:39] Right. My favorite places, that's easier. My favorite place to do field work is Ladakh in northern India. It's up along the Indus River right up on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, essentially, where the river comes out, as of Tibet. And it is Shangri La, it's, you sit in this valley at 10,000 feet staring up at 16 thousand foot mountains around you, with glasses pouring off. It's very pretty, the people are really nice. There's actually some quite good food, you can get a cold beer in the evening. The climate is very pleasant. It's usually in the mid 70s, during the day in the mid 60s at night, low humidity. And for a geologist, it's it's a rock desert. So essentially, I mean, there’s mountains, but you can see everything. So you don't have you don't have to wonder what's behind that bush or why there's all this grass all over my rocks. I mean, you see everything, it's terrible for the local farmers. But for for geologists, it's marvelous. And it's also very safe. Except for maybe, you know, there's a lot of curvy roads and abilities to plummet of hills and so on. But if you watch your footing, and you're driving, there's no real reason that you should have any problems. And it's just very pleasant, relaxing place.
Becky Carmichael
[22:55] So that leads me to the question of what's the most dangerous thing or dangerous situation you've been in? In terms of your research.
Peter Clift
[23:04] I did once have a rather sketchy experience in Pakistan when we were doing a bunch of work out there in the Pakistani Punjab, and we were driving back to Karachi one day, and we stopped to have tea, actually, our police escort which, we needed a police escort, wanted to take tea. So that wasn't unusual. But as we were having tea, my student went to the bathroom. And then he came back, and he insisted we get in the truck. And I thought, you know, were having our tea, you have to wait. And he was quite insistent. So we got in and I asked him, What, what was all that about? And he said, Oh, where he'd been to the bathroom, and he was the only Pashtun speaker in the group. And basically, the guys in the tea shop, were phoning their friends saying, Please, you know, come quickly, there's an American here. And they were he was immediately thought, This is not good. So he can came back and sort of said, you know, and the police were useless. Basically, they were just a bunch of old men. With some rusty looking AK-47s, we didn't have much faith in them. So he basically came back and said, I don't know what that's about, but I don't want to find out. So let's leave. So that was a little bit spooky. Otherwise, most of the dangers have been weird things I've had for dinner that made me feel really bad and extremely nervous, some mountain rides overpasses, and but so far, I have yet to plunge off one. So fingers crossed.
Becky Carmichael
[24:31] My fingers are crossed to Peter, I don’t want you to go plunging off a mountain. So. So when you have these kinds of, you know, field hazards, if we will. What kind of what kind of, like processes? What kind of permits Do you have to?
Peter Clift
[24:49] That depends completely on the country. So in China, you need permits for everything, and you need really need a local collaborator, and everything is very formal. Same is mostly true in Vietnam, oh, they're a little bit more relaxed. And I'm lucky I'm one of my old students is a professor there. So he smooths all the bumps for me. In Pakistan, it was quite formal. That's how we had the police escort. So it just depends on where you are.
Becky Carmichael
[25:15] What are some of the advice that you tend to give your students with their if they're getting into geology, if they want to pursue a career in this area?
Peter Clift
[25:25] Well, in some ways, my research is sufficiently broad that I always say that the students are in a good state, whether they want to go and work for Exxon Mobil or whether they want to work for the USGS or stay in academia, or whatever, because I that's my thing is broad. broad field, we don't have a speciality, really. So it allows them to apply their skills in many different fields. And I think generally speaking, that is healthy for the students to maintain a broad interest across a number of sub disciplines are getting too specialized too early, is a mistake. I mean, maybe not everybody should be as generalist as me, eventually, you probably do need to be a specialist in something. But I would delay that as much as possible. And that allows us to work with a whole feast of collaborators in various universities, both in this country and overseas. And that’s sort of one of the appeals to me.
Becky Carmichael
[26:28] And I imagine that that collaboration, one the flexibility with that you've had, because not specializing getting too specific to one niche has allowed you the flexibility to travel and just pursue questions that were really of interest, but also the collaborations you've been able to form that's also I'm sure has aided in you being able to go to different places around the world,
Peter Clift
[26:53] Right. I mean, I've built up good relations, particularly in China and in Vietnam. And although we worked informally with India, to the professor's don't really care if I have permission either, so. And of course, I do have lots of friends in Pakistan to they just advise me not to come at the moment, because it's too dangerous for I don't pass as a local. So I am waiting for things to come down.
Becky Carmichael
[27:17] What’s some of the best advice you ever you have ever received do you think?
Peter Clift
[27:20] The best advice I had, as a scientist was remembering that you can't do everything and to and to work on subjects that other people cared about. So you know, it's all very well to indulge your own interest. But if nobody else cares, then you're probably a waste of time. And even if you can get some funding to do it, it may not last very long if it's too obscure. So making it I guess the key thing is remembering is my work making a difference to the way other people do their work? And if the answer is no, you should probably change your subject.
Becky Carmichael
[28:02] Or you can reevaluate.
Peter Clift
[28:04] Yeah, right.
Becky Carmichael
[28:05] How could I reshape this so that it is more applicable.
Peter Clift
[28:08] Right, and also focusing to a certain extent trying to work on one or two things. This was a mistake I made early on when I was trying to work on like five or six things. And essentially, there's not enough hours in the day to do five or six things well. And that you might feel... I either used to feel like I was repeating myself unnecessarily. But other people don't feel like that. But it's better to pick, pick your target and work on it until you get some good results. And that's what I would say,
Becky Carmichael
[28:40] What do you like to do for fun?
Peter Clift
[28:42] I like to cook. And I like to play croquet and I like to ride my bicycle. And I like to travel and take photographs. And I'm cunning you see. My field areas are not entirely chosen purely for scientific reasons, it is helpful that the world's biggest mountains are in some of the places I like to go. Because the big mountains gives you a great excuse when you were a geologist. But I wouldn't go if it was boring. I go there because it's interesting. So I do like reading about history. That's the other thing. That's always been a passion of mine. If I wasn't a geologist, I'd be a historian. So I like to go. And I like to read about history and take photos, and then enjoy the cuisine.
Becky Carmichael
[29:28] Do you put your photos online anywhere?
Peter Clift
[29:30] Yeah, there's a lot on Facebook?
Becky Carmichael
[29:31] Oh, um, well, I know I enjoy seeing beautiful places.
Peter Clift
[29:36] I should probably put some more up somewhere that people don't always have to be my friend. But we do have some on our little group web page. But that probably we need to work on that a little bit.
Becky Carmichael
[29:47] I can hook you up with something there.
Peter Clift
[29:49] Sounds good to me.
Becky Carmichael
[29:49] Yeah. So I also am going to be interested, we're going to have to do some kind of cooking exchange or something. Because I i think that that was always interesting. I think it's always nice to when you're traveling, you get to meet new people, you get to taste different cuisines. Yeah, I'm happy when my belly is full.
Peter Clift
[30:10] Vietnam is my favorite at the moment. They have a uniquely splendid combination of giant river deltas, and tasty food, especially seafood. So and there are not many other people working in Vietnam to so it's no cop. It's like a It's my dream combination. It's bizarre after the bad history of Vietnam in the latter part of the 20th century. Now it's become like cushy and pleasant. And they are the locals are also very friendly to Americans. So it's, you know, I give them the thumbs up. That's my favorite vacation at the moment
Becky Carmichael
[30:42] you share, you want to let that out. I mean, because that might attract more people.
Peter Clift
[30:46] Oh, yeah, no, no. It's long, at least there's a lot of beaches in Vietnam, it will be a while before it's all blocked out. It's almost about 2000 kilometers along the coast. So there's plenty of plenty of places to lie out and eat the shell fish.
Becky Carmichael
[31:00] Sounds pleasant.
Peter Clift
[31:01] Great.
Becky Carmichael
[31:02] Peter, is there anything else that you'd like to share with anyone listening?
Peter Clift
[31:06] I would just like to thank my wonderful students for all the work and help that they do, and, and good luck in their future endeavors. And I'm looking forward to working more with you and indeed getting more new bright students to come enjoy the fun we're having here at LSU.
Becky Carmichael
[31:24] I think that sounds wonderful. So thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, we're going to get together and we still need to go and have some lunch.
Peter Clift
[31:33] Sounds good to me.
Becky Carmichael
[31:34] Alright, thank you.
Peter Clift
[31:35] I'm hungry every day.
Chris Dellinger
[31:38] Experimental was recorded and produced in the KLSU Studios here on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU's Communication Across the Curriculum, and the College of Science. Today's interview was conducted by Becky Carmichael and edited by Chris Dellinger. To learn more about today's episode, subscribe to the podcast, ask questions and recommend future investigators, visit cxc.lsu.edu/experimental