Geologists from Planet Earth

Geology as a journey through generations - Adrian Finch

• Julie Hollis

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Adrian Finch hailed from South London and - in his own words - started out utterly hopeless at fieldwork. His lifelong love of crystal structures led him to research into car catalysts and superconductors, before settling on the Arctic for a love affair with geology that, despite hurricane-force winds on a remote Greenlandic nunatak, proved irresistible. It's a testament to stubbornness, mentorship, and an unyielding passion for understanding the Earth. 

Teaching resources (questions prompts) for 12-16 year olds can be found here: https://www.tes.com/resource-detail/resource-13276404

Julie:

What do you know about geology? What does a geologist do? And who are these people who are so interested in rocks? In this podcast, I ask geologists from around the world to tell the stories that mean the most to them. And, well, it turns out they're not who you might expect. The remarkable things they've done, the experiences they've had, and the passion that every one of them feels for the planet that we live on. But it's not about what I think. You decide for yourself. My name's Julie Hollis, and you're listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.

Adrian:

Hello, I'm Adrian, and I'm a geologist.

Julie:

Hi Adrian, tell us your story.

Adrian:

Well, I suppose I'm not the obvious choice of person to become a geologist. I grew up most of my life in South London, a place called Catford. None of my parents were outdoor people at all. had an interest in nature in the broadest sense. And I was a bit of a magpie in the sense that I liked collecting things. On one of our holidays, and I can't remember when it was, I must have been about five or six, we went to Lyme Regis and we started collecting fossils along the shore there. And that absolutely fascinated me. They were tangible reminders. The amount of time that I actually spent collecting As a child, actually collecting things was very trivial compared to the amount of time that I spent researching the items that I'd collected and trying to find out more about them.

Julie:

So your interest in geology started with collecting fossils. How did that progress?

Adrian:

Then I became interested in collecting minerals. And, you know, let's be honest about it. It was sparkly minerals. It was sparkly things that were attractive. I was fascinated by all the different types of minerals. And from that, I became interested in chemistry. I think I was about 12 or something, 11 or 12, we started to do chemistry at school. And I recognized that minerals in many cases are very simple chemical compounds. And I remember chatting to my chemistry teacher and bringing some of the minerals I collected in and discussing them with him and being able to realize that these were just simply natural chemical compounds. And that fascinated me. And it gave me a real lead, if you like, when it came to exams in chemistry, because I'd already been interested in crystal structures and chemical elements and formulae and things like this from my mineralogy. So it felt very natural when I came to choose A-levels. It was very natural for me to be thinking of doing chemistry and physics.

Julie:

Where did this lead in terms of studying geology?

Adrian:

I started to get a field for wanting to go to university and my first choice was to go and do chemistry and i sort of if you'd have cornered me just as i went to university and asked me what my career was likely to be i'd probably said i'd been a chemical engineer or working in some form of the chemical industry but in my first year so my first year was at durham university i had the option to do an alternative subject and it was very obvious to me that i would attempt geology But I'd never been taught geology before, and I wasn't quite sure whether it would be a subject that I wanted to do. But I thought, yeah, let's give this a go. And I didn't perform particularly well in it. And the thing that I found most difficult about geology was dealing with such a wide range of different aspects. So geology is the decathlon of the sciences. You have to do a bit of chemistry and a bit of physics and a bit of biology. And As I looked around the class, I always felt that everybody else was better than me at this. But to be honest, I realized that there were some bits of it which I was very good at, notably the geochemistry, and I wasn't very good at the soils. But what I realized was is that there was nobody in the class that was comfortable with every aspect of what we were doing. And I was... taught by a number of lecturers. One of the more senior members of staff was called Henry M. Elias. He had worked for the Greenland Geological Survey in the 1960s, and he'd been part of these pioneering groups of geologists that were given effectively whole areas to study with very little briefing as to what they might find. And he illustrated his lectures with a views and examples of the geology from Greenland. And I was fascinated by this. The visual impact of this, the nature of the science was exceptionally dramatic. And I looked at that and went, wow, I'd love to go somewhere like that. But the one thing that I really wasn't prepared for was fieldwork. Having come from the middle of a city where You know, if it starts raining, you dive indoors immediately. Even when we went on our holidays to Scotland, if it started raining, we'd just get back in the car again and go and find a cafe. I still remember the very first field trip that I did, which was in my first year. You know, I was supposed to be at the bus at a certain date and I turned up there and And everybody else was wearing all these strange clothes, all these really bizarre sort of odd, and they had these bizarre boots on the likes I'd never seen before. And I had exceptionally naively just turned up in my normal gear and everybody else was kitted in outdoors gear. And somebody said, haven't you got any walking boots? And I went, what are they? So the idea of being outside and having all of this protective equipment was completely foreign to me. And I was absolutely drenched on that first field trip. I still remember now just being so wet. I was so cold and so wet and so miserable that I just thought to myself, why am I doing this? Why am I here? And at that point, chemistry appealed dramatically as a career pathway.

Julie:

It sounds like that could have been a bit of a deal breaker for your geology career. But here you are. So how did you overcome that?

Adrian:

I took advice. I asked colleagues and friends about all of this kit that they had. And I started piece by piece to get the kit together. I kind of sort of felt that this was an obvious weakness for me. So I tried my very best to improve as fast as I could with it. So that first field trip, I was supposed to be taking notes. My hand just turned blue and solid. My notebook just turned to papier-mâché. And with the help of people that were very serious and very experienced field geologists, people like MLS and others as well, they gave me advice on how to keep my notes dry, how to not get soaking wet all the time. I went from someone who was an absolute disaster in the field and I really, really put the effort in and I really worked on it so that by the time I graduated, I felt that I was a pretty competent field geologist.

Julie:

So where did you go from the end of your studies?

Adrian:

Yeah, when I came to the end of my degree, I had that moment that many graduates have when they ask themselves, what shall I do? And I was inspired by the idea of working in the Arctic. So I went to Henry Amelaus and said, what's the possibility of a PhD in Greenland? And he put me in touch with a couple of his colleagues and students who had gone on to become professors in their own rights. And I applied for a PhD and... I was accepted for a PhD. Initially, I started at Aberdeen University with a professor called Ian Parsons. And then I moved with him to Edinburgh. So I actually graduated at the end of my PhD from Edinburgh University. And that was based on an extensive field program, which took three months, actually, in 1988. It was my first field trip to Greenland. I had the support of other colleagues there. I felt rather concerned before I went out that this would be a step too far, that I really wasn't a natural choice for this type of work. You know, we all have the devil on our shoulder that tells us we're rubbish. But I realised very quickly that I was as good as anybody else on the team.

Julie:

And what was your experience of Greenland once you made it there?

Adrian:

There were two things that really attracted me. And the first one, I have to be honest, is the visual aspect. strikingness, the way the landscape looked in projection. It looks superb. The first approach from Greenland is from Iceland. And we flew over the Iceland, over the Greenland ice cap. And as I looked down out of the window, it's just pure white with a couple of rocks sticking up as little points up through the ice. And I remember looking at that going, oh my goodness, what have I done? And I looked out of that and went, Wow. Okay. But you find as you're coming into land that the snow and the ice starts to withdraw. And then you start to see quite a lot of rock. As you come into the final approach on the airport, an airport called Nassau Swack in this case, you begin to find that it starts to become rock. As I got out of the other end, I was surprised how warm it was. It was about 15 degrees. It was beautiful rock everywhere. There was icebergs in the fjords everywhere. And it was remarkable. The air was so clear. It was remarkably clear. You had very little sense of distance. You could see for miles. This seemed to be the outdoors of a different level than anything I'd ever seen before. But also the questions which were being answered by research in Greenland. Henry M. Elias, who was my tutor, he was an igneous geologist. So he was studying the insides of old volcanoes. And what had happened in Greenland is that there had once been a long rift environment, a continental rift, not dissimilar to today's East Africa. But around about 1.3 billion years ago, this rift was active. And in the time intervening, what had happened is that all the volcanoes had been eroded away. And we lost about three or so kilometers of the rocks above Greenland. really beneath the volcano. So what was exposed in Greenland was the insides of the volcanic systems, if you like, the guts of the volcanoes themselves. And what MLAs and others like him were able to do was to explore and to find out what happens underneath volcanoes today by studying what had happened several kilometers deep beneath the surface in those volcanoes in the deep past. So the attraction to me was not just that it was a beautiful environment, but that we could really open up and understand very fundamental questions about how volcanism worked and how volcanoes worked in the hidden part of it, the bit that's kilometers underground, the bit you can never study by going to an active volcanic environment today.

Julie:

You made it through a PhD working in Greenland. Where did you go from there?

Adrian:

My PhD was in mineralogy and geochemistry, and I recognized that I had skill sets in crystal structures. And my career at that point took a rather interesting turn in that I became interested in synthetic crystalline solids. So I ended up working for a chemical company. company called Johnson Matthey and I was working in their research group. I was working operating electron microscopes for them but I was working on different projects and they were things like looking at car catalysts for example. I was working on some of the earliest car catalysts. I was working on some of these rare earth bearing magnets and the development of some of those and again what I was doing was essentially good old-fashioned petrology using electron microscopy which I'd done using thin sections of rocks. And I was now applying it to synthetic materials. So I did that for about a year. And I enjoyed my time in industry. It set me up. It gave me a slightly different mentality to that of working in academia. I got a phone call after I'd been at Johnson Matthey for about a year saying that there was a position coming up at Aberdeen University in the chemistry group there. And it was working on superconductors. And I found that they were receptive to the idea that someone bringing in skills from earth sciences to what is essentially a synthetic system was something they were very receptive to.

Julie:

So you were a geologist, a geochemist, working with chemists who didn't have geology as a background. How did you find working in that environment?

Adrian:

I realised very quickly that there are certain skills that earth sciences has which are not necessarily that intuitive. to other physical sciences. So the earth scientists, you know, the first thing we do when we collect a sample is get out a hand lens and look at it very, very closely with a hand lens to study it visually. And my instinct studying synthetic materials was to do exactly the same. I'd pull out my hand lens and look at it. Whereas the chemists, it wasn't natural for them to do that at all. They would simply take the material and then start inserting it into various technical instruments, which would measure its purity and things like this without ever having looked at it. And it was very obvious to me, sometimes you could learn a great deal just by looking at it. I remember one seminar, it was one of the group seminars, and the group had produced a new superconducting material. And they knew it was superconducting, but the problem was, is that this particular recipe had provided a very intimate mixture of two chemical compounds in there. When they measured it, they realized that it was superconducting, but it must be one of the phases that was superconducting. And they didn't know which of the two materials in the synthetic charge was the actual superconductor. And at the end of it, the presenter asked for any suggestions on how they could do that. And I remember that some of the professors in physics and chemistry were suggesting various analytical methods They tried it. It didn't work. Couldn't really solve that. And in the end, I put my hand up and George is in the back. And I said, what color is it? And he said, well, one of the phases is sort of black and the other one is green. And I said, well, it's the black one. And he said, well, how do you know that? I said, well, because superconductors are all black. I'd realized, you know, making my own superconductors that there was a particular blackness, an exceptionally black blackness. when something was really, really going to work as a good superconductor.

Julie:

How did you end up moving back into field geology again?

Adrian:

I worked on superconductors for two years of my career. And at the end of it, I just saw an advert for a lectureship in geology. And I thought, you know what, I'll give that a go. And I was delighted when I was called for interview. And I realized that I had missed fieldwork. So I applied for this lectureship. And I was delighted when I was offered it. So I started to plan and to execute field expeditions to greeners. And I did that in most of the 90s. Led my first expedition in 95 and then again in 96. We were exploring these issues of how the insides of volcanoes work. So I was picking up the baton in many ways. that those that had come before me, notably Henry M. Elias and also Brian Upton, who became a mentor to me in my later years, these questions that they'd invested their lives exploring, I was fascinated by the opportunity to be able to pick up that baton and run with it further. And that's where I targeted my efforts and targeted my career. Where were you working in Greenland? I was invited as part of an expedition to go up to an area called Motzfeld. And in some parts of Greenland, there are cliffs which are over a kilometre high. And this is one such environment. It's a very extreme environment. The area we were studying is a nunatak. And a nunatak is essentially an island of rock sticking up through the inland ice. And we had the inland ice on three sides. And in the summer... The lake at the bottom thawed and we ended up with a lake on the fourth side. I could stand at the top of a cliff and literally look over and see a drop that was over a kilometre deep. That's an astounding environment to work in. And what were you working on there? Underneath every volcano is a volume of liquid that we call the magma chamber. We don't quite know how deep some of these are. but we know that many of them are something of the order of two or three kilometers in depth. And here in Motzfeld, we had the top of one of the chambers and the slice was so large that we could actually go right from the top of the chamber down into the middle of the chamber. And I could study what was happening at the top of the chamber and then compare that with processes that were happening in the middle. So Motzfeld became to me one of the most important natural laboratories that I've studied in my career. Now, that's the good news. But the bad news was that being a kilometer up in the air on a piece of rock, sticking out through the inland ice is not the most comfortable environment in which to be. The weather there, it was typically freezing. So you had to be prepared to tolerate freezing. a certain degree of discomfort to work there. And most of the time, the weather was pretty benevolent to us. It was cold and there was always a pretty stiff breeze most of the time. But very occasionally, there would be katabatic winds or what are known as fern storms, which is when a low pressure tries to climb up onto the inland ice and it gets blown back again. And under those circumstances, the winds become extreme. And they actually get to hurricane force. So there we were stuck up on top of this rock, very, very exposed position. We had to camp next to water. And I found a sort of little melt water lake, which we camped next to. I set up the camp there. And then when this storm blew up, it was so extreme that there was no way you could stand in it. We did the only thing you can do in those circumstances, which is basically buckle the tents down, zip them up and stay put. And it blew for about a day, but the wind was so strong, it was picking water up off of this little meltwater lake. I could see the wind literally picking buckets of water up off of the surface of the lake and belting, pummeling the far end of the lake with this water. And the wind was coming over the promontory and it was edgy and swinging in very unusual ways. And so occasionally I recognised as I was sitting there watching it, the water was being picked up and being carried towards us, that this is actually against the direction of the wind was blowing. But because it was eddying in such strange ways, it was picking the water up and throwing it sideways. And then when the storm got to a more severe position, it was actually emptying buckets of water over the tents. And at that point, the weight of the water, one by one, all of the tents that we had snapped one after the other. And it was the poles that were going every time. So we had three tents for four people. We lost the first tent. So then we had two tents for four people. And then we lost the second tent. And then we had four people in a two-man tent. At that point, I began to think, okay, we're actually quite exposed here. And then a big bucket of water hit the tent. And I remember seeing this snap and the pole of the tent sort of had like a jagged point and it went straight up through the outside of the tent. And then it created like a little pocket in the outside of the tent and the wind went straight into the pocket and lifted the entire tent. And there was a ripping noise. And next thing I know is that the whole outside of the tent is gone. Oh, no. And we were all just sitting there on the ground looking up at the cosmos. And that was it. There was no tent anymore. There was just the base of it left behind, which we were sat on. And at that point, I realized that we were in trouble. This is not a tenable situation. I remembered experiences of the generations before me that had been to Greenland. You just have to lie down on the ground and hunker down. So we tried to lie on the ground, but every so often a bucket of water would come and empty itself over us. And the wind was also so strong that when the tent effectively blew apart, all of the equipment that was in the tent also went with it. We lost cameras in sort of like soft, quite light bags, and they just took off with the tent. not only had we sort of lost the tent, we'd lost all of our equipment as well. And we were still getting buckets of water, very cold water, emptied on us. And I thought, okay, this is not tenable. So we're going to have to move from here. So the plan we really worked on was that we would try and take the bottom of the tent, which was still pinned to the ground. We would pull it up. We would carry it, try and find a dip in the ground, and try and bring the base over our heads to try and give us a bit of protection. So we found a hole in the ground and that was good. And the good news was, is it fitted three of us. And the bad news was that there were four of us. So the three of us went in and the fourth person laid diagonally across the other three. And then we pulled the base over the top of us. And actually, when I was under there, I thought, okay, this isn't very comfortable, but this is tenable. So we stayed there for another day and eventually there was a sense that it was still blowing, but the real power, the way it was lifting the water off of the lake was ebbing. And the other thing was, is the lake was now almost empty. And I'd noticed when I'd visited this area once before that I'd sort of not really understood what it meant, but I realized that the water on the lake was very variable. Every time we looked at it, it seemed to have a very different level of water in it. And after this storm, it was essentially empty. And it made me realize that effectively it gets blown out by these storms. And then over the intervening period, it fills back up again with water. Fortunately, I always keep the emergency radio in my pocket. I climbed up to a point where I could get a decent signal and I called for a helicopter to come for us. And it couldn't come immediately. It was still too blowy. But we knew that we were going to be lifted out. After just literally about a week, we're back at the airport again, sitting there. wondering going wow what happened we got the helicopter to take us back after the storm had blown out and the strangest thing was is that when we went back it was so still you could hear a pin drop and then we picked up what was left of our camp we found equipment strewn over an area of about two or three hundred meters where it had blown and hit a rock or something like that and stopped We visited the area subsequently. And for every year since, I've always gone back and found more equipment that we got blown away at various distances, sometimes several kilometers away. We found bits of equipment from that camp where it blew apart. But you kept returning to do fieldwork again? The following year, I'd been invited on a trip to Hawaii to study the volcanoes there. And what happened was I compared my experiences where we'd spent a small fortune Lost all our equipment, got nothing achieved with a trip to Hawaii where we stayed in a beautiful, lovely sort of villa on the seashore, eating in restaurants every night. And it was cheaper than going to Greenland. And I remember thinking to myself, you know, is this really what I want? And the thing about it was, is I asked myself whether I wanted to face up to this. And it took me about a year of really thinking about this, whether I should go and move my field area somewhere else. But I realized that I did have a love affair with these environments. And okay, and love affairs can be bumpy things sometimes. And I realized that I did want to go back. I looked at it again and I thought to myself, life throws you challenges like this. And the question is not whether or not you're going to face challenges, but how you respond to them. And I decided I would go back. It's a bit of a life lesson as well as a geological lesson that sometimes life throws you these problems. And it's then up to you how you rise to that challenge. Do you accept that there's an easier way out of this, there's an easier life to be had? Or do you go, no, actually, I'm quite stubborn. I'm going to go back and I'm going to do this properly second time around.

Julie:

When you look back at your journey to becoming a geologist and the people who mentored you along the way, what stands out for you?

Adrian:

I've felt very strongly that I'm part of a community, a series of generations of geologists. I've referred explicitly to some of my mentors, Henry M. Elias, Brian Upton, Ian Parsons, who were very important in inspiring me and giving me the skill sets and the confidence to work in an environment like this. I'm confident that the next generation of geologists will take over. They will learn from my mistakes as I learned from the mistakes of the people that came before me. And the likes of Upton and MLS were inspired by some of the really early pioneers like Ussing and even Giesecke who went to Greenland in the 1800s. So I feel very much part of a family of geologists that are using this environment to understand not just the geology of Greenland, but the geology of the world.

Julie:

Adrian Finch is a professor of geology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, specialising in research on mineral deposits that form in volcanic rift environments, including rare earth elements, and with a particular focus on fieldwork in the Arctic. My name's Julie Hollis, and you've been listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.