Robert S. J. Sparks

Session 1

Doel:

And let me begin. This is Ron Doel, and this is an interview with Robert Stephen John Sparks… Steve Sparks. I should say Sir Steve Sparks, now.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

And today’s date is the 31st of July in 2018, and we’re making this recording at the University of Bristol in England. And I wanted to note immediately on the transcript that there is a prior oral history interview with you that Paul Merchant did as part of the British National Life Stories Project back in 2012, roughly nine hours of interview [Paul Merchant, “National Life Stories: An Oral History of British Science. Professor Stephen Sparks.” Reference number C1379/89, British Library, London, Oct. 2012]. We’re not going to be covering what’s in that interview, which included your childhood and undergrad, PhD training at Imperial College, the postdoc position at Lancaster University of Rhode Island before your appointments at Cambridge, then here at Bristol. That interview was particularly strong in recording the research you did in volcanology…

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

…and the work at Montserrat. But I do want to ask a number of questions that weren’t raised in that interview. One of the themes not covered in-depth there were some of the service activities that you were involved in with different professional organizations, including the Royal Society and the American Geophysical Union.

I’m curious, though: back in your childhood, you were roughly 8 years old when Sputnik was launched.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

Did you have a memory of that at the time?

Sparks:

I can’t say I did. I mean, when… I’m not sure what was in that interview, but I was… I had a very bad injury when I was 6 and was hospitalized for about six months.

Doel:

Indeed, that was covered at the interview.

Sparks:

And I went… so, I don’t really remember. You know, of course, I remember Sputnik happened, but I don’t remember it as being a sort of pivotal moment. I think the lunar landings were more… I remember being more excited when they happened.

Doel:

Right. And you were a teenager at that point.

Sparks:

I was a teenager then, that’s right. So, my science then was, I think… my sort of gradual interest in science really emerged from going… you know, going into the mountains and being in a Roman city, Chester, where they had a nice museum. And I went to the museum, saw Roman artifacts, could dig them up in my garden.

Doel:

Because that was what you could do in the area where you were growing up.

Sparks:

That’s what you could do in that area.

Doel:

Did you have a particular interest in the space program as it unfolded in the 1960s, or was it something you were generally aware of?

Sparks:

I was just generally aware of it, and I think in the… yes, in the ’60s, early ’60s, when I was a teenager… yes. I mean, I was aware of it. I wouldn’t say it was something that was really foremost in my mind.

Doel:

One of the issues that didn’t come up in that good early interview… was there a library in your house when you were growing up?

Sparks:

There were a lot of books. My father read a lot, so books were easy to get, and he encouraged me to read novels and books. So, we had a decent collection, yes.

Doel:

Do you remember any in particular that you enjoyed?

Sparks:

Oh. I suppose when I was very young, I think my first books… which I really got sort of avidly interested in… were books called Just William stories by Richmal Crompton, which is a… not sure if that ever got to the USA, but it certainly was very popular for, if you like, kids aged 8, 9, 10, 11. Basically, William was a rascal who got up to all sorts of tricks with his friends. And I remember sort of really enjoying that. That was when I was younger. Moby Dick, I remember reading that. Very exciting… I was excited about that. Yes, so what other books? Again, rather young. I can’t remember the author. Was it Sewell, that Black Beauty, about the horse that was…

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

There was Winnie the Pooh. My father liked Winnie the Pooh, so he would read that. And Sherlock Holmes, of course. My father was a great Sherlock Holmes fan. And I remember reading the Sherlock Holmes stories very—you know, when I was a youngster—and really enjoying them. And I liked solving the mystery, solving the puzzle, and the uncovered crime, and all the great images that the Sherlock Holmes stories have. So yes, Sherlock Holmes, I think, would have been another one I really enjoyed.

Doel:

Have you continued to be interested in mysteries, or was that limited to when you were growing up?

Sparks:

Well, I think… yes, I haven’t become an avid reader of crime novels or anything like that. I mean, I do have a strange family connection with Sherlock Holmes.

Doel:

I’m curious.

Sparks:

Okay, so in a way, he’s a sort of relative. My father spent quite a lot of time in Cornwall, and at that time, a friend of the family… his family—my grandfather and so forth—were, as it turned out… great grandfather, I should say, was someone called Sidney Paget, who was the artist who illustrated the Sherlock Holmes. So that was a sort of long friend of the family. And evidently, some distant relative of ours was the model for Sherlock Holmes in the original sketches for the Strand magazine.

Doel:

That’s interesting.

Sparks:

[laughs] So, you know, this sort of rather gaunt-looking chap with his pipe and so forth.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

So, there was a sort of a rather vague family connection and apparently my ancestors were friendly with Sidney Paget.

Doel:

That’s interesting.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

Were you also reading in the library in town or at the school?

Sparks:

I did what most kids did in those days. You went, you know… secondary school in particular, you do English literature courses, and you’d have set novels you’d read. I remember we had David Copperfield, we had Macbeth as our Shakespeare play. I think… so you’d get… I remember reading Catcher in the Rye. We had a sort of more progressive English schoolteacher who thought, you know, that Salinger’s portrait of a teenager would go down well with the teenage boys. And I remember enjoying that. And then more… I also enjoyed more gothic literature. I remember reading quite a lot of Edgar Allan Poe stories, short stories. So, what else? There were things like… who is the author… Day of the Triffids? Wyndham, was it?

Doel:

I think.

Sparks:

Yes, [John] Wyndham. There were those sorts of ones. Something like, sort of popular science-fiction, gothic type of novels, that area. So yeah, so that was more in the sort of teenage era, as it were.

Doel:

Were there magazines coming into the house that you remember?

Sparks:

We took the papers, and I think we got the Guardian, that Dad used to buy. And we had magazines of various sorts. I don’t think very highfalutin magazines. I was very… as a teenager, I was very keen on soccer, so I had some kind of soccer magazine, and earlier on, of course, all kids of that area would have read The Beano and those sorts of comics when you’re sort of 8 or 9. So, I can’t really remember any… now, I can’t really remember any particular magazines. I remember Dad used to get Reader’s Digest, which was quite a… it sometimes had interesting articles.

Doel:

I’m curious: did you have a television set in the house from the time you were remembering growing up?

Sparks:

Yes. I remember we got a very early television set when I was about… because I know we moved from a place called Harpenden, Hertfordshire, to Chester when I was about 5. And we did have a television set, a very early one, in the house in Harpenden. I just very vaguely recollect watching a show called Andy Pandy, which was very popular with little kids at that time. And then we did have a TV when we moved up to Chester. But I’m not sure I did a huge amount of TV watching. I obviously watched some shows, but because I was into sport, you know, getting out and so forth…

Doel:

Yes. And that was covered quite well in the earlier interview. I was just curious: were there any other television programs when you were a teenager that you remember particularly having an interest in?

Sparks:

Oh, well I suppose with the television theme, again, it’s very sort of lowbrow. But one of my father’s favorite shows was called Z-Cars, which was a TV cop show based in Liverpool. It had a very distinctive theme music. And he used to like that, so I’d watch that. I got quite involved in that. It was a very early kind of cop show.

Doel:

Shows that have become much more popular.

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. Yes. And we’d watch things like… again, my father liked some… he was interested in politics, so we’d watch things like the very early versions of a show which still runs, called Panorama, which was a current affairs program in the UK, which deals with topical issues.

Doel:

And again, because your earlier interview covered so many of the details in your secondary school, we’re not going to repeat that here. But I wanted to turn to a few issues that weren’t covered as well, such as when you went to Imperial. You mentioned some of the faculty who were influential were John Ramsay and John Sutton.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

Also, his wife, Jane Watson, and of course, George Walker, who becomes your PhD…

Sparks:

Yes, he was a sort of mentor, yes.

Doel:

I was curious: did you meet them as an undergrad only in the classroom or immediately after or before, or were there more social interactions with them?

Sparks:

Not much. I mean, we met them largely in the classroom and on field trips. We’d… and that’s, of course, on geological field trips. As an undergraduate, you get to know the staff better through that. So, I went on field trips which involved George Walker and John Ramsay, and I got to know them a bit. But I can’t remember a lot of socializing with academic stuff. George was very helpful and got… took an interest because we organized this expedition to Iceland, which I think I must have covered in the other interview.

Doel:

You did. That’s quite important.

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. In fact, I am planning to go with the three guys I went to the expedition with next year. We’re going to have a… it’s the 50th year since we went there, so we’ve all agreed that we’re going to go to Iceland for a few days to mark the occasion. So, I’m going to go with my three friends who… you know, we went on that expedition. [SS written addition: Note that this trip was cancelled due to my wife becoming very ill in 2019 and I became her carer.]

Doel:

That’s excellent.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

What I’m curious about too: as you began to read as an undergrad to understand the field, how did you come to sense what was important? How much guidance were you getting directly from the faculty, and how much was it your own exploration as you began to learn about Earth science?

Sparks:

I think it’s much more of my own exploration. I think with the exception of George and some extent John Ramsay… I would take George Walker and John Ramsay as the sort of, really the inspirational figures at the time. But it’s quite interesting, because when we were being taught at Imperial College—this was in 1970 and 1971, second or third year, where we were being taught… we were taught extraordinarily little about plate tectonics. And I remember going to the library in Imperial College and reading… is it all of… there’s the… what’s the classic subduction… Oliver and Sykes…

Doel:

The Isacks, Oliver, Sykes…

Sparks:

Isacks, Oliver, and Sykes.

Doel:

The 1968 paper.

Sparks:

Yes, and I found that paper myself and read it up.

Doel:

That’s what I was very curious about.

Sparks:

We weren’t being taught about that. In fact, John Sutton was largely telling us about geosynclines… geosynclines and mountain building. We got a bit of… we even got a dose of vertical tectonics. We were taught remarkably little about plate tectonics. It was much more classical geology. And even John Ramsay, at the time, was teaching us about… if you like structural geology… and of course, superb teacher and a brilliant man, very inspirational. But he was talking much more about how trilobites get squashed when you reconstruct the strain ratio from the deformed trilobites, or plotting stereograms to work out how many phases of deformation had occurred… We went on a great field trip around the Scottish Highlands looking to all the classic polyphase deformation structures. So, we were taught a lot, and taught extremely well about all that. But as I say, surprisingly, we weren’t taught much plate tectonics. Somehow, it escaped them. [laughs] But I mean, George did, of course, sea floor spreading a little bit, and then, of course, he made a contribution to that from some of his work. So, we got something on sea floor spreading.

Doel:

And that story you’re telling isn’t unfamiliar. There were quite a few departments where introduction to plate tectonics came later than the 1960s. But I’m really curious, how did you find that one classic article?

Sparks:

I think because we had a good library at Imperial College, we were encouraged to read stuff for ourselves. At the time, of course, the literature compared to today was sort of manageable. You could go into a library and browse through the Journal of Geophysical Research or Journal of Petrology and find things which looked interesting and reading about. And then I just remember coming across that particular paper and sort of learning about… that was the first time I… reading that paper is the first time I sort of got an idea of what subduction was about.

Doel:

But clearly, you grasped those larger concepts as an undergraduate that were present in that paper?

Sparks:

Yes. That’s right. And I think I… I mean, one of the things about Imperial College, I was most keen on volcanology and petrology, but I couldn’t actually do petrology in my final year, because I was the only student who wanted to do the class. And they couldn’t run a class with just one student. So, I took Structural Geology with John Ramsay, Ernie Rutter and Neville Price. And that was, without doubt, the strongest part of Imperial College at the time, that structural geology group.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

Which I learned a lot actually, usefully… I learned a lot about that, of course.

Doel:

You mentioned JGR. What other publications were you particularly reading at that time?

Sparks:

I browsed Nature, Sedimentology. Because I was interested in volcanoes, Bulletin of Volcanology, Journal of Petrology. Some of the more obvious ones, I think. As I say, it was a bit of an eye-opener reading that, you know, Isacks, Oliver, and Sykes paper. I remember being quite enthused by that at the time.

Doel:

When you read that, do you remember talking with either fellow students or faculty?

Sparks:

I remember talking with fellow students, but I don’t remember really talking much with faculty about it.

Doel:

What did your fellow students say?

Sparks:

I think they said… yes, I mean, one of my colleagues, Geoff Wadge, I’m sure I must have chatted to him about it. And… I mean, I at the time, I mean, again, we were… it in the final year. I think it was actually a 1971 paper? I think it must have been my final year that I came across that paper.

Doel:

The paper had been published in ’68, I believe? [Bryan Isacks, Jack Oliver, Lynn R. Sykes, “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics,” JGR 73, 18 (1968): 5855-5899.]

Sparks:

Maybe it’s ’68. I think, yes. I read it ’70 in my final year. Yes. And, I mean, by that time, of course, we’d been to Iceland, and so actually our real enthusiasm with volcanoes… and Geoff and I, Geoff Wadge and I, both would… interest… went on to do PhDs with George.

Doel:

Curious about two things. One is: how did you come to know about [Vladimir] Belousov and his work, and was… were you also reading others in the Soviet Union in geology?

Sparks:

Not very much. There was… I think Sutton had told us there were these sort of alternative views. There was also a Dutch volcanologist called [Reinout Willem] Van Bemmelen, who also was very keen on, I think, vertical tectonics and so forth.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So, we read them as part of the… I think in that particular case, Belousov, we were probably given a reading list and suggested we have a look at it.

Doel:

And was that translated into English, what you were reading?

Sparks:

Yes. I remember it being an English-language version, yes.

Doel:

Yeah. Okay.

Sparks:

But otherwise, we weren’t very aware of what was going on in Russia… in the Soviet Union.

Doel:

Yeah, I was just curious what the geography, in essence, was of the literature that you were reading?

Sparks:

Yes, it was almost entirely western literature, I think. The stuff that had been translated into English in particular.

Doel:

Right. Right. And I’m curious, too… the Iceland trip… how unusual was that among the cohort of young Earth scientists at that time?

Sparks:

I think, in retrospect it was quite unusual. I am sure there are other Imperial College instances. Imperial College had an expedition society, and you had to apply to a board, which would basically approve your plans, and they would also give some financial support. I remember it because we… I think what was particularly usual was that they organized it in the first year, because it was between the first and second year.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And in retrospect, that probably is unusual, because when you first go to university, most people are sort of… by the time their year’s ended, they’ve sort of worked out where they are and what they’re doing. And so, we started to think about that pretty early in the first year and then formulated the plans. And we… there was a group of PhD students who helped us to some extent, who were structural geologists and volcanologists, who had organized a PhD expedition to Chile, which George went on. And that was a chap called Pete Cobbold, who’s a well-known structural geologist at Rennes, an old Ramsay student; Mike Coward, who was a professor at Leeds in structural geology; Pete Francis; and a chap called John Roobal. And they organized an… because they were PhD students, then they organized an expedition to Chile at the same time as we were organizing ours. And they were more experienced than we were, and they helped… they gave us some advice.

Doel:

Did they talk to you about how to write a proposal of that sort?

Sparks:

No.

Doel:

I’m assuming you had to write…

Sparks:

We had to write some kind of proposal. I’ve got really no recollection of what it looked like. [laughs] But we’re… I mean, we did a lot of writing to companies to get sponsorship, and we got some sponsorship.

Doel:

Which sponsors do you recall?

Sparks:

Well, the most amusing one is we got sponsored by a company called Vesta, which in those days… in the sort of late ’60s did dried dinners. And they were quite popular. There was a beef curry, a chow mein, a prawn curry, and there’s something else as well. There were four varieties. And they gave us a whole heap of these dried food for free. And so you got a little pack of curry… dried curry and rice, and you’d cook it up in a pot on a Primus stove or whatever. And we got a lot of that. In fact, we got completely sick of it doing the expedition. [laughs] So we got our bits of sponsorship. I think we got some loo roll from somewhere or other. There were bits and pieces. I probably have to talk to my other friends to remember all the things that we got. We got… I think we got some discount from a tent company to buy some equipment.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

The camping equipment.

Doel:

Yeah, I recall you mentioning that in the first interview.

Sparks:

Yeah. So, we got… I suppose we were relatively enterprising in seeking sponsorship. In fact, it was one of the deals that you had to have in your case to the Imperial College board. You had to make a… you know, say how you were going to raise money to do the expedition. So, I guess in hindsight it was unusual.

Doel:

I’m curious. Did you need to acknowledge the patronage that you got from these firms?

Sparks:

Yes. We produced a report on the expedition at the end, and we listed all the organizations that had helped us in one way or another.

Doel:

Were you asked to take photographs of your using them in the field?

Sparks:

No. No. I mean, eating curry on a glacier… [laughs]… yes. Yes. Yeah, so I’ve still got that report. I’m afraid it’s not here. It’s at home. But I’ll have a browse at that tonight and just check what we put. Yeah.

Doel:

That is remarkable for coming so early in your undergraduate time.

Sparks:

Yes. I think it was pivotal, because we… certainly for Geoff and I, we got out to see Iceland and volcanic rocks and volcanoes and that. And George had been very important in helping us to decide where to go and had given us advice. And I think that’s when Geoff and I, I suppose, forged a little… something of a relationship with George, and then we got keen on doing a PhD with him afterwards.

Doel:

Yeah. And again, there’s good background on that in that first interview.

Sparks:

Yeah. Yeah.

Doel:

What I’m curious, too… was there a speakers series when you were an undergrad at Imperial? People who were coming through to talk about Earth science?

Sparks:

There were people coming through. It wasn’t anything like the kind of typical Earth science department now. We did get occasional overseas speakers and people coming in to give lectures.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

I can’t really remember any lecture that was extraordinarily stimulating or… I mean, I suppose the lecture I remember most from my undergraduate days was actually John Ramsay’s lecture. And that, I think, did actually have a big influence on my career and thinking, because Ramsay gave a lecture which was explicitly to show how mathematics was really… using mathematical skills and mathematical techniques and having some maths was so important to understanding rocks. So, most of the education at Imperial would have been very classical geology, paleontology, petrology, mineralogy, sedimentology, the classic disciplines of geology, taught in a pretty classic way.

Doel:

A way in which maths and physics were off on the side?

Sparks:

They were off on the side, and John Ramsay, of course, where maths was so critical to the success of his science and the developments of structural geology at the time. That… his lecture really just showing us the relationship. I remember that being a very inspirational lecture, because I’d been quite good at maths at school.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And we did some supplementary maths in the first year. And so, I enjoyed maths and seeing how Ramsay… John Ramsay could put the maths and the geology together and show how they fed off each other, and you really would learn an awful lot by trying to quantify geological processes. That was a wonderful lecture.

Doel:

And times like that, you were realizing what could come of this at the time. It wasn’t… or was it something…

Sparks:

No, I don’t think I would…

Doel:

…that you thought more…?

Sparks:

I don’t think I had any thoughts that… I think his… that lecture was actually in our first year, and I don’t think it led directly to saying: oh, I’m going to go and do a PhD and do this. I don’t think I had any thoughts like that at all. We… but once I started with George for my PhD, and I suppose one of the realizations whilst doing my PhD that people had… there was hardly anything known about the physics of volcanoes, and I started to get interested in aspects of the physics.

Doel:

Right. Very quickly, you realized the opportunities…

Sparks:

The opportunity. That’s right, that having some basic maths and interest in understanding those processes. That’s… that really came about in the PhD.

Doel:

Now, I want to talk a little more about that when we get to your PhD. I’m just curious, were there any textbooks that you read as an undergrad that just were memorable for you?

Sparks:

Well, there’s John Ramsay’s textbook. Where is it?

Doel:

And you’re looking at your shelf.

Sparks:

Yeah. Folding and Fracturing of Rocks. That was a classic textbook. Of course, it was the Bible as far as our third year was concerned, when I did structural geology. Neville [James] Price’s book on the more brittle mechanics. And I think actually that’s probably pretty important that I did that third… even though I didn’t want to, I did that third-year structural geology, because Imperial, at the time, I would say would likely have been the top structural geology place anywhere in the world. And they had this very quantitative approach, and lots of… you had to understand the equations, whether you were looking at stressing, brittle fracture, you know, all these classic structural geology… linking with rock mechanics. And of course, they were superb at doing that. So, those were two… those two… those were two textbooks. I don’t think there was… then there was, of course, Principles of Physical Geology, the great Arthur Holmes book.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

My undergraduate first-year book on the shelf, there.

Doel:

Copy of it, yes.

Sparks:

Copy of it. That was… of course, that covers absolutely everything, so you could more-or-less read everything from paleontology to mantle convection…

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

…in that book. So, those are the… those, I would say, were the books that were most inspirational. The… I can’t really remember anything very inspiring in… I mean, George was the guru in terms of volcanology and physical petrology and volcanic geology. But he hadn’t actually… you know, there weren’t any textbooks.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

You just had George there, so you didn’t really need a textbook.

Doel:

Yeah. That was the case with a number of fields in geophysics in that time?

Sparks:

Yeah, that’s right.

Doel:

That’s all quite interesting. I’m curious, too, did you get to any conferences when you were an undergrad, that you recall?

Sparks:

I don’t recall going to any.

Doel:

And one other question I wanted to ask: it’s clear the progression that you had with George Walker… you were interested in his work leading to the PhD. Were you ever tempted to consider a PhD elsewhere outside of Imperial?

Sparks:

Not really, no. I don’t think so. No, I think by the time I’d got to the third year and started to talk about, you know… George had asked Geoff and I about our interests, and I don’t think we really ever thought of doing anything else. And also, we were in London in the sort of late ’60s, early ’70s, and so it was a great place to be socially, and a lot of people were going to stick around.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

So, no, I don’t think I really had any other thoughts.

Doel:

Was it fairly common for undergraduates to do their PhD at the same institution at the time?

Sparks:

I think it was, yes. I think it was quite a… probably somewhat more common than it is now. I mean, there’s a sort of encouragement for undergraduates now to go somewhere else. I don’t think that was quite the case then.

Doel:

I wanted to ask a few more questions on your graduate, your PhD career. By the time you were preparing for the PhD, were you taking any more seminars, or had you more-or-less completed that at the end of undergrad?

Sparks:

I’d pretty well completed that, and of course the British PhD doesn’t have any coursework.

Doel:

Exactly.

Sparks:

You just…

Doel:

And I was curious if that was the case at the time.

Sparks:

You just get on with doing the PhD. So, there was not much course… there was really no coursework.

Doel:

Did you feel that you had sufficient background in math and physics by the time you began the PhD research?

Sparks:

I don’t think I even thought about that, because I went into the PhD doing field work. I mean, George’s great talent, his flare was for field work and for meticulous observations in the field. He was a wonderful field geologist. He didn’t know a great deal of maths, so I got very little out of George apart from very basic stuff, and knew really rather little physics, either. But he had a very… when I say he didn’t know much physics, I mean that in a sort of narrow sense, that he hadn’t… he didn’t have a sort of formal background in physics. So, his… but he had a wonderful intuition for physical processes, and so he could read the rocks and the minerals and the field data and understand it intuitively in terms of physical processes. So, in some ways, he was a very sort of natural physicist, but not somebody with a physics background.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

So… and limited maths. So, I started out the PhD really as a field… doing stratigraphy, field geology, grain-size measurements, a lot of sieving work, grain-size distributions, sort of fairly classic stuff. And it was really during the PhD that I started to think about what were the processes that were causing these things that we were observing.

Doel:

And looking at that as physical processes?

Sparks:

And starting to look at that as physical processes, yes.

Doel:

I’m wondering… your inspiration for that… I’m thinking, for instance, M. King Hubbert had written much earlier about the importance of integrating physics into geology.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

Was that someone whom you’d read?

Sparks:

Not particularly. Now, I was aware of Hubbert’s work. I think again I’d say that my experience when I was an undergraduate with Ramsay and the quantification, you know, the thing that was really instilled to you by the Imperial structural geology school was this idea that you would quantify and try and understand observations. So, I learnt a lot about that approach, I think, from Ramsay and Price and colleagues. But of course, the questions you were asking with trying to interpret volcanic rocks were very different, completely… much more fluid mechanics. And we really didn’t do much. Well, I suppose I learned about rock mechanics through Ramsay, so there were elements of it. But a lot of the questions we’re asking about were completely different from the sorts of questions he and his students would be asking about folds and thrusts and so forth. So, I think one paper that did have a bit of an influence… and I think it was the… George who at least suggested that I looked at the literature was… there was some… there was the idea of fluidization. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

But the… so the idea that you could have something like sand, and you could pass a gas through it and it would make it behave like a liquid…

Doel:

Like a liquid itself.

Sparks:

And that idea had been around in a rather vague way for quite a while. The first person to suggest it in geology was Doris Reynolds, who is… I think that was Holmes’s wife.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And she had written a paper in… sometime in the 1950s on fluidization in geology. And before that, she was inspired by a German geologist called [J. H.] Kloos, who had written about diatremes and the idea of having pipes full of debris which then had gas flowing through them during volcanic eruptions, and that that would fluidize them. And these were very qualitative ideas as they were expressed. But the basic core, I think Kloos and Reynolds and then there was a rather obscure paper by somebody called Bennett, I think it was, who’d heated up some ash to high temperature and showed that it flowed like water. There was a little paper by… and so George said: You should go… we’re going to try and understand pyroclastic flows, then maybe this is an area you should look at. So, I did… so I read this earlier literature, and I think that… then… I think the key thing was that I got interested in the subject of fluidization, and I then started looking up all the engineering literature. And Imperial College, at the time, had a very good chemical engineering department. And they… who was the professor? Was it Davidson, I think his name was? Anyway, I went over to a chap called Pye or something like that. Anyway, I went over to the Imperial College engineering department where they had lots of fluidized beds, and they were really quite strong in that field, in doing experimental fluidization. And so, I went over and talked to some people in chemical engineering, and I saw the experiments that they were doing. And then I built some equipment to do the experiments. So, I set up a sort of big tube with a porous bed, and I consulted the chemical engineering about how to design this effectively. So, I set up my own fluidized bed and did some sort of very sort of basic experiments with those and started learning about the sort of engineering-style physics of fluidization. And so, an important bit of my PhD was actually applying this to volcanic flows. And so, I sort of picked up a lot of the physics… I didn’t… I never did physics at school.

Doel:

That’s what I was curious about.

Sparks:

[laughs] So, I never did any physics at all. Well, I’m sure I did something very rudimentary when I was 11 or 12. But I did chemistry and maths, but no physics. In fact, the school I went to, I think we had to choose between physics and chemistry, so I chose…

Doel:

And you chose chemistry.

Sparks:

…chemistry.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

So, I didn’t have any physics background, almost no physics background at all. So… but the… you know, my maths was okay enough that I could read these engineering papers and look at relatively simple engineering-type maths with, you know, lots of calculus and so forth. And I could sort of understand what they were doing, and then I could apply the maths and put it into… put geological numbers into the equations and come up with interesting relationships.

Doel:

And that became part of the pattern of your early research, using the data.

Sparks:

That’s right. Exactly. So that’s really… that’s how it started. I think it was George saying: why don’t you read these old papers about fluidization? And I did that. And then getting interested in that area, and then going off on my own and then reading the engineering literature.

Doel:

When you did the lab work, putting together those… the apparatus…

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

…did that come easily to you? How did you know how to make those devices?

Sparks:

Well, I suppose it’s mimicry. As I said, I went over to the chemical engineering department.

Doel:

Right. And saw what they were doing.

Sparks:

Saw what they were doing. They helped me… you need permeable plates to allow the gas to come through. So, it’s not terribly complicated in the sense that basically you need a big Perspex tube, you needed a plate with clamps to contain the porous media above the permeable plate at the bottom, and then you need a gas supply and a cylinder of gas. And you connect them up and put some sand in, and then you’re away, really. So, it’s a relatively straightforward sort of experiments.

Doel:

Yeah. Did you have any trouble raising or getting funds to do that work?

Sparks:

No. I think we had got… the PhD… I don’t think we ever had to get funds. We could talk to the workshop and say what we wanted.

Doel:

Yeah. And that was common for PhD students at the time?

Sparks:

Yes. Yeah. I don’t remember… I mean, it’s possible George had to get some money, but I don’t think I was ever tasked to do that work. But I don’t think it was… I don’t remember being involved in that myself.

Doel:

I’m just curious, as you’re preparing your PhD, were there… at that point, did you sense any gaps in the training that you had gotten as an undergraduate that stood out for you?

Sparks:

Not really at the time. I mean, obviously if you look back, there were huge holes in the undergraduate education. I mean, I mentioned the lack of much on plate tectonics. And of course, as far as volcanology was concerned, there weren’t… I mean, there… really, there wasn’t anything. There was no… there was very little research. I mean, there have been very limited, particularly on explosive volcanism, quantitative work at all in the past.

Doel:

And that was a point that you’ve raised?

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

This was generally in the field, not simply at your own institution?

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. Yes.

Doel:

Yeah. I’m curious, too, about your first publications, which came out in 1973.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

And one of the… the first… you had teamed with George Walker, “The Ground Surge Deposit: A Third Type of Pyroclastic Rock.” And that was published in Nature.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

And that’s not often what happens for PhD students, to be published in Nature.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

How did that paper come about?

Sparks:

I think it’s because we… George and I and Steve Self… Steve Self was another PhD student who was a year in advance of me. We had been working with George in the field, and we were seeing these curious deposits at the base of quite a few pyroclastic flow deposits. And we were seeing cross-bedding and curious things that we didn’t quite understand. We took a lot of inspiration, I think, from… for that paper from Dick Fisher and Jim Moore’s work earlier. Both were American scientists, volcanologists. Jim Moore is a wonderful, brilliant scientist, and he was the first person to recognize that the phenomena that you see at the bottom of nuclear explosions, called the base surge, a ground-hugging cloud which goes from the bottom of the cloud… and recognized that that was happening in volcanoes as well. And he called… and those were described as base surge. And he and then Dick Fisher also started to describe these deposits. And their work… I think what was new about our work was that their work had been to do with submarine volcanoes. They thought that these base surges… which were correct… that base surges happened when water got mixed into vents, and you got various intense explosions, and that was a bit like a nuclear cloud. And you got these ground-hugging clouds which look very like the atomic explosions. And so, they’d already recognized that these sorts of base surges were cross-bedded. But we started to see deposits like that associated with these ignimbrites, where it was not at all clear that water was involved.

It looked like a different phenomenon. And that led to the Nature paper, because we thought this was evidence of high-temperature flows, which had similar characteristics but didn’t require water to be involved. And there was… there were some differences between the sorts of deposits that Dick and Jim Moore… Dick Fisher and Jim Moore had described. And we thought it was worth reporting on these and sort of identifying a new sort of deposit, really. Because before, you either had fallout deposits or you had massive ignimbrites flows, and these sorts of phenomena, which we now know are much more complicated than we thought in 1973… but we thought there was enough there to identify these high-temperature phenomena. And that led to the Nature paper.

Doel:

How difficult was it to get a paper in Nature at the time?

Sparks:

I don’t really remember. We… well, there’s an interesting story there that we published that paper in Nature, and then later on… that was ’73. And then we published a paper with me, George, and Steve Self called “The Products of Ignimbrite Eruptions.”

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

And we tried to… we initially sent that to Nature, and it got rejected as being too esoteric. And I remember Steve [Self] and I looking at a copy of Nature a few weeks later after it had been rejected and seeing the Nature cover story was head-tilting in herons. [laughs]

Doel:

And you found a new definition of esoteric. [laughs]

Sparks:

We thought it was a… that was at least as esoteric as our paper. And so we didn’t get it accepted in Nature, and we sent it off to Geology. In fact, just as Geology…

Doel:

That was a new journal at the time.

Sparks:

That was a new journal, so we were in the first volume.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

I mean…

Doel:

You were.

Sparks:

And we sent it to Geology, because it was a new Geological Society of America publication. And I think it got through quite easily. That’s been a very highly cited paper, and it was really probably the start of a huge literature now on what you might call… really taking a sedimentological view of pyroclastic deposits. And so it… that was an important… a very important paper.

Doel:

And you list it as one of the top or among the 20 that you consider to be particularly important.

Sparks:

Yes. Yes. That’s right. And I think that’s… I suppose that’s the other thing that George encouraged me and Steve to do, was to read up a lot of sedimentological literature, because obviously the sedimentologists had been, for a long time, linking the structures of sedimentary rocks… deposits to physical processes, so they were much more advanced than volcanologists were at the time in making that connection or sort of trying to understand sedimentary rocks in terms of physical processes.

Doel:

Had you met any of these researchers who were in sedimentology at the time, or were you reading their literature?

Sparks:

Mostly reading their literature. Didn’t really interact with… we had a very good sedimentologist called Graham Evans at Imperial College who taught us sedimentology, but I don’t… apart from going to his lectures, I don’t think we interacted very much.

Doel:

Do you remember any discussion about the ordering of the authors for either of those papers?

Sparks:

Not really, no. The… I think George… I mean, George, certainly for the ground surge deposit, one could argue George really should have been first author, because I was pretty inexperienced at that time, and we were observing these things. But I think George certainly contributed an awful lot to that paper and the sort of concepts behind it. The products of ignimbrite eruptions, I think I was first author on that.

Doel:

You were first.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

And then Steve Self, and George.

Sparks:

That’s right. And I think that was really that George and I in the field, and then discussing some of my results, we were seeing these systematic relationships and trying to make sense of them, and trying to use… we were, to some extent, influenced by [Arthur H.] Bouma of turbidite fame, who had essentially done that job. I think the way of classifying turbidites is the Bouma sequences, and basically that was a sort of classic sedimentary lithofacies work, which was closest to what we were thinking about… big flow of particles in the environment. And Bouma had already created his Bouma Sequence, and we definitely were influenced by that. And I think George and I were thinking: well, can we develop something, a somewhat similar kind of generalized stratigraphy, lithofacies stratigraphy for ignimbrites, and can we do what Bouma did for turbidites? And I remember that being our thinking. And then Steve had been doing his work in the Azores, and he sort of contributed… because he’d been out at the field with George and had made similar observations. But curiously, because Steve was in advance of me, I think they hadn’t had those sort of in-depth… George and Steve had… I now wonder, I have to ask Steve what he thought at the time. But my sense is that they didn’t have that sort of in-depth conversation about what these things would mean. And I’d started the fluidization experiments where you could reproduce some of the things we had been seeing, things in the field, by just taking a bed of sand and putting a rock at the… on the top of the sand bed, and a lump of pumice at the bottom, and then you’d fluidize it, and the pumice would come to the top, and the rock would sink to the bottom. And that would reproduce some of the grading structures we had seen in the field. So, I was doing those experiments. So, George and I, I think, were interacting a lot on that topic. And then Steve came in, because he’d sort of said: It’s not just in Italy, where I was working. It’s also in the Azores. And George had seen in lots of different places, in Japan and Chile is where he’d seen things. So, we could sort of pool our information together.

Doel:

I’m curious how that process worked. Was that a lot of discussion before you started to write, or did some of these ideas flow from working up early drafts?

Sparks:

George was always very keen on getting his work published. He thought if it wasn’t published, it didn’t exist. So, he was very much keen that his PhD students would publish their work. And you know, the timing of when it was… a piece of work was sort of mature enough to put into a publication. George had a… I suppose an approach which I’ve followed to some extent, that he’d start writing stuff almost straightaway. [laughs] And even if it wasn’t, you know, had become pretty obvious that it wasn’t enough to make something you could submit, but he was… he had the technique of as soon as he got what he thought was a good idea or some good data, he’d like to start thinking about writing it up. So, he had drawers full of sort of half-finished manuscripts, which then would get fused or pulled apart and so forth. So, we were taught to sort of write our stuff up early, by George, I think.

Doel:

So, how did that work, then? Did the three of you share one manuscript? Were you each pulling different contributions?

Sparks:

Yes, you’d get on a typewriter and bash out some words and give it to George. Then he’d cut and paste… literally cut and paste with cello-tape, and cut out a sentence, and then put it somewhere else and so forth. And then we’d retype it, and it would sort of iterate.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

So, I remember it being a very… it was a collaborative process with George.

Doel:

For preparing the final version, were you meeting together to hash it through, or was that done…?

Sparks:

Yes. I think we had… again, we didn’t… we were in offices next door to George. Steve and I were in offices, but we never… I don’t think we ever had any formal meetings. We met a lot, but we didn’t have any formal meetings. You know, we would just go into George’s office when he was free and talk to him about what we were thinking about.

Doel:

Yeah. Was that mostly during the daytime, or…

Sparks:

Mostly during the daytime, because we lived in London. I think we all lived in separate places, yes.

Doel:

So, most of the discussions then among you and your colleagues really were during the daytime?

Sparks:

During the daytime, yes. Very much so.

Doel:

Okay. I’m also interested… in 1973, you’d published “A Fiery Fate for Heimaey.”

Sparks:

Oh, yes. Yes.

Doel:

I’m curious how popularization was received at the time by colleagues or your faculty. Was that something encouraged?

Sparks:

I think it was. George was certainly encouraging to popularize his… I mean, he liked to talk. He liked outreach. He liked talking to schools and groups, and so it was part of the ethos. And I think what… I mean, the story behind the piece was that George would have gone, and Steve Self and I wouldn’t have gone, had George not been on fieldwork in the Canary Islands. So, he was incommunicado. And the eruption started, and John Sutton had suggested we put in for some money to the Royal Society for the two of us to go out and look at… watch the eruption and make some observations.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And I don’t think that’s possible now. [laughs]

Doel:

In terms of getting the funding, the flexible funding?

Sparks:

Yes, I mean, we applied to Royal Society, Steve and I. We… I think it… I haven’t got the correspondence now, but I was… I think it was just a letter and asked for the money. And John, of course, Sutton at the time was quite an influential figure in the Royal Society. I mean, he… I mean, you know, at that time, it wouldn’t have been surprising had he certainly suggested to us to apply. And it wouldn’t be that surprising if he was the person who [laughs] made the decision. And that was the sort of nature of the times. And we were given enough money to get airfare to fly out to Iceland and go to Heimaey for it and watch the eruption. And then of course we came back and wrote that popular article for New Scientist.

Doel:

Yeah. And that story is covered in depth in the first interview… the particular challenges you had there. I was just curious if you recall any faculty or others feeling that wasn’t an appropriate spending of time or energy to communicate those more popularly?

Sparks:

No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m not sure quite… I suppose we had already… the ethos of publishing that George instilled in his students was very strong, so writing an article for New Scientist was a… it would be something you’d do on the side.

Doel:

Yeah. And I noticed you continued to do that throughout your career, including Endeavour.

Sparks:

Yes, I’ve written popular articles from time to time.

Doel:

Yeah. We’ll come back to some of those as we move forward. I’m curious, you mentioned in that interview with Paul Merchant that you almost accepted the offer from the Rabaul Volcanic Observatory…

Sparks:

Yes, I was offered a job, yes.

Doel:

…in Papua New Guinea. What would that have entailed? And I’m just curious what you expected that would have been like had that been your best opportunity?

Sparks:

I think it would have been… at that time, it would have been interesting. I mean, I think being a sort of young man at the time and wanting to see the world. I was married by that time of course, so… and we didn’t, of course, have any children till later. And I think it would have been quite exciting. It was certainly tempting to go out to New Guinea and work there and be the observer there. I don’t think I’ve have had much idea what it was like working in an observatory in a sort of fairly remote and wild part of the world. I don’t know what it would… I mean, at the end of the day, of course, we’d decided against it, and…

Doel:

Right. You had the other opportunity at Lancaster.

Sparks:

That’s right. The person who’d got it was killed on Karakar volcano a few years later [in March 1979], sadly. So yes, so it is. It just sounded like a good, you know, good opportunity, and I think a lot of my friends at Imperial, geologists, all wanted to go out to do… to go to different parts of the world. They’d see different things.

Doel:

Were you invited for that position?

Sparks:

I just remember applying for it.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And then being offered it. It wasn’t… I don’t think there was any interview. It was a postal advert, and I suspect George would have written a strong reference. But then, the opportunity to go to Lancaster came up, and that seemed to be a better plan.

Doel:

Let’s talk about that in just a moment. Were there any other opportunities you were pursuing at that time that you recall?

Sparks:

Not really, no. No, they just fell into… I… oh, well actually, I did apply for a NERC fellowship, the research fellowship…

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

…which I didn’t get. And that was to do similar work to what I… so I… clearly my plan was to… the choice of going to Lancaster when I was offered the 1851 fellowship was that there wasn’t any sort of question of any alternatives. That was the thing I wanted to do.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And I had applied for a NERC fellowship but didn’t get it.

Doel:

And I realize we were in some sense talking about this in your undergrad career, but I’m curious as you look back how you learned how to write a successful grant proposal, because you’re doing this at a very early stage in your career.

Sparks:

I think it’s because George was a superb craftsman when it came to writing. He knew how to put a paper together. And the skills to write a good, coherent paper are not that different from writing a proposal.

Doel:

Did he talk to you about strategies for writing proposals, or is that something you intuited?

Sparks:

Not… no, I think it’s something you just learnt on the job, as it were. I never had any sort of formal… which I know that you can get now. You can get… our university here offers, you know, grant writing courses and things like that, and paper-writing courses. But we never had anything like that. We just learnt on the job from working with George. And he knew how to structure papers, and then of course, working with a draft, he was a very… I mean, he was quite… he was… he often edited your first drafts in great detail, and so you learnt an awful lot about writing scientific papers. And I think that just flowed into writing proposals.

Doel:

So he’d be writing in the margins, both about concepts and strategies?

Sparks:

Yes, he scribbled… lots of scribbles, and this needs reorganizing, that needs to go there, and you know, grammatical points, whatever.

Doel:

Yeah. You’re right that in the moment there’s quite a bit of emphasis on the craft of writing grant proposals. But clearly, still in the 1970s, that was not something?

Sparks:

That was not something you did. No, you just learnt from experience.

Doel:

Do you have any challenges given the nature of the… the new ideas that you were advocating in your early publications, in getting your material into journals, you wished to publish?

Sparks:

Well, I mentioned the lack of success with Nature.

Doel:

Nature, in the second round.

Sparks:

Yes, on the second round. On the whole, at that time, I think there wasn’t a great deal of trouble in getting our papers published. The other thing about George was, I guess because he was very experienced, he had a very good feel for which journals’ particular kinds of science would go to, and which would… and where bits of science or papers would fit in the… if you like, in the landscape of journals that were around at the time.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So, he had very good choices, I think, for us in where we should publish. And I… that’s probably helped smooth the way for getting stuff out.

Doel:

The Nature story, you remember, that was more the exception rather than something that happened more often later, in other words.

Sparks:

Not really. I mean, I’ve… I mean, like I suppose all scientists, you’ve had papers which have been rejected or which get a lot of resistance. And I’m not sure there’s anything terribly systematic, because you only have sort of two reviewers, and if you luck out and the two people are sort of empathetic to your approaches, then you can get… you know, you can get something published fairly easily. And if… obviously, if they’re antipathetic to what you’re trying to say…

Doel:

Exactly.

Sparks:

…then, of course, you can get a lot of resistance. And I think nowadays, with journals like Nature, it’s really… there is a strong lottery element in it, because there’s so many people who want to get papers in Nature. Cutting-edge science is so pivotal to their careers that it’s just a huge amount of competition.

Doel:

That’s very interesting.

Sparks:

And I don’t think it necessarily means the best stuff always gets published in those journals. Probably statistically, it does, but [laughs]…

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

They’ve published some less good stuff, shall we say, as well as some outstanding stuff.

Doel:

And I think that’s an important issue, what we’re talking about, how fields develop.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

I’m curious, too. When do you recall first attending a scientific meeting conference?

Sparks:

I think it was when I was a PhD student, and I would go to the Geological Society volcanic studies group meetings. That was the one that you presented your papers as PhD at the GeolSoc Burlington House in London. I certainly remember going to, I think, pretty well every year, to a GeolSoc… while I was a PhD student, to a GeolSoc meeting and giving a talk. So that would be my first recollection. I didn’t go to an international conference, I don’t think, until I went to 1976 AGU meeting in Washington. That was the first one I…

Doel:

And that would have been when you were at Rhode Island?

Sparks:

That’s when I was at Rhode Island, yeah. Yes. But Geological Society was, I think, the main event.

Doel:

How big were those meetings at the time?

Sparks:

There’d be… they’d be pretty packed. The main lecture at GeolSocs probably got a capacity of 120 people, and they’d be pretty full. I’d say many tens would be typically attending a meeting in those days.

Doel:

When you look back in those first meetings you attended, were there any that were particularly memorable?

Sparks:

I just remember them being pretty exciting, because this is a growing… it was a growing field, and there was a lot of interest in physical volcanology being developed in the UK at the time, so it was… so there were a lot of really interesting papers being published and people like Lionel Wilson. Planetary science was starting to… volcanoes on other planets was starting to come in. John Guest at UCL I remember him giving some excellent talks. There was some… the UK was still very… it still is, but at that time, it was very strong in petrology, so there were some very good… some very good people giving talks on petrogenesis at the time. So, they were just good meetings. I just… I remember them being sort of stimulating and enjoyable.

Doel:

Were there any people that you met at those meetings that became influential for you, then or later?

Sparks:

As a PhD student, I don’t… I don’t think so, because in a way, what George was doing was so unique. The people we looked to as doing work which was comparable and in that area of physical volcanology was cutting-edge, were all… I think all abroad. I mean, there was Hans Schmincke in Germany. Oh, I did go to a… when did I go to my first IAVCEI conference? That was ’77. I might have…

Doel:

That would have also been in the Rhode Island period, then?

Sparks:

Yes, it… yes, that’s right. I think that was the IAVCEI meeting in Durham. But there were people like Schmincke, Dick Fisher, more Bob Smith, the… a lot of physical volcanology going on in the USA at the time. And I think you’d look… you know, if you were going to read… there was, of course, Iceland with [Sigurdur] Thorarinsson. But they were abroad, and you were sort of reading their works. [Shigeo] Aramaki in Japan. You were reading their work rather than meeting them at meetings.

Doel:

Did you ever correspond with them by letter, that you recall?

Sparks:

As a PhD student? I don’t recall doing very much correspondence. I mean, George would come in with some reprint. I mean, I think George kept, at that time, reprint exchange was the big thing, and he would get… he had a lot of contacts, so we would get Aramaki’s papers or Peter [W.] Lipman’s papers or Jim Moore’s papers, and he would send them theirs. And so there was a lot of exchange of reprints, and he’d get reprints in the post, and he’d put… you know, give them to Steve Self or Geoff or to me and say: Read this, or this is pretty interesting. But I don’t really remember corresponding with anyone at the time. Not… well, once you get in the postdoc, that’s different.

Doel:

That’s a different stage.

Sparks:

Yeah, that’s a different stage, yeah.

Doel:

Yeah. I want to ask about AGU in just a moment, but you’ve reminded me on Jim Moore and his work on the comparison between atomic explosions…

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

Do you remember if Jim Moore had a security clearance? Was he able to inspect craters at the Nevada Test Site?

Sparks:

I don’t know. Dick Fisher was very connected, because Dick Fisher was in the Navy, and he’s written a very nice biography. And he was swimming in Bikini Atoll. And of course, poor Dick did succumb to a… you know, to the cancers in the end. But Dick was, you know, involved in the Navy. I think he saw some of the tests, and as I say, swam in the atoll. He swam off the Navy boat just after it.

Doel:

After the detonation. Yes. [laughs]

Sparks:

[laughs] After the detonation. And he… and so I think the two of those, they were… I don’t quite know what their relationships were. They were rather… there was a sense that they were a bit of rivals, but I think those two together really… their series of papers really put base surges and hydrovolcanism on the map. [crosstalk] It was very, very key, very pioneering work. As for… and then there was [H.U.] Schminke, of course, and his group. Of course, I was working in Italy. I did have a bit of link up with Pisa University and some of their scientists. But it wasn’t… there was very little… like it was pleasantries. There was very little interaction.

Doel:

You didn’t have that much direct experience with them, say, compared to Rhode Island…

Sparks:

No. No.

Doel:

…where you had quite a bit.

Sparks:

No.

Doel:

Yeah. I’m curious. When you went to AGU meeting for the first time, how did that compare to the meetings you were used to here?

Sparks:

Oh, that was totally different, because it was vast. In those days, I think the AGU would have been 3,000 people.

Doel:

That sounds about right. Yeah.

Sparks:

Yeah. It’s now 22,000 or ridiculous numbers of people. But at that time, three thousand… so if you’re going from meeting… GeolSoc meetings with 100, 150 people, to a meeting with 3,000, it’s a huge step change.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

So, I just remember being very inspired by going to the first AGU… spring AGU in Washington. That was 1976. And that would have been shortly after I got to Rhode Island.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And I remember meeting lots of people that I hadn’t come… you know, you start meeting a lot of sort of famous scientists and people at a meeting like that.

Doel:

Those whose papers you’ve read [crosstalk] among others, right.

Sparks:

That’s right, yes. And you started interacting with a much wider community.

Doel:

Right. Do you remember any discussions in particular from that first meeting?

Sparks:

Not really. I mean, I remember that because I was new to Rhode Island, I’d went… I remember hearing some of Haraldur Sigurdsson’s talks… he was giving a very good talk, and Haraldur was from Rhode Island. We were beginning to work together a little bit, and I remember that being pretty interesting. I think we were… I’m pretty sure that we gave one to the papers that Lionel Wilson and I had been working on, this abstract. So, I don’t really remember anything in particular. I just remember it being a really great meeting. And because I’d just arrived in Rhode Island and started to get to know some of the graduate students… other graduate students who were under Norman Watkins’s mentorship. And they made it exciting, because Norman was a sort of larger-than-life figure, and he wanted to have as many abstracts… his… I remember his ambition was to have the most… to be a co-author on the most number of abstracts of any AGU author. [laughs] And that was… and so he had an enormous… submitted an enormous number of manuscripts with his students. And that was sort of fun. So, I suppose I hadn’t been used to the… you know, the more… I guess more dynamic and competitive environment of U.S. science before.

Doel:

I was curious what other impressions you had of these… this research community as you were in Rhode Island.

Sparks:

Of the Rhode Island community?

Doel:

Well, Rhode Island specifically… but I’m also curious about your impressions more generally.

Sparks:

I think that’s… that’s the aspect which I got most out of, was that I hadn’t really been exposed to sort of the dynamics of American culture and life, and it’s such a much bigger community, in some ways much more sort of competitive. I wouldn’t say we had… when I was a PhD student, we got as much sense of being in a sort of competitive… we were doing our own… you know, we were doing our own thing with George, almost sort of independently of anyone else and going a way that… I mean, George used to tell me that at the time, it was something that I learned from was that, okay, you can make a decision. You can work on basalts, and there’s another 150 people who work on basalts, geochemistry, and your chances of making a big splash in basalts is probably not nearly as high, but you can do something that was completely different or new. And then there’s nobody else.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

Aim for those niches, that’s right, that nobody else is doing or nobody’s thought about. And that’s, of course, what George did. And I suppose that’s what made him a sort of pioneer. And we learnt… and that… but if you’re in that because there’s nobody else, there isn’t actually as much sense of competition. When you got to the States, as a young scientist, then of course, you do get that sort of sense of sort of dynamic competition.

Doel:

Was it that there were fewer niches, or was it just the dynamic?

Sparks:

I think it was a bigger community.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

I mean, you… there are more people doing research which relates to yours. And of course, by the time I’d got to the States in 1976, I mean, the revolution that George started had begun to really explode, in a way. I mean, there were a lot… there were many more people doing physical volcanology and just thinking about volcanic processes than…

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

Within… even though five or six years after I had started the PhD

Doel:

When you think about either United States or North America generally, where were the centers that were really strong, emerging in volcanology?

Sparks:

Well, the U.S.… I mean, at the time, the U.S. Geological Survey was really the… I suppose the leading research producer of original volcanic, volcanological research. I mean, they had some, you know, immense talents. I mean, you had Wes Hildreth and Bob Smith. You know, Ian [S.E.] Carmichael was starting to produce all his great PhD students like Wes Hildreth and Gail Mahood and Charlie Bacon and so on and so on and so forth. Ian Carmichael was essentially a petrologist geochemist, his students started to have a big influence on volcanology. The… there was Dick Fisher and his group, which was very strong. You had people like the Los Alamos group, Tom McGetchin and so forth. Where else would… the time would have been…

Doel:

And when you say USGS, are you thinking Denver branch particularly?

Sparks:

All of the centers… well, they’re scattered around.

Doel:

Including Menlo Park or Hawaii?

Sparks:

Menlo Park around, yes. Bob Smith, of course, and Roy Bailey. So, there was a lot of… so the U.S. was very dynamic. I think… I mean, I think that… of course, I’ve often noticed there’s a difference between Europe and North America. It wouldn’t have occurred to me at the time, but the U.S. tends to be more lone individuals. In Europe, you tend to produce clusters of excellence in particular fields, which can become quite large. And it’s much… it’s more unusual for that to happen in the U.S., because you’ve got a faculty, and you’ve got the volcanologists, but they don’t often sort of build up into a sort of bigger groups.

Doel:

So, is it primarily the institutional structures?

Sparks:

I think the institutional structures are different. I mean, I don’t think you could quite imagine what happened here in Bristol or at IPGP in Paris happening in the U.S. I mean, we’ve got… I suppose currently on our faculty in Bristol, we’ve got seven people, probably more than this—if you count Jon Blundy, you’ve probably got about eight faculty who are doing volcanology. I don’t think you’d get that… possibly the University of Alaska, but I don’t think that’s common.

Doel:

It’s still a fairly small unit.

Sparks:

It’s small. It tends to be centered… the U.S. tends to be centered on individuals, very talented individuals to a very great extent, the academic side of it. And so actually, that’s why the USGS was so successful, because it’s such a big organization.

Doel:

And you could have this specialization?

Sparks:

Then you have the specialization, and then you can have perhaps a dozen really outstanding people in volcanology in the USGS.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

You wouldn’t get that in a U.S. university, but you might get that in… occasionally in the European university. So, there’s some difference. I don’t quite know what.

Doel:

That’s a very interesting observation. Did you have much interaction with Harvard, MIT, when you were at Rhode Island?

Sparks:

Very little. None with Harvard. I had a bit of interaction with MIT through Woods Hole, so not really MIT, but more Woods Hole. I was involved in, you know… I certainly started to get to know one or two people from Woods Hole, and then later…

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

…I went to their geophysical fluid dynamics summer school and sort of kept in touch with a few people.

Doel:

Who do you remember in particular from those early years?

Sparks:

Well, the… I mean, the person I… do you mean from MIT?

Doel:

Well, from Woods Hole, what you were mentioning.

Sparks:

Yeah. Woods Hole. Well, there’s some great characters there. The person I got most out of… well, I never actually published a paper with, but was certainly very influential, is a chap called Jack Whitehead, who was their geophysical fluid dynamicist. There was Henry Dick there, who was a sort of very famous petrologist and larger-than-life character. It was, yeah, I mean, a very strong… very strong place. But otherwise, MIT, no, I didn’t have much to do… [crosstalk] Lamont…

Doel:

I was curious about Lamont, because of the coring work that you were doing as well.

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. And the person I worked with a lot was Dragoslav Ninkovich, and that’s because Dragoslav came on our Santorini cruise with Watkins in 1974, I think it was. That was the cruise that led to me going to… eventually going to Rhode Island and getting a NATO fellowship.

Doel:

Did you get to Lamont during the time that you were there?

Sparks:

In Rhode Island?

Doel:

In Rhode Island.

Sparks:

Oh, yes.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

Yes, I went down to sample cores and to see Dragoslav.

Doel:

What were your impressions of that facility?

Sparks:

I thought… I mean, I just remember it… it still is a very really nice campus. Lots of wooden buildings, a gigantic core shed with it must be hundreds and hundreds of piston cores from around the world. That was extremely impressive.

Doel:

Indeed.

Sparks:

And my interactions were largely with Dragoslav Ninkovich at that time. I mean, I’ve been to Lamont quite a few times since.

Doel:

I’m just curious, because you had read Oliver and Sykes, who happened to be there. Did you have any interaction?

Sparks:

I don’t think I ever met them, no.

Doel:

Okay. They would have been in a separate building.

Sparks:

They’d probably be in a separate building, yeah.

Doel:

Just curious too, when you were there at… in the United States at that time, did you have a chance to visit other Earth science centers across the country? Of course, there were institutes of geophysics, Berkeley, and [crosstalk]…

Sparks:

Oh, well, I was just going to say, there was one group in volcanology which were very strong at that time, which I did go to see, which was Dartmouth…

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

…which was at Hanover, New Hampshire, where Bob Decker and Dick Stoiber were the… at the time the gurus of that department. And I went up to go… I remember going up to give them… give a talk, meeting them there, and Steve Self was actually a postdoc there as well at the time. So, that was a very strong group. Did I meet Bill Rose there? I probably did. Not sure about that. But anyway, that was a… that was a very good group, and I went to give a talk there, and I’d have gone to… I think I must have given a talk at Lamont at some time in that period.

Doel:

Was that in the Big House [Lamont Hall] that you remember?

Sparks:

Yes, a big wooden…

Doel:

Big structure.

Sparks:

That’s right.

Doel:

That had the big seminar room?

Sparks:

Yes. So, I started to spread the wings of getting to know other groups.

Doel:

When you gave those talks, were there any interactions or reactions from people that were memorable? I’m assuming some of those ideas would have been new to those you were presenting, given the cutting-edge work you were doing at the time.

Sparks:

Yes, I… I can’t… I must admit, I can’t really remember getting any sort of particularly memorable interactions. I’m wondering where I went to. It was much later, I went to Santa Barbara and saw Dick Fisher. Yes, not… no, not really. I mean, I don’t think it was quite in the same… in those days, it probably… it probably wasn’t quite as frenetic. I mean, you were a postdoc based in a school of oceanography. I was going on a… I went on a couple of cruises, so it was just basically… most of the time in Rhode Island.

Doel:

How long were the cruises that you were on?

Sparks:

We had… the Santorini one must have been about close to… not quite three weeks, I think. And then we did the big Caribbean cruise with Harold in the Endeavour.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

We went down, and that was probably about three weeks. It also… that included doing… visiting most of the West Indian islands to collect samples.

Doel:

Of course, that’s a different kind of field work. How did you find being out at sea?

Sparks:

I enjoyed it, yes. I mean, it was pretty exciting, I mean, taking the… of course, that was the Santorini, the Aegean cruise, was the first one I’d ever been on. And so actually collecting the samples off the sea floor, and that was completely new, because nobody had tried to do that before. So, it was… there were a few cores that… from a Swedish cruise in the ’50s, which Ninkovich had studied, and he’d identified the Minoan ash. But this was a much more comprehensive cruise. And I remember it being a very enjoyable time. I mean, lots of things went on, which [laughs] couldn’t possibly go on nowadays. There was a… at the end of the day, there was a cocktail flag which went up at the back of the ship that Watkins had created, which was a big white sheet with a… using black tape had made a sort of cocktail… cross-section of a cocktail glass with a cherry in it. At the end of the day, that would be hauled up for cocktail hour on the deck.

Doel:

And you honored it?

Sparks:

Honored it at that point, yes. That’s right. So, we had cocktails. And you look back at the photographs, and we were all in short trousers, no protective boots, no helmets. [laughs] There’s no health and safety… hardly any health and safety going on at all. So very different days, but it was very exciting.

Doel:

And that was very common at the time.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

You look at photographs of [crosstalk]…

Sparks:

Yeah, that’s right.

Doel:

…cruises at the same period of time. Quite different.

Sparks:

Yes, now very different, yes. So that was good fun. And that’s when I met, of course, Dragoslav Ninkovich.

Doel:

Do you remember getting to GSA meetings during the time you were in Rhode Island?

Sparks:

I don’t think I did, no. I was almost… the affiliation was almost… because I think I’d enjoyed that first AGU so much, from that point on, I would go to AGU meetings.

Doel:

Did you get to the fall meeting in San Francisco?

Sparks:

Occasionally, yes. I’m not sure while I was in Rhode Island…

Doel:

Sure, yeah.

Sparks:

…but I did later. Later on, I went to the fall meeting.

Doel:

The Washington meeting at the time was one of the crucial ones.

Sparks:

That was the… that was the key one.

Doel:

The key one, yeah.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

That has changed. One other thing I wanted to ask you about in this time period. You were also getting your first NSF, National Science Foundation, grants.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

1976 was the first one. The second two years later. And did you know any of the science managers at NSF in the Earth sciences when you made those applications?

Sparks:

Not really, no. No. I mean, I remember… but they were co-applications with Haraldur or Watkins or whoever with… and in fact, I think I’d got some… when I left, when I got the job in Cambridge, I think I had at least a year’s salary on NSF grants that could have kept me going there for another year. So, and then from then on, probably for almost 10 years, I was sort of somehow involved in NSF proposals and grants and got bits of travel money to come from the UK and stay in Rhode Island. So, we went to Rhode Island most summers, in the sort of seven, eight years after leaving Rhode Island.

Doel:

Right. And you’d purchased a home there?

Sparks:

I did, but that was much later.

Doel:

That was much later. Okay.

Sparks:

Much later, yeah. But we were… we were pretty well regular visitors, I would think, almost 10 years after I’d left Rhode Island. And I was always supported. I’d be on somebody’s grant or a co-PI, and I wouldn’t get salaried, but I’d get travel money and enough money to come over.

Doel:

And you had sufficient funds with that… were not getting salary from an NSF [crosstalk] while doing that.

Sparks:

Yes, while I was getting salary from the UK, so I didn’t need any salary funds from…

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

…from the NSF grant, but I just needed money to sort of pay for the visits.

Doel:

So, all those were co-written grants?

Sparks:

Yes, and I think…

Doel:

The NSF…

Sparks:

That’s right. Yeah. And I think the choice was that GSO would have liked me to have stayed and carried on being in a sort of soft money… it would mean… needed a visa change, of course, which I never… had never applied for, because I got the job in Cambridge.

Doel:

Yeah. Was that tempting at all to you at the time?

Sparks:

Yes, it was tempting, because we liked Rhode Island… my family and I liked Rhode Island as a place to live, and we were very happy and comfortable there. And I liked the school of oceanography and the people I was working with, so it was… it was… had been quite tempting to have stayed there.

Doel:

Were there any hard-money opportunities you sensed might have been emerging?

Sparks:

Oh, I think so. But they’d never really got to that stage. I mean… so I never really… it wasn’t in fact until the late ’80s that I started to get approached by some of the… some American institutions to see if I would be interested in moving over there.

Doel:

Do you recall those in particular?

Sparks:

Well, I’d got interest from Scripps in particular, University in Washington in Seattle, places that at least had some discussions going. And so there was a… you know, there was a… definitely, I could have. That was a stage. This would have been sort of late ’80s, like 1987, ’80s.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

Just before I went to Bristol.

Doel:

Did you know the U.S. West Coast? Were those familiar places by that point?

Sparks:

Oh, yes, I did, yeah. And in fact… so I had a sabbatical at Caltech. I got a Sherman Fairchild Scholarship in ’87, I think it was.

Doel:

That’s right.

Sparks:

And we took… we were there for about four months, and I took the opportunity of doing a lot of traveling.

Doel:

And I wanted to ask about the earlier sabbatical that you had, and that was [crosstalk]…

Sparks:

Australian National University.

Doel:

And while we’re talking about Caltech, I’m just curious, because you were officially in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Division?

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

What were your impressions of that? I realize you ended up working in a different unit that…

Sparks:

I really enjoyed it. I mean, I wasn’t there very long.

Doel:

It was four months, wasn’t it?

Sparks:

About something like four months. And Ed Stolper was my host, and I got to meet most of the sort of big, names you know… Hugh Taylor and Lee Silver and Kerry Sieh and [W.] Barclay Kamb, these sort of big-shot… David Stevenson, you know, all the big shots of that time. And I really enjoyed it. You know, there was a seminar series which was very entertaining.

Doel:

And that covered broadly planetary science…

Sparks:

It covered everything, really. And I suppose my interactions were principally with a grad student of Kerry Sieh’s called Marcus Bursik, who’s now a professor at Buffalo. And Marcus and I got interested in various things. And I got… and he… I attracted him to come to Cambridge as a postdoc. So, we did a lot of… that was a very good interaction. And then the main interaction was with Brad Sturtevant as an aeronautical engineer, where he had some sort of fancy equipment in his aeronautics department. So, I did…

Doel:

How did you find out about his work?

Sparks:

Well, I knew about it a little bit, because…

Doel:

Even before going?

Sparks:

Even before going, yes, I knew about it. I’m not sure if I’d met him or not, but I probably had at a conference, because he worked with Sue [S. W.] Kieffer, who is a sort of physics… she’s been interested in sort of high-speed physics of volcanic explosions. And Sue and Brad had worked together, and so I knew about their work. And I think I’d talked to him before going and wrote him and said when I was coming, and I’d be interested in working together.

Doel:

Yeah. I’m curious. That was a second U.S. institution you had experience with. How did that compare to Rhode Island?

Sparks:

Oh, it was totally different. [laughs] Caltech is unique, I think, in many ways. And I found it… I found it very enjoyable. It’s, you know… as you probably know, it’s got hardly any undergraduates…

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

…or undergraduate program. And obviously, it’s got a, shall we say, a high level of self-esteem. [laughs]

Doel:

[laughs] A good way to put it.

Sparks:

And that was a very… you know, there are some brilliant people there, and so it was very enjoyable talking to them. But I was… it wasn’t… you could sense quite often when they had visiting speakers, some of whom might be potential Caltech appointees, there was much more sort of tension about…

Doel:

You could tell by who’s coming [crosstalk]…

Sparks:

That’s right, yeah, whereas a visitor from the UK, where I didn’t have any ambitions to become a Caltech faculty member, so I could sort of be… I think adopt a much more sort of relaxed view of things.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And yeah, it was… it was very good. And I met… I also met, by coincidence, somebody who turned out to be a very good… has been a sort of longstanding friend or family friends, is… we met the Sharplesses, who was the other Sherman Fairchild Scholar with me, and we were there almost the same time. And we ended up going out with—he had his young family—to Joshua Tree National Park. Did you know Barry Sharpless?

Doel:

I know the name.

Sparks:

He got Nobel Prize for chemistry, so he’s one of the very top U.S. organic chemists. I mean, he didn’t have the Nobel Prize then, but that was much later. But he… we got to know Barry and his wife and family very well, and we and the kids keep in touch. So, that was very enjoyable too. So, it was… and I saw Pele on the Rose Bowl Parade, which was great, with my… and my son, who was sort of 8 at the time… the oldest son was about 8 at the time. So, it’s… it was a great trip.

Doel:

Did you get up to JPL during the time?

Sparks:

No, I didn’t. No. In fact, at the end of that trip, I think I was still at Cambridge, and I was beginning to get… thinking of doing something different, going somewhere else. And that’s when I started to talk to… you know, we had discussions with Scripps.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So, the informal discussions with other places. Went on a bit of a West Coast tour to see what was happening.

Doel:

I’m curious what you recall from those visits that you made at Scripps and in Seattle?

Sparks:

Scripps?

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

Well, Scripps wasn’t… Scripps wasn’t so… there’s… again, individually, there’s some great people in Scripps. I didn’t get quite the sense of the… I didn’t feel that it was quite the intellectual powerhouse that Caltech is, at that time. There were some… you know, some fantastically good scientists there, but it seemed more individuals doing their own thing. And there wasn’t… and I’d come from… well, Cambridge, of course, was… in the ’80s was quite a, you know, reasonably collegial place, and there are a lot of people to interact with, and I didn’t get that sense at Scripps.

Doel:

Some have described Scripps in that period as being a set of fiefdoms.

Sparks:

Yes, exactly, yes. That’s right. And they ran their own labs, and they did the… they didn’t have much to do with each other, so I didn’t get the sense of it being such a great place to work. And then, of course, you… at that time, you… the only choice of housing would have been somewhere in the desert, whereas you needed to be a multimillionaire to buy anything close to the coast. So, it didn’t look like a great place… the place I wanted to live… where we really wanted to live. So, I was more struck with Seattle, I suppose, University of Washington, and Oregon… University of Oregon… as nice places, sort of campuses and somewhat appeared to be more collegial at that time.

Doel:

Yeah. Yeah. And you had a good interaction with people at Washington?

Sparks:

Yes. That’s right. There were some very good people there, too.

Doel:

They had a long tradition in Earth sciences.

Sparks:

Yes. It felt more like a British geology department.

Doel:

That’s interesting. We have plenty still to talk about, but one last question I wanted to ask today before we bring this session to a close: you’ve mentioned several times when you went to Rhode Island, when you were visiting elsewhere, the importance of interacting with graduate students.

Sparks:

Yes. Yes.

Doel:

And was that unusual, do you think, among visiting postdocs and others? How much did that reflect your sense of the mentoring role that postdocs can play?

Sparks:

Well, you see, the thing is that I wasn’t really any more experienced or any older than most of the postgrads, because in the UK, you get your PhD within three years.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And in the States, it takes five to six years.

Doel:

Five, six, or more, yeah.

Sparks:

So, the graduate students that I interacted with when I was at Rhode Island, like Peter Meyer and Steve Carey and Mike Ledbetter and so forth, were those… they were all my age, and you know, they were doing their PhDs, and they had been four or five years, so they were just as experienced. So, I don’t think there was any… I played any mentoring role at all, so I think I was just part of their…

Doel:

Part of the cohort in a broader sense?

Sparks:

That cohort, yeah. That’s right.

Doel:

That’s an interesting observation.

Sparks:

Yes. So yeah, so that… and that was good. And again, I… I mean, I worked with Harold and Steve Carey in particular. I mean, I think because Norman [Watkins] became so ill…

Doel:

So, ill very soon after you arrived.

Sparks:

…quite soon after I arrived. I didn’t really… in the end, I didn’t really interact with him much at all. It would have been interesting if I had, because he was a sort of larger…

Doel:

Larger-than-life character, wasn’t he?

Sparks:

Character. Yes, that’s right.

Doel:

And there’s a great deal I want to ask you about Cambridge and then Bristol and larger involvement you’ve had. But we’ve been talking now for nearly two hours.

Sparks:

Right, okay.

Doel:

And this is probably a good time to bring this to a close. And I want to thank you so much for this long session, and we will… and this should go on the… on this digital recording… not release the recording or its transcript without your express approval in terms of the permission forms, you’ll be receiving for this interview.

Sparks:

Okay, yes, that’s very good.

Doel:

And thank you very much.

Sparks:

Good. Okay.

 

Session 2

Doel:

Okay, and once again, if you can just say a few words, I’ll double-check that the volume is set properly.

Sparks:

Okay. It’s Wednesday morning and we’re continuing the interview. We’re going to go onto the time at Cambridge.

Doel:

Yes, indeed. And you did a great job covering what I typically say. [laughs]

Sparks:

Right, right.

Doel:

Which is... This is Ron Doel, and this is a continuing interview with Steve Sparks. And today’s date is indeed the 1st of August, 2018. And we’re once again recording this at the University of Bristol in England. I wanted to return to the time when you were at Cambridge.

Sparks:

Yes, yes.

Doel:

One of the issues that hadn’t been covered in full depth in that first, long interview you did was how you prepared for teaching. You were brought into that rather abruptly. I’m curious how you developed a teaching philosophy.

Sparks:

Yes, I hadn’t done a great deal of teaching before I went to Cambridge. I’d done bits and pieces, both at Rhode Island and Lancaster, but not very much. I would say I was very inexperienced. So I was, to some extent, left to get on with it. Again, they didn’t provide training courses or how to teach.

Doel:

Those sorts of things are more common now.

Sparks:

Yes, and I think I started off by doing quite a lot of preparation on my own. In the Oxbridge system, you have tutorials, and so I did some tutorials at teaching and I did quite a lot of demonstrating initially, where I would be helping other lecturers in classes and I gradually took on some responsibilities of teaching myself as well as on field trips. I think I already established a fairly reasonable style of lecturing and giving seminars for my research. So I don’t think I found it a huge change from that point of view of delivering lectures. It was obviously a lot of hard work to prepare the lectures, and to sort of pitch them right. I got involved quite quickly with teaching the first years. So essentially sort of a 101 Geology. The advantage of being at somewhere like Cambridge is the students are incredibly bright. So, I think that always helps because they catch on quick, and perhaps you can pitch lectures at a sort of reasonably high level. Of course, you make mistakes in terms of timing and how much you can put across in a 50-minute lecture, but I think I caught on quite quickly to that. I think that perhaps the biggest struggle I had was that they wanted me to teach in something called crystalline state, which is a course given by the materials science department at Cambridge. So it’s for metallurgists and materials people. And to some extent, the physics and also because we had a lot of mineralogists, we (the Earth Sciences Department) contributed quite significantly to that course, so all the geologists doing the natural sciences track had to take crystalline state. Now, this wasn’t my field, but I had to be the sort of class demonstrator, what was called a demonstrator. I had to teach in the class and I also had to give tutorials in this area. And that was really quite challenging, because it wasn’t my area and I had to learn a lot about it from scratch. And there was a lot of reflection and refraction crystallography going on, so one had to learn about space groups and how you convert x-ray diffraction patterns to understand lattice structures.

Doel:

And were you learning that by reading textbooks, or also talking with—

Sparks:

Reading, yes, I had to basically read up textbooks. I went to the lectures, so I learned partly that way. There were some good textbooks around that I used to teach myself. And then I ended up doing tutorials for students in college who were taking that class, and that was pretty challenging, because most of the tutees were doing physics, and they’re sort of, they’re basically the elite, and they’re very strong. A lot of them, the undergraduates had very strong maths. So I was only just about able to keep ahead of the undergraduates. And I had to teach myself vector calculus because that’s part of the subject and an important part of crystallography and materials science. I found that quite challenging. I spent a lot of time actually teaching myself this field. I wish I… I sort of enjoyed it, but it was, as I say, challenging.

Doel:

When you said earlier that you were able to take from your research presentations a sense of style of teaching, what particularly do you have in mind?

Sparks:

I think presenting straightforward diagrams, not giving the students too much information in one dose. Of course, we used slides and overhead projectors, long before PowerPoint, and quite a lot of chalk as well was used. So the teaching, if you like, the communication tools were very different, but fundamentally, I think you just have to pace the delivery. You have to judge what the student class can take in terms of the pace. And try and get across the really important points and not too much, not go into over-detail. So I think that was one aspect, and then of course, it helps if you are enthusiastic about the teaching and that’s very important. And so I found actually teaching to the first years basic geology was interesting, because you had to go back and remind yourself about things well outside your own research area. And I took on, I’m not quite sure whether it’s the second or third year after being at Cambridge, but I took on a course which, for our second years, which was basically the geological evolution of North America.

Doel:

Huh. How did you get that topic?

Sparks:

I think I decided that that’s what I would like to teach, and so I had to learn a lot about the geology of North America. I taught in a plate tectonic, tectonic context. So it wasn’t about volcanology in that, but that was quite rich, because you could teach metamorphic geology, you could teach igneous geology, you could teach tectonic structural geology, and integrate them together. And I very much enjoyed that. I think I taught that for probably five years in a row. I developed the course myself, and it was just second years, so they already knew some geology, so I could start teaching at a reasonably high level. There were classes which, most of which were some petrological classes, metamorphic rocks, and also I had to gather the rock collection, some of which were at Cambridge and others I had to get from asking around. So I very much enjoyed that, and that was, I taught myself a lot there, because I was teaching a lot about more general geology than my research.

Doel:

Did you cover the Cascades area?

Sparks:

Oh yes, the Cascades, yeah. Klamath Mountains and all that and thrust, folds and back thrusting—so I covered the whole thing. It was within a kind of plate tectonic, tectonic context about how different bits of North America fit together and it was largely Cenozoic. I didn’t really go back too far, so the Cenozoic to the Neogene as it were, and so I think I covered most of the obvious topics. The subduction of the Farallon Plates and I remember sort of reading Tanya Atwater’s classic papers on the plate tectonic reconstruction. So that was a lot… I remember enjoying that as a teaching task. And then, of course, I was being a field geologist, I took field classes to Scotland and to... I think most of them were to Scotland. We also went to Devon, Cornwall.

Doel:

Were any of those particularly memorable when you look back?

Sparks:

Oh yes, I mean, they’re always quite fun student field trips, and we had some fairly memorable trips. I remember it’s one classic one, which was to North Wales, to Snowdonia, with students, and that was memorable. Three students actually got arrested [both laugh] and that was quite entertaining in that the first night of the field trip, they’d gone down into the local town and came back with items. They’d collected some of these billboards you put outside shops, and they decided to… they’d obviously been to the pub and they collected these. And they got stopped by the police, and the first thing I knew was about one in the morning, being woken up by a police constable. So I had to go down to the police station and identify them. And so, because I’d identified them, and obviously the police didn’t regard this as sort of a you know particularly important, but it was the first night of the trip, and they told the students that the magistrate was coming on the Friday when the trip ended, would be coming, and they’d make a decision whether to proceed or not. And obviously, they didn’t proceed. They’d obviously thought—

Doel:

But it worked.

Sparks:

It worked. It made the students behave. And from then on, these three particular students were called by all the other students "The Criminals" and they were made to sit at the back of the bus, and there were sort of jokes like asking me whether they’d be able to take their exams in Wormwood Scrubs, one of the famous British prisons.

Doel:

Prison, yes. [laughs]

Sparks:

(They asked me) did I know anything about the (exam) regulations? There was a lot of banter there. So that was an example, but all the field trips were great fun, and again, because the students were pretty bright, the vast bulk of them were very enthusiastic and able in the field. And I taught mapping classes as well, up in Skye in North Wales. And that was great, those were all great fun.

Doel:

Did you meet with any of those students out of class during those years?

Sparks:

Not really. By the time I got to Cambridge, my wife had, you know, the first child in Rhode Island, so by the time… and I lived outside Cambridge, so you didn’t really socialize that much. I mean there were social events at the department that you went to, so there was... I mean, I think that you socialized mostly on the field trips. That’s when you go with the students and socialize. On a field trip, there’s evening work, they have to look at their field notebooks. They have to maybe draw up their maps or there’s usually stuff for them to do, and then maybe by...and have a meal, and then by sort of maybe 9-9:30pm, people go down to the pub or whatever, and so there’s a socialization there. So that was very enjoyable. I went to Santorini in Greece and took students. And I think I enjoy field classes most, because my science is very much, as a geologist, in reading rocks and looking at the rock record, looking at the textures, the structures, the arrangements. And teaching students how to do that is a very enjoyable... it’s something I still really enjoy and to some extent, miss from now, is I’ve always enjoyed field classes.

Doel:

Were there any students, undergrad students, you got to know then who continued on in some way?

Sparks:

Oh yes, yes. In fact, I won’t say who, the name, but one of The Criminals is now really quite an eminent scientist in the USA. [both laugh] And another student I had as an undergraduate who I was a tutor to, is now the head of the hazard section of the New Zealand Geological and Nuclear Sciences. So she’s now in charge, director of that, so that she’s written… and there are quite a few others who you come across from time to time. As I say, the Cambridge students tend to be very good, and so quite a lot of them have gone on to successful careers.

Doel:

I’m curious, too, about your impression of Earth Science at Cambridge when you arrived. Bullard had his own group that was away from the campus...

Sparks:

Yes, so I arrived at a very interesting time, because Ron Oxburgh had just taken over as head of the Mineralogy and Petrology Department. There were three departments: there was the Geology Gepartment, which did sedimentology, stratigraphic, paleontology, broadly soft rock areas. And then there was a Mineralogy and Petrology Department. And they were in adjacent buildings, but they had rather little to do with each other.

Doel:

Despite the geography being close enough.

Sparks:

Despite the geography, and then there was the Geophysics out at Madingley Rise where there are the Bullard labs. Which was physically separated, and I think also culturally separated. I mean, the geophysicists, having been such a key in developing plate tectonics, rather like Caltech had a fairly high self-esteem about what they’d achieved, which was probably justified, so people like Drummond Matthews and Dan McKenzie and others (were) out at Bullard. So it was quite, the (earth) sciences was quite disjointed in a way, when I joined. I was appointed to the Mineralogy and Petrology department. And Ron Oxburgh was appointed as the new chair, and I was essentially his first appointment. Somebody new. And so I came in at a period where his mission was to fuse those three separate departments into one Earth Sciences department.

Doel:

How much resistance was there? With that?

Sparks:

I think there was some resistance. I think the majority of people thought it in principle was a good idea. I don’t think that the actual idea was resisted that much, and Ron was very, I think, astute. He was certainly very much a role model for how to manage change and for leadership. He was very astute at how he talked through and finessed discussions with people who might have been more conservative. So I mean if you were going to get a nice new XRD machine and you’re a mineralogist, you know, there might be an incentive to agree. Then it was clear that this fusion was going to come with investment, and I think he was, Ron was very clever and astute at bringing people on board. Though there was resistance, of course, but... And the cultures of the three departments was, I think that it was more that the cultures in the three departments were so different.

Doel:

And now would the three buy that, because what were… how would you characterize the different cultures?

Sparks:

It’s hard to be... I’m just trying to think how you would summarize. Mineralogy and Petrology had some… I mean, all of the departments had some really outstanding people. They all develop cultures, I think that were influenced by previous heads, who were very influential. Tilly was the (past) head of school in the Mineralogy and Petrology. And I think he had brought in a lot of appointments to, if you like, strengthen mineralogy. And those appointments have been… quite a lot of them have been there for quite a while. So they were very sort of traditional in the sort of approach they had to the science. So it was clear that that needed refreshing, and of course, because there were some retirements— over the coming year, after Ron was appointed, there were some retirements and opportunities. Then again Ron appointed a new sort of cohort of younger researchers in those areas, which included me. The Geology Department was, again, just different. The atmosphere was different, they gained some very good people there, like Alan Smith. So for example, Peter Friend, who was a first-rate scientist (sedimentologist), strong force of the field. A lot of paleontology going on there. But of course, they didn’t really have very much in common. At one end, you had some pretty hardcore mineralogists in you know, diffraction and structural analysis and the geology department.

Doel:

Different instrumental techniques as well.

Sparks:

And then you had people like Barry Richards and [Simon] Conway Morris and... Well, actually, Conway Morris was appointed just after I came, wasn’t he? And there were the mineralogists, so there were, it was just a different style and different field, and they didn’t have really much to do with each other. I don’t think it was personal, as it were. That it was just they were different. 

Doel:

Was there much intermingling at a common seminar?

Sparks:

Oh yes, I think Ron managed to... I mean, that was Ron’s task, was to sort of fuse this into a single department.

Doel:

That was created then.

Sparks:

That was created, and I think it took a few years to gain a sense of, you know, a single department, but I think that happened pretty quickly—my recollection was that the... that it probably took three or four years to, you know, everybody was in the Sedgwick Museum was a common area for tea and coffee, so quite quickly, that became the place where everybody gathered. They didn’t have separate teas and coffees, and then new people were appointed and that changed the atmosphere in a way. So it was... So I think that was what one of Ron’s great successes, was to get that. I think it was more difficult with Bullard, but simply because they were physically separated from us, so they carried on. They were part of the department, but they were physically separated.

Doel:

Were there also cultural differences?

Sparks:

I’m not sure. I think there were. As I say, the geophysicists clearly saw themselves as, you know, sort of an elite scientists, and in many ways, that was justified. I mean, they played this huge role in plate tectonics. So they had some pretty good evidence to support their view. And again, people like Dave Gubbins and Dan McKenzie and Drummond Matthews would come down to seminars (at the Downing site). They would have tea and they would attend, so they made an effort to be part of the department. So I think that was, given the distance, that was reasonably successful.

Doel:

Yes. How did it affect pedagogy, teaching, for the undergrads?

Sparks:

I think it changed it a lot, because you’re going from three totally separate departments to one, then obviously, they have to have one coherent program, and you’re bringing in new people, so what was taught I think changed over a number of years, that the nature of the courses changed. And so they were integrated into one Earth Science degree.

Doel:

How much did you interact directly with Teddy Bullard?

Sparks:

Not at all. When did he... I’m not sure, I’m trying to think of when he retired and passed away, but I don’t think...

Doel:

It might have been right around when—

Sparks:

I think that was about the time I think he might have even retired. I’d have to look that up on the Google or something to find out what… but I’m not sure I even remember meeting him, actually.

Doel:

That’s interesting. And I was just curious about that.

Sparks:

Yeah. I mean, I met Drummond Matthews, who was a sort of charming character, of course. And Dan McKenzie and Dave Gubbins. Some of the prominent people there.

Doel:

Another matter I’m curious about. As you were training your own graduate students at Cambridge, how did you mentor those that you took on as PhD students? Did you have a style, a philosophy, of what was most effective? 

Sparks:

I think I’d learned a lot from George. I mean, my interactions with George were I think strongest when we were out in the field. And so I made sure I spent a fair amount of time in the field with the graduate students. And that’s when we could start talking about the styles, and the early ones were very much, PhDs, were very much field-based projects. And so I think going in the field, but I always, I suppose, kept it fairly, like George, I suppose, I kept it informal. I think later in my career, I probably changed the style a little bit, but early on, of course, I wasn’t all that much older than some of the graduate students, like Tim Druitt, early on. And again, I was very fortunate to have such bright students. In fact, my first PhD… I heard two days ago, that my very first PhD student, Tim Druitt, won the Bowen Award of the AGU.

Doel:

Ah yes.

Sparks:

That’s just been announced, I think, two days ago. So Tim is a brilliant student, and has gone on to fame and fortune himself and been a sort of major figure in igneous petrology. So it was quite pleasing to hear him win the Bowen Award a couple of days ago. And so I think I always kept it fairly informal. You know, we chatted at tea and when we needed to. And I found over the years, of course, I was fortunate in my first few PhD students, but of course, when you get less able PhD students, you do find you have to start having a bit more formal structure. I mean, a very bright student is usually pretty easy, because you just tell them once and they respond.

Doel:

They’re low maintenance.

Sparks:

They’re low maintenance, exactly. But when you get less-able ones or people who’ve got one problem of one sort or another, then you may have to, I’ve found, you have to make it a little bit more formal. You know, say let’s meet every week and see how you’ve got on, and give them tasks that are manageable. But that sort of came a bit later, because as I said, the first few ones were very able.

Doel:

And I realize your work was very much field-based in that period of time. Were students self-selecting topics, or was that something that emerged out of a—

Sparks:

It would usually be, most projects, I think, I’ve sort of conceived the broad outline of a project, but allowed students, particularly able students, to develop their own approach to the project, or even to move it in particular directions, which by the time the PhD is finished, it doesn’t look all that like the original project, in some cases. So it depends very much on the student, but I’ve always, particularly for able students, given them some leeway on what they do. And usually, I’ve devised projects which are sufficiently general that they could go in different directions.

Doel:

At that time, were there any challenges in getting enough funding to get your students?

Sparks:

Not really, no. I managed to get NERC studentships quite easily. I don’t think I ever had any real problem. And so I was taking on one or two a year while I was at Cambridge, I think. 

Doel:

Yeah. Were there more who wanted to work with you than that?

Sparks:

There probably were, yes, but I was able to choose the best.

Doel:

But you had a choice.

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right, yes, that’s right, yes.

Doel:

When you published with them, how did you determine as to like author orders?

Sparks:

Well, I think that always depends on the extent to which you as a supervisor put effort or sort of intellectual effort into the project, in terms of helping the student interpret data, or if you’re in the field, gather the data. So I’ve never really had many problems with students being concerned about authorship issues. I’ve not always been a coauthor on all the student publications. I would say the majority I probably have, but occasionally, they would publish independently. And so it really just depends on whether they’ve done something which I’ve already not contributed to at all, and then they’ll come and they’ll publish on their own. So it varies a little bit. Certainly in the first few students, because again, I think there’s a difference later in your career. You tend to gather larger groups. Early on in Cambridge, I would just have one or two students to work with, so you could give them a lot of attention, particularly again in the field working with them and helping them gather the data or interpret the rocks and so forth.

Doel:

And I ask in part because in certain parts of science, authorship is much more contested.

Sparks:

It is, and I mean, I think in Earth Sciences, like even within Earth Sciences, you have different traditions and cultures of how you publish.

Doel:

I wanted to ask something related. You were publishing quite a bit during those years, in fact, you’d been continuously publishing. What were the ways that, as you look back, helped you to generate new ideas, new insights? Do you think it came a lot from conversations, from reading, from walking and thinking through? I’m just curious about the process.

Sparks:

I think the field certainly... I think throughout my research career, the field has been a very strong motivator. So if you go and you watch a volcanic eruption, or go in the field and look at volcanic deposits, and you see things which are difficult to understand and you start to tease out from data, you start to tease out empirical relationships, which you again don’t really know how to interpret, then those are sort of challenges. And you then start to think how can I advance understanding about what I am seeing in all the data? So I think the field and the data you gather in the field and the lab are the real prime motivators for thinking of new projects. And so you see, of course, in volcanology, which is very rich in terms of variety of phenomena, if you go and see more volcanoes, you’ll see new things you’ve not seen before, which then invite thinking about how you could devise a research project to help understand that. So I think that’s always been the main motivation for constructing PhDs.

Doel:

And it certainly was important for you very early in your career.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

It helped shape your approach to the science. That’s interesting. Also curious, you... In your Cambridge career, you won a number of prizes and distinguished honors. In 1982, the Darwin lectureship at the BAAS (British Association for Advancement of Science).

Sparks:

 BAAS, yes, yes.

Doel:

And then one year later, the Wager Prize in volcanology and ‘85, the Bigsby Medal.

Sparks:

Yes, yes.

Doel:

How did that affect your career and your ability to do what you wanted to do in science?

Sparks:

I’m not sure... I mean, I’ve always felt that, I mean, it’s certainly nice and rewarding to get sort of accolades like that, awards. I don’t think any of them really changed in any sense the way I approached research or my interests. Because they were just driven by the curiosity and nature really, and I don’t think really those awards were that important in driving what I did as a scientist.

Doel:

Did it make it any easier to get funding or other opportunities?

Sparks:

I don’t know. I suspect it probably does. It’s part of the building a… you know, any scientist builds a reputation and as they build their reputation, I suspect that that (awards) give them more advantage in things like grants. Their track record starts to look stronger, so the reviewers have got more confidence that this is somebody who if they fund, that is going to produce some interesting science.

Doel:

It’s a very high level of peer review, in that sense.

Sparks:

In that sense, yes, I mean, the peer review system, which I was most… well, as we talked about yesterday, I was used to the NSF system. And so I knew both the NSF system and the NERC Research Grant system. So a lot of my funding in the UK came from NERC. And then, I think, probably things like that would have influenced one of those. I wouldn’t say it was a major break, but it was certainly an important moment, when Herbert Huppert and I got BP Venture research funding. Which we did from sometime I guess sort of early/mid-80s. BP set up a research award scheme. It was quite a lot of money to fund researchers. And I think things like the medals and early career awards would have had quite a big influence there, because the way BP chose its recipients, which they funded very generously, was much more to do with their track record than the quality of the proposal— you know, I wouldn’t say that the proposals they were getting weren’t of good quality.

Doel:

Right, but that mattered.

Sparks:

But that really did matter. So I think do BP Venture Fund, that what really mattered was that they were funding people who there was evidence of sort of quality and so I think things like the medals did tend to play a role, and then of course, BP gave Herbert and I quite a lot of money, and that bought out quite a lot of our teaching admin time. It didn’t mean that I stopped teaching or anything, but it meant I’d reduced my load and allowed us both to focus on the research more.

Doel:

What became your teaching load at that point?

Sparks:

Oh I think, if I’d had a full teaching load, I’d have probably done about three courses and a field trip and I think I probably went down to one to two courses and a field trip. It wasn’t a huge reduction, but it was enough to make a difference. 

Doel:

It makes a difference, yeah.

Sparks:

It made a difference, yeah.

Doel:

I wanted to talk in a moment more about your work with Herbert Huppert, but I’m curious when you were talking about NSF and your work. What were the key differences between those two funding agencies and their ways of promoting science?

Sparks:

They weren’t too different. I found the NSF intrinsically, surprisingly less bureaucratic than the Research Councils of the UK. And I think those characteristics are still with us. In fact, if anything, the Research Councils of the UK have gotten even more sort of bureaucratic with the amount of form-filling and information required. NSF have got big, thick proposals, but a lot of the stuff you can gather sort of fairly automatically. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, so a lot of the core research proposal is easy to put together. I suppose they’re not that different in the sense that there’s a core research proposal, but the way they go about judging it is rather different. You know, the NSF panels, I think, are intrinsically different. Probably more than the NERC panels that existed. And I mean it’s hard to know how it affected me in the sense that whenever I was involved in either NSF or NERC proposals, the majority of them seemed to get funded. So I had some failures of course, but there were never many. There was never a sort of barren or a drought of funding. I was always able to achieve funding from both organizations. So I suppose, given that I put the proposals in with colleagues and they succeeded and we got the money, it didn’t really... [laughs] I didn’t worry too much about sort of competition… you know, I wasn’t saying that I always got funded by NSF, but I never lacked funding by NERC. That didn’t happen.

Doel:

Yeah. And given that the field was small enough at that time, did you have a sense of who the reviewers were for your [crosstalk]?

Sparks:

You could usually make guess or something, that’s one of the great games of reviewing, is anonymous reviews, that the recipients of the reviews are always trying to guess who the reviewers are. Quite often mistakenly, but that’s sort of, I suppose, a dalliance that a lot of scientists will play. And then of course, I started doing reviews myself for other proposals, as one does. So.

Doel:

And did you start that first for NERC, as I recall? You were involved in the reviewing for...?

Sparks:

I think I did some NSF… getting some NSF… I was never on an NSF panel.

Doel:

Panel, but you got the reviews to...

Sparks:

I got to read the proposals to review, yes. And but of course, going back to that BP, that was important funding, because also the BP money came with very relatively few strings attached, because our proposal that we put in to get funded by them was rather quite general. Not very specific. I mean, it would probably have no chance in the NERC or NSF systems. My recollection is it would probably have no chance in NSF or NERC, because—

Doel:

Because it was so broad?

Sparks:

It was too broad for them. It wasn’t quite so sort of mission-oriented or hypothesis testing. And NERC in particular, hypothesis testing was always regarded as a very important attribute of a proposal. Possibly less so with NSF, I don’t know, but certainly, that clear missions, clear hypothesis, to test, were important there, whereas with BP, we were just generally saying we wanted to do some good science in this general area. 

Doel:

And what did the BP funding actually allow you to do?

Sparks:

Well, it allowed us to have some support for experiments and computer program development. Huppert had a programmer funded, I think. And it supported some postdoc work. It bought a bit of time out of admin teaching responsibilities. So it eased the, it allowed both Herbert and I to focus more on research than we would have otherwise.

Doel:

Did that come before or after your 1982 sabbatical? 

Sparks:

It must have been around the same time. I’d have to look back at my records to check exactly when the BP (confirmed to be 1983).

Doel:

But it’s in that same period of time?

Sparks:

Yes, it’s in that same era. And of course that’s when I went on sabbatical to ANU. We were working with Stuart Turner and his group in Canberra, and I think that was a very sort of productive period, working with Herbert and Stuart.

Doel:

What do you remember most from that sabbatical?

Sparks:

Oh just, I think having a lot of good time in the lab. Stuart Turner had two extremely able technicians who were already funded. I mean, ANU was well, it was a very, regarded as the sort of the elite Australian research center, and they had pretty generous funding, so they had technical workshop support. It meant that the technical guys could build our experimental equipment. You could sort of sketch out not exactly on the back of a cigarette packet, but certainly you could sketch out plans of what we would like to do in the experiments, and they would build the apparatus for us. We did a lot of experiments when we were at ANU. And they were already very experienced with stuff with Stuart Turner’s great forte was experimental fluid mechanics. And so we came into a very well-oiled machine. They could build equipment and they could build it quickly. It generally worked. And of course, they could help run the experiments.

Doel:

Was that particularly the case there compared to Cambridge? Or again, other places?

Sparks:

Well we were lucky again, through the BP support, we had a very able laboratory technician called Mark Hallowrth, who’s still in Cambridge running experiments. And he played a similar role. We appointed him and he played a similar role at Cambridge, so I suppose we’ve kind of modeled it a little bit on what—

Doel:

On what you’d experienced?

Sparks:

Experienced at ANU. So that was very productive, because we could get a lot of stuff done and the actual making the equipment, making it run, was being effectively done by some other experienced people, technicians.

Doel:

And that was during the time that you were looking at the early, hot, very fluid lavas. 

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right, and that came about during the sabbatical. I went over to Western Australia and we’d started reading up about komatiites and found them very interesting. And we were, started reading up the geology, and we went to Western Australia to Canberra, and we went down the (Kambalda) mines and looked at some of the lavas, and that’s when Herbert and I started thinking about the flow processses. I don’t think we, I think we did all the experiments in Cambridge after we got back, so I would say that that Australia trip motivated our interest in komatiites, but the actual research, I think, took place in the subsequent couple of years, two or three years. But we started to think about some of the issues around komatiites and the spinifex textures. And there had been some earlier work by a colleague I met at Lancaster, actually, called Geoff Hulme, who had done some very nice work on the rilles on the Moon when I was at Lancaster. They were, Lionel Wilson and Geoff Hulme, were both interested. There was a big planetary sciences group, and they were both interested in planetary sciences, and Geoff had done some nice fluid mechanical models of formation of lunar rilles, and to some extent, we thought, well, maybe these really hot lava is the same sort of phenomenon, were happening. So we started to get motivated by the, again, by the field.

Doel:

And I was particularly curious about that. Did you ever get to any of the lunar or planetary conferences to present those ideas?

Sparks:

I went to one lunar planetary conference in Houston, and I can’t remember when that was. The ’80s.

Doel:

I was just curious if you met some of the—

Sparks:

Yeah, I met a really [crosstalk] strange that I’ve never… I’ve always been interested in planetary volcanism. Lionel Wilson, of course, has been a sort of major leader in thinking about volcanism on the other planets. And he was already, when I was at Lancaster, thinking about that. So I’ve always maintained an interest in it, and I think fundamentally, I never really did much myself in that area. Because I was always sort of frustrated by the, you couldn’t actually go and observe. 

Doel:

Mmhmm. Do the field work directly.

Sparks:

Do the field work. So you got basically wonderful surface images of structures, and that’s the only information you really had. So I thought, I suppose I really decided that it wasn’t for me, because I couldn’t go in the field and make observations and collect the rocks and find ancillary information that could help interpret the features. And in terrestrial volcanism, of course, you can do that.

Doel:

That’s quite interesting, and I can see how that connection is there. 

Sparks:

Yeah, so there was always going to… in the planetary volcanism literature, there’s always, it seems to me, ambiguity. 

Doel:

Mmhmm, yes.

Sparks:

[laughs] So I’m not decrying it as a very worthwhile and interesting area, it’s just it wasn’t for me.

Doel:

Do you remember anything particularly from that meeting in Houston when you did go to that group?

Sparks:

No, not really, no. I mean I think it was the time of the basaltic volcanism book.

Doel:

That you were involved in, yeah?

Sparks:

Yeah, it was a big [crosstalk]

Doel:

You’re pointing to it here in your office.

Sparks:

Yeah, that’s a sort of classic basaltic volcanism on the other planets, and I wrote a chapter in that book with a number of coauthors.

Doel:

Yes, yes.

Sparks:

So I think that was, that must have been late ‘70s.

Doel:

Were there any... we talked a moment ago about the prizes that you got.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

Were any of them particularly surprising to you?

Sparks:

I was quite... I think they both came as surprises, the Wager and the Bigsby. I hadn’t really got any notion that I’d been nominated. So they were surprises when they came through. And of course, enjoyable to receive. The Wager, of course, by its nature, is an international award. And so I suppose that would have probably got me more visibility internationally than the Bigsby medal.

Doel:

Because that’s part of the International Association of Volcanology—

Sparks:

That’s correct, yes.

Doel:

—and Chemistry. How active were you in that group by that time?

Sparks:

Well, I really enjoyed going… I’ve always enjoyed going to their conferences. I mean, it’s obviously The Conference to go to. It was every four years initially. Now they have other conferences as well, so there’s a sort of bigger program these days. But at the time, the general assembly of IAVCEI was the must-go-to meeting for volcanologists. And usually, it was a very good meeting, because we’re obviously mixing the people who’ve got similar passions and interests.

Doel:

You may have mentioned this yesterday, which was the first meeting that you recall going to?

Sparks:

I think it was 1977, and I think it was Durham, and I remember being in a camp actually going to the conference and camping to go to the conference.

Doel:

Is that right?

Sparks:

And I’d have to check the dates, but it’s the day, I think, Elvis died (16th August 1977). [both laugh] I remember that very well. [laughs] So that was very memorable, I remember hearing that news. And that was a great conference. Again, it was a bit of an eye-opener because the great French volcanologist Tazieff was there. And he was at that time regarded as the great guru of volcanology. And he had a sort of almost an army of people who, acolytes who swarmed around him at the conference. [both laugh] It was great. There was a group of Russian, Soviet volcanologists there, and so it was a great meeting. Very sort of international and diverse culturally.

Doel:

Were any conversations particularly memorable from that time?

Sparks:

Well, actually, the one thing I do remember about that was asking a question to Tazieff, because I think he had definitely got his temperature measurements wrong. And I remember that, as being a very junior scientist who you probably never heard of, asking a question about, you know, how had he measured his temperatures? And saying that we’d gotten much higher temperatures than he had. [both laugh] I remember that being quite an interesting exchange. 

Doel:

How did he respond?

Sparks:

I think fairly dismissive. I don’t recollect him really answering the question at all. But quite a lot of flannel about, you know, that they bought the latest radiometers and they’d done this and they’d done that. And sort of more or less just sidelining, moving to the side, I think. But I’d been on Etna with Harry Pinkerton in ‘75 when I was at Lancaster and we’d done a lot of temperature measurements. And just behind you, you can see the instrument where, the filament couple we used to measure the lava temperature. 

Doel:

Ah, indeed. Looking in the back of the office, yes.

Sparks:

That’s right. And so we were pretty confident that our temperatures were pretty good.

Doel:

Were your interpretations accepted pretty quickly at that point?

Sparks:

I think so, yes. Yes, we started to publish on lava flows—with Harry—and we started to publish on lava flows and we got some, I think some quite interesting results. Some of the sort of earlier descriptions of how lava flow morphology develops. And we’d done this in tents. We camped on Etna for two weeks measuring viscosity and temperature and we got some pretty good data and we published some quite significant papers, I think, at that time on lava flows. And so I think people started to catch onto some of the ideas quite quickly 

Doel:

You had the basis of the field experience plus the mathematics and physics.

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right.

Doel:

That’s [crosstalk] informing the arguments. 

Sparks:

That’s right, yep.

Doel:

Were there any... lack of measurements or any other concerns that were the 4 a.m. worries in the research at that time?

Sparks:

On lava flows, or just more generally?

Doel:

Or more generally.

Sparks:

I think it was just in such an interesting time, going on from George and onwards over the next perhaps decade. There was such, I suppose, there really wasn’t very much in terms of proper fluid mechanical descriptions of processes from volcanoes, be they lavas or explosions, and so because the research I was doing with people like Lionel (Wilson) and Harry (Pinkerton) and George (Walker), of course, were actually outlining things which really, the basis of sort of understanding some of the basics of these processes, and nowadays, of course, people have advanced computer models and they can do a much better job than we could. But I think we founded some of the basic ideas of the time about the key processes.

Doel:

When you think about the different meetings, the General Assembly was of course every four years, AGU was meeting more… which were during your Cambridge years? The meetings that really mattered to you to attend?

Sparks:

I think the IAVCEI meetings, actually. I went to New Zealand. I’ve got an idea that that Durham meeting must have been in ‘77 and New Zealand was ‘81. 

Doel:

That’s interesting.

Sparks:

I may have made—

Doel:

That we can check.

Sparks:

I can check those. But I’m not sort of thinking that must have been the case, because I’m pretty sure I went to New Zealand in ‘81. But IAVCEI meetings were I think the most fun.

Doel:

And clearly the interactions were pretty [crosstalk]

Sparks:

That’s right, and I think that that was because you were collecting all the volcanologists together. Easy to check that by finding out when Elvis [laughs] poor old Elvis demised. So yeah.

Doel:

I thought that was the late 70s, but we can check. I’m just curious, you spoke in the other long interview about being able to attend rock concerts going on in London when you were there.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

Did you ever get to an Elvis concert?

Sparks:

To...?

Doel:

An Elvis concert.

Sparks:

Oh no, no, Elvis was not, no...

Doel:

That was not your...

Sparks:

No, not, not at all. No, I mean, I was at an IAVCEI conference with Kathy Cashman when she was a young scientist, with a guy called Bob Hildebrand. We went from the conference to see Bob Dylan and Tom Petty in a concert in New Zealand. I remember that being a highlight of that IAVCEI conference.

Doel:

I could imagine.

Sparks:

Yes. [laughs] That was...

Doel:

During those years at Cambridge, how often could you share the emerging work that you were doing with other colleagues across the broad spectrum of the Earth Sciences? Did people understand pretty well what each other was working on then?

Sparks:

I think so. I mean, at Cambridge I had a lot of good colleagues there, and we’d talk science with them, and I started to, I supposed, because some of my work has gone into areas outside volcanology. I’ve always had a little bit of an interest in sedimentology, so I’d talked to people like Peter Friend and Nigel Woodcock from time to time. It didn’t amount to very much collaboration in terms of writing papers or anything, but just exchanging ideas and talking to someone like Peter who was so knowledgeable about sedimentology. And so I got a lot out of that kind of dialogue. Again, Dan McKenzie was there, so he was always a good person to bounce ideas off of, because if there was a flaw, he would pretty quickly see what those flaws were. And Mike Bickle, we talked about komatiites and issues in the archaea and so there was a lot of good science discussion going on at Cambridge. But my main, of course, collaboration was with Herbert Huppert. I think if you look at the papers I wrote in that time, they’d either be with graduate students and the odd postdoc, or they’d be with Herbert, and some with Stuart Turner, so that was very much the main collaboration, I think.

Doel:

And he was in Australia right during that time, Herbert?

Sparks:

No, he was at Cambridge. 

Doel:

He was at Cambridge?

Sparks:

Yes, he was in their Applied Maths department.

Doel:

I see.

Sparks:

So we both went on sabbatical at ANU. He is an Australian.

Doel:

That I remember, yes. But he was there with you at Cambridge.

Sparks:

And when I first went there, Stuart Turner was on sabbatical in Cambridge, so that’s when I met Stuart, and then we started to work—Herbert, Stuart, and I—started to work together, and then I think from that, the idea of going to ANU on an extended sabbatical, it was seven months, came about.

Doel:

I imagine that it was hard to leave at the end of that seven months.

Sparks:

It was, yes, we really enjoyed Australia, and lots of, I had a young family there. And it was also very good, Australia, because there’s a famous area of Australia, which the ANU put all their visitors up, called Garran, which is called the ‘Garran Ghetto’ which is really is basically academic visitors to ANU. And you meet just very interesting people there. And we got to know people completely outside science and became quite good friends. And one particular couple was an Indian family, and the guy was essentially a very well-known journalist. And we became good friends with them and still keep in touch.

Doel:

That’s interesting. So the social community was—

Sparks:

Yes, the social network was very good there, and our children were very small, so we didn’t have any issues of school or anything. And I even played a couple of soccer games for the Australian Air Force.

Doel:

Did you? [laughs]

Sparks:

In the park that was there. [laughs] Which was good fun.

Doel:

You got a chance to be back in sports again.

Sparks:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, so that was a very enjoyable experience.

Doel:

During those years at Cambridge, did the grad students have a chance to present their own ideas at colloquia seminars in the department?

Sparks:

Yes, they did. Again, it wasn’t quite as formal as... I mean, now, we have very structured approaches, where students are expected to give seminars. I think my main encouragement was for them to present at meetings, and the Geological Society meetings, the volcanic studies group was a very good venue for that, so I encouraged the PhD students to present at Geological Society meetings, and started to go to some AGU meetings as well. And then we would do practice talks and they gave colloquia and things, yes. I mean a lot of that was going on, but I can’t remember it being terribly formally organized. 

Doel:

Right, but that’s important to know, how it worked at that point. Did you make it a point to try to get your grad students over to AGU meetings?

Sparks:

Not every year, no, but I’d encouraged them to do that, and if I was going, we would see if we could get some funds and go over there for AGU meetings, yes.

Doel:

And when you did, were you all presenting together, or were you in different panels throughout the meeting?

Sparks:

I think, I mean, usually if I had PhD students presenting at AGU, I would make sure I went along and heard their talk or looked at their poster, and of course, as posters came in, then of course, that was a lot of work preparing nice posters for meetings like that.

Doel:

And posters have long been one of the key means of communicating—

Sparks:

That’s right, yes.

Doel:

—the interview. Was that also the case at the General Assembly meetings for Earth’s interior? 

Sparks:

For IAVCEI?

Doel:

Yeah, were posters as important or were there more oral?

Sparks:

They became very… Yes, actually, IAVCEI was quite a pioneer, because they put a lot of emphasis on the posters. So if you go to an IAVCEI meeting, they devote more time to posters and less to oral sessions than a typical AGU meeting.

Doel:

Interesting.

Sparks:

Or a GSA meeting.

Doel:

Mmhmm, interesting. You were also mentioning yesterday that in the 1980s, you were beginning to think about another position. Being someplace else beyond Cambridge.

Sparks:

Yes, and I think that was triggered by the Caltech trip. I mean, I’d been at Cambridge since 1978, so I was, by the time I went to Caltech on that short sabbatical, I’d been there nine years. And I was just beginning to think it would be good to have a change. And there are a lot of good things about Cambridge. I was by that time quite heavily involved in the college system. I’d become a fellow of Trinity Hall. It’s one of the smaller Cambridge colleges. And that was interesting, but it started to take up more time than I’d like. As you became a fellow, you’d have to take on quite a lot of responsibilities, both from running the college and being a tutor.

Doel:

Mmhmm. So day-to-day administration and handling.

Sparks:

Yeah so they started to creep in more admin and one of course the problems was the pay wasn’t great in those days, and so when you became a college fellow, you got some extra pay. But the Faustian pact was that you had to start doing things for the college in an administration, more administrative... Taking part in interviews for people coming into the college, a more pastoral care for students. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, couldn’t do those things, it was just it was eating into research time.

Doel:

And you could see what the impact it was having.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And you could also see people going down the paths where they almost largely became college-oriented. Their dominant life was being in college rather than being an academic, and I didn’t really want that to happen, so I think I rather vaguely got itchy feet and started to look around. 

Doel:

Were you getting offers at that point?

Sparks:

Well the Scripps, as I mentioned, Scripps was the one which was really trying to, but they were trying to get both Herbert and I to come together, actually. As a kind of pair. And I think the fact that they came to us and invited us down there for a few days and talked to us in depth about coming to Scripps, I think that probably was a bit of trigger for saying, well, maybe there’s some other opportunities. And I think that’s when the Bristol job became open.

Doel:

I’m curious, at Scripps, was John Orcutt involved in—?

Sparks:

John, oh yes, John was there, yes. Yeah no, well I won’t say I know him well, but I’ve come across John in quite a few meetings, and he is very convivial chap. In fact, I think he was one of the main hosts when I was there. Was the famous oceanographer, was it Walter?

Doel:

Walter Munk.

Sparks:

Walter Munk, that’s right. And I think he looked after Herbert. I think my recollection was John...I remember John and Miriam Kastner being the two people who were the most prominent, you know, it’s the usual thing in American institutions. You go round and talk to lots of people and you give seminars…

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

… and so forth. And I think Walter Munk was looking after Herbert, if I remember right.

Doel:

It sounds like the pattern that would have happened at the time.

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. So I think that their interest triggered the idea of looking elsewhere, and that’s when, as I say, the Bristol job came shortly after that in the 80s.

Doel:

I want to get to that in just a moment. You mentioned yesterday that University of Washington was also in play.

Sparks:

Yes, they were kind of interested. It never came to any offer or anything like that, but there was conversation. I went there and had conversations, and that was quite interesting, I felt. And who was the geomorphologist there? Tom Dunne, is it?

Doel:

I think so.

Sparks:

Yes, who, he was my host there and we talked to people. That wasn’t with Herbert, I think that was just me.

Doel:

Would it have been more attractive if you and Herbert had both gotten an offer?

Sparks:

I don’t know whether it would or not. I mean, obviously, we’d had a very successful research collaboration over a number of years. And I suppose if we’d both gone there, no doubt that would have continued. I think this is very much in hindsight. I think probably coming to Bristol and pursuing a lot of research independent of Herbert was, for me, very good. Worked out very well. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

Doel:

It would have been different, though.

Sparks:

It would have just been different, but coming to Bristol did open up new areas that I hadn’t...maybe wouldn’t have pursued had I gone to Scripps with Herbert.

Doel:

And how did, as you think back, what was the first time that you heard of the Bristol opportunity?

Sparks:

I think I saw...I was shown an advert that they were going to put out. I wonder, I’m not sure whether Ron…

Doel:

Oxburgh.

Sparks:

… alerted to me or not. But, Oxburgh was of course, the leader of the Earth Science review of 1988...

Doel:

Mmhmm. Right.

Sparks:

You know about this major review of UK national research.

Doel:

And that’s also in that first [crosstalk]

Sparks:

Yeah and he was involved in that, and of course, being my head of department in the same college, I’ve got an idea he may have just alerted, said, "This might interest you." So I thought that was... and so I just applied. And of course, got it with Bernie Wood, so. And I think it was well into the Earth Sciences Review, because they were, there was a chance they would have closed Bristol Geology Department at one time. But the university were very insistent on...

Doel:

Maintaining?

Sparks:

Maintaining geology and strengthening it. And they basically won the argument with the University Grants Council under whose auspices the review had taken place. So yeah, so I think it was a very timely, both point of view of my family and professionally, it was a very timely thing to have done.

Doel:

I’m curious, in the review process, were geology departments closed at other British universities?

Sparks:

Yes. Oh yes. 

Doel:

How did that impact undergraduate teaching? In other words, were there still courses that were available in those fields, or did it pretty much limit those opportunities?

Sparks:

Yes, I think the general… I mean, I’m probably greatly over-simplifying quite a complicated landscape at the time, but I mean, the main conclusions of the review was that there were too many geology departments and that really you should focus resources on the better ones, was really the nub of the argument. And so the reduction in the number. And my recollection is that there were thought to be over 40. And I think they were reduced to less than 20 as a consequence of the review. And some of those came about by amalgamation. Some were fused at the universities, fused their geology departments into geography and environmental science. Some were really closed. I don’t think, I’m not sure how many were amalgamated actually. I think Birmingham and Aston, the Aston department was closed, and all those people from Aston went to join Birmingham. Durham and Newcastle fused. There was quite a lot of fusion of departments, so perhaps Bristol probably if they’d closed Bristol, they’d have probably taken the staff and put some of them to Exeter or something like that would have happened. So there was a lot of amalgamation, concentration of resources, in neighboring universities in the same city, or the geography departments were fused. In the case of Bristol, of course, it was a bit unique because they decided to take what was at the time a fairly small geology department and expand it.

Doel:

And that was based on the particular strengths that were in the university’s commitment?

Sparks:

It was partly based on some of the strengths that the geology department already had. In particular, in paleontology. It was always big.

Doel:

That was the strongest of the—

Sparks:

That really was the strongest part of the department. And I think that was recognized. It was also recognized that the science faculty in Bristol was very strong, and so if you were going to develop new synergies, and I think that’s part of the Oxburgh review, was that there should be more traditional geology departments reaching out and starting working with physicists and biologists and mathematicians.

Doel:

Synergy in the sense of collaboration and...

Sparks:

Collaboration, that’s right, and so the university argued that Bristol would be a very good environment because of the strength of its science faculty. And that argument was accepted, I think, that... I mean, going just back to your question earlier about students, which I didn’t really quite answer, but I think the point is that it’s generally been the case that there have been more places for geology students than people who want to do geology. So the market wasn’t very propitious for having lots of geology departments.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So I don’t think it really affected the... I don’t think their Earth Science Review really affected the undergraduate program of producing geology graduates in the UK that much, except to make quite a few of the departments stronger and therefore, probably in the long run, stronger for the teaching programs for the undergraduates. So it’s probably a good thing from that point of view.

Doel:

Mmhmm, mmhmm. I’m curious when you came to Bristol, you also became head of the of [crosstalk] for the first five years.

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right, yes.

Doel:

Were there concerns you had as you looked at the opportunity at Bristol? I’m just curious as you’re evaluating this possibility of what you were feeling.

Sparks:

Well that was interesting. The carrot, of course, was that Bernie Wood and I could make several new appointments. I think initially, it was five or six new appointments. There was quite a dowry in terms of well over a million. I think it was 1.25 million, which at the time was not insubstantial.

Doel:

Was nothing to sneeze at, yes.

Sparks:

And that meant that you could build laboratories, you could bring in new sorts of people, and so I think Bernie and I, we were both interviewed together, and offered the jobs, and we talked quite a bit before we both decided to accept. And I think we both saw this as a fantastic opportunity. We had the opportunity of building up a new department, effectively. Or a much bigger and stronger department. And we could shift the directions. We could bring in things which Bristol had never done before. Like volcanology and experimental petrology, geochemistry. And so we just thought of it as a great opportunity.

Doel:

How did you feel about becoming head?

Sparks:

I was probably a bit naive. I thought it would be something interesting to do. Bernie and I had a conversation about who would do it first, and I agreed to do it first so that Bernie could get on with his building his labs, but I should say that in many respects, because we were appointed together, a lot of the decisions were done jointly with Bernie. It wasn’t...so I was head of the school with all the sorts of responsibilities you would expect, but particularly on things like appointments and research, I worked closely with Bernie, so I think it was very much a join decision on what directions the department should go, who we would appoint, how we would structure it, were very much joint ones.

Doel:

I’m curious, when you accepted the position, did you ask for any particular kinds of authority or material support when you were negotiating your role?

Sparks:

Well, we certainly negotiated some of the funding, and about things we, Bernie and I talked about, things we’d like. And that would set us up with a lot of momentum at the beginning. And so we had this 1.25 million, and I think we did some negotiation on the total amount, but it was more about what we would spend it on. And then we were also determined to bring in a pretty international, you know, search internationally for the very best people we could find, so I think that we thought those were the two key things for making the department successful.

Doel:

Yeah. Now, realizing all that was occurring, at the same time, the Soviet Union was dissolving.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

Did that, changing the end of the Cold War, affect how you were able to recruit people or look at horizons? Or didn’t that matter so much?

Sparks:

I don’t think that mattered very much, because I can’t remember that we had anybody... I mean, I know there was quite a lot of talent brought in from the Soviet Union at the time into the USA, and in the UK. I mean in fact, I think the buckmminsterfullerene people, are they Russians?

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

At Manchester. So talent was definitely brought into the UK, but I don’t think we had anybody from that neck of the woods at all. I don’t think Earth science, compared to physics and mathematics, I don’t think Earth science in the Soviet Union was terribly strong, actually.

Doel:

It took a long time for plate tectonics to gain acceptance.

Sparks:

It did, yes, and they were so hide-bound by hierarchies that... I mean, there was some very good stuff going on in the Soviet Union, completely independently, but it was by the odd individual. There wasn’t a kind of collective aspect.

Doel:

I’m curious when you say that, what are you thinking about? What comes to mind?

Sparks:

Well, the one person I’d come to mind is a chap called Yuri Slezin, who was at the Institute in Petropavlovsk. He was a physicist and he was developing independently models of volcanic explosive eruptions and volcanic processes in the ‘70s. The papers are mostly in Russian, and if you could get English translations, they were terrible, so you didn’t really know what they’d done. [laughs] But in hindsight, because I’d got to know Yuri much later, I went out to Kamchatka a few times. And it became clear that he had done a lot of brilliant independent work, and had come to some similar conclusions to the ones we’d come to, but we weren’t really aware of that at the time.

Doel:

Yeah, yeah. It’s not uncommon for there to be independent strands in science.

Sparks:

Yeah and so I think Soviet science generally was not so strong in earth sciences. So I don’t think anybody came up on our horizons who we could recruit. I mean, actually, we brought in... we had in our first set of interviews, we had three Americans, two of whom we hired. So we looked to the—Bernie, of course, knew the US very well too, so we looked to the United States, actually, for our recruitment.

Doel:

I’m curious, as you say that. Were you looking to develop particular fields or were you looking at particular individuals that you thought could make this work?

Sparks:

I think we had a broad landscape of the science, broadly the science, what we thought the department should look like. Without being very specific. And we wanted to search for talent, mostly. That had been the ethos at Cambridge with Ron Oxburgh. So I was sort of influenced by Ron’s approach to recruitment. You know, you look for the very best people and you don’t take too much… within broad constraints, you don’t take too much notice of the field. And then we adopted that philosophy and so we looked at, you know, we had massive interview sessions and just basically looked for people we thought were very talented in the area. And that, of course, because they then of course inevitably take the department in certain directions because of the nature of the stuff they do. 

Doel:

I’m curious about two things. You mentioned massive recruitment—how many people were you considering?

Sparks:

I think we, my recollection, I could probably count them up... Probably about six or seven initial recruits? Lectureships that we appointed. And we must have shortlisted 20+ and probably interviewed maybe 15, something like that?

Doel:

Yeah. That’s quite a cohort. 

Sparks:

Yes, and it was all in one big go, as well. And then of course subsequently in the years, we also got posts coming up, so we were able to expand in the 90s further.

Doel:

What… I’m sorry.

Sparks:

Yes, we were able to, further expansion, but at a slower rate. 

Doel:

Yeah. I’m curious, too, as you’re looking at these candidates, how important was it to find personalities who could interact well with other researchers?

Sparks:

I think personalities, people who are collegial and are likely to interact with, I think, are an important criteria, and I think we were reasonably successful at doing that. So one of the features I think of the Bristol department that I think everybody says and still says is that it’s very collegial, and so we were looking on top of people being very good scientists, we were looking for people who could, you know, were likely to be able to interact with one another.

Doel:

Who could play in the sandbox together.

Sparks:

Yeah and were not going to plow their own furrow. And I think our recruits, we had one or two individuals who were superb scientists, but I think at the end, we didn’t go for, not because of their ability, but because we thought they would just do their own thing and ignore everybody else. [laughs] So we didn’t want, in other words, I suppose, going back to your scripts, we didn’t want a script-style, scripts of the ‘80s type.

Doel:

The fiefdoms.

Sparks:

The fiefdom idea. We wanted it to be much more collegial in that.

Doel:

That’s interesting. And you felt that you were successful?

Sparks:

Well, we felt we were successful, yes. We appointed some very good people, many of whom have moved onto other places.

Doel:

You mentioned the various opportunities, the funding that came together with the ability to hire. Were there any particular challenges, though, as you think back? To building the department?

Sparks:

Well, I think that the big challenge, and again, it’s to some extent in retrospect, but I think we even felt at the time, if you have a big... I mean, the problem with big lumps of money or resources is, you’re often compelled to spend the money because it disappears if you don’t spend it. Or you’re compelled, you’ve got some hires, you’ve got five or six faculty posts, and you feel rather compelled to fill them. So always the problem is, are you just spending money for the sake of it, or are you appointing somebody you’re not quite...confident in, but you’ve got to really fill the place? And so that’s always I think the dilemma of those situations, where you suddenly get these big lumps. [laughs] Of resource, and then you have to do things very quickly. So I think that way, I think we were aware of that, and we tried to make sure we weren’t, you know, hiring people who weren’t going to work out.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

Or spend money unnecessarily. But... so yeah, so I think we did it okay, but that’s always the concern, I think. 

Doel:

Yeah. It’s an important point.

Sparks:

Yeah. The other thing, I think I also learned from Cambridge days, and I think Bernie would have, I think, agree with me, is we didn’t want to hire people who were just like us. One of the things I have noticed and a lesson I learned from Cambridge was that their mineralogy department had been very dominantly due to, influenced by a very powerful professor hiring people who did things that were rather similar or of great interest to the leader.

Doel:

That looked like his own work.

Sparks:

Either looked like it or could help support it. And we didn’t want that. We wanted people who were going to be independent researchers and brought new tricks and new things to the party.

Doel:

Yeah. A very deliberate strategy.

Sparks:

That was, yes, that was quite deliberate that we did that.

Doel:

When you think back to the differences and similarities, Bristol to Cambridge, colloquia and visitors, socializing. How was it similar and in what ways was it different?

Sparks:

Well, we tried to build that ethos that it was, when we came here, it was quite a small department. An oft-told story is, one of the people I brought with me was John Blundy, who is now a very eminent petrologist and professor in the department. I guess one of the issues was that Jon had been my PhD student, and extraordinarily talented person, and I brought Jon. And he was the first postdoc in the department. So actually, some other people who’d already been in the department weren’t quite sure what a postdoc really was, whether there was a...

Doel:

Interesting, that was, yeah.

Sparks:

Well it was that when we arrived, there was a separate tea room for all the technicians and admin staff. A tea room for the staff and a tea room for the students. The handful of PhD students. So they were all separated, so one of the first things we did was to have a common tea room. But before we made that change, again, there was a sort of discussion, well, would a postdoc go in the staff tea room or the PhDs’ tea room? What were they? And now, of course, we’ve got about 60 postdocs in the department, so it’s a different story, but so I suppose coming back to your point, it was, the culture of the department was very different, and so changing it with the new appointments. It was obviously a process of changing the culture and the ethos of the department.

Doel:

Yeah. I’m curious how you achieved that, because you saw it in other units, and then here, you had a chance to enact it.

Sparks:

Yes, I think of course, if you bring in new people. Because remember, we’d hired five or six people and then Bernie and myself were both new, so very quickly, the department was, there were more people who were new.

Doel:

New than remaining.

Sparks:

Than remaining. And the people who’d remained, I think quickly were very positive, you know, as I say, the paleontology in Bristol has always been extremely strong, so the paleontologists who were here were very supportive. They could see this is an opportunity to develop themselves. And they of course, one of our hires was Mike Benton, the dinosaur expert. And Mike was one of our early hires. So the paleontologists who had already been here started to benefit, I think, from the changes. There were some interesting resource issues. There was one member of staff of the old guard, as it were, who virtually took all the resources, operating resources, and any spare money and used it for his research group, so there had to be some interesting conversations that that wasn’t going to happen from now on. [laughs] And so that the money would be spread around more evenly in the school. So, you know, there were hiccups, but by and large, within three or four years, I suppose, it was a very different sort of department. 

Doel:

Yeah. And did you have a regular colloquium series or did you maintain it informally as a—

Sparks:

Oh yes, we straight away went to having seminars, trying to get international speakers. We were very keen on getting people coming here on sabbatical, moving towards getting postdocs. We quickly, one of our main strategies was to identify very talented early career scientists, and encourage them to come to Bristol and to apply for things like Royal Society research fellowships, the prestigious ones. And so part of our recruitment strategy was getting very talented postdocs in. Some of whom have now become members of staff.

Doel:

Mmhmm, yeah. You mentioned Jon Blundy coming as the first.

Sparks:

That’s right.

Doel:

Who else are you thinking about?

Sparks:

Well, Alison Rust, who is still here, came in that way. We’ve just got a chap called Ollie Lord, who’s just been appointed the same route. We had Colin Wilson here, who went to New Zealand. He was a URF. So we had quite a few NERC fellows. So we went out of our way to look for people who are talented and could get them to apply to the fellowships and come here.

Doel:

And you mentioned bringing in international visitors. Who do you remember particularly having an influence here?

Sparks:

Well, we had Brad Sturtevant when I was at Caltech. We invited Brad in. In fact, that was another postdoc. Two of my postdocs who worked with Brad. Because I was very interested after the Caltech visit, I was very interested in high-speed flows in conduits and doing more shock tube experiments. So I got a grant from NERC which included a year for Brad to come from Caltech to here, and I got money for a couple of postdocs. Jerry Phillips and Heidy Mader, who are both now still in the department. And they were again examples of postdocs who grew into independent scientists. And so quite soon after getting here, I had got these grants, had Brad come over here, and we made shock tube apparatus in the labs and did a lot of experimental work on very high-speed flows to try and mimic what’s going on in a volcanic conduit. So that was...yes, so again, that was part of the building process of bringing in talented...of course, the grants in that case supported the postdocs. 

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

But that was a very definite strategy. So Brad was a visitor. We’ve had lots of people over the years, and then we had, well, I could probably give you a list, a very long list, but two years ago, we’ve had John Mavrogenes from ANU come to work on our economic geology program. Bill Rose. Oh, of course, a very important not postdoc but visitor was Claude Jaupart from Paris, who’s a very good friend and collaborator with me, and I wanted to hire Claude. So I wanted him to be one of our new appointments and we encouraged him to apply for one of the jobs, and Claude said, "What I’ll do is I’ll have a year off from IPGP and I’ll come to Bristol and I’ll spend the year here." And that’s what he did. He came over for a year. What I was hoping was that at the end of the year, he would say, "Yes, I want to stay." And we had a job opening for him. But of course, I think they caught wind of this at IPGP and he went back to Paris and became director of IPGP. And probably one of France’s very best Earth scientists. So I suppose it wasn’t that surprising we didn’t manage to get him, but he was here for a year. He co-supervised some students with me, PhD students, and we’ve collaborated ever since. So that was another example of trying to bring in a very talented, and in that case not successful, but the fact that he was in the department for a year and contributed and we had a brilliant man, Claude. And so having him around was fantastic. 

Doel:

Right. Were there any speakers who were just coming to give a talk who turned out to be particularly influential?

Sparks:

In the early days? I mean, we got a lot of good speakers. I mean, we went out of our way to encourage really top-quality speakers coming. I think it added to the intellectual atmosphere, to have very good physicists. I’m not sure I can think of anyone who... you know, Claude and Brad, at least in my field, were very important because they added to the volcanology, and then of course, they’re both absolutely top-class scientists, so they contributed an awful lot. They helped build the community of postdocs and so forth. So I think those longer-term visitors are probably more, in my mind, influential in supporting the department’s development.

Doel:

That makes sense.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

And we’ve now been talking for nearly two hours. I wonder if this might be a good time to pause and then resume later this afternoon?

Sparks:

That would be fine, Ron. What’s the time? It’s quarter past?

Doel:

It’s about 20 past.

Sparks:

20 past, yeah.

 

Session 3

Doel:

We are resuming this interview after a good lunch. During that time, you were telling a story from the same period of time at Bristol about Soviet researchers with whom you’d come into contact.

Sparks:

Yes. I mean, it rather illustrates that when you’re a field geologist, you go to lots of different countries, and inevitably, you get some very entertaining and sometimes a bit alarming episodes. But the story I was telling was that in probably around 2002, I went to Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka to look at the huge volcanoes of that area. And I visited a very famous institute called the Institute of Volcanology in Petropavlovsk, which had actually been split into two in the glasnost perestroika period.

Doel:

Right. And you were saying, this was an enormous building that held 400 scientists?

Sparks:

400 scientists at once, in the Soviet… in the you know, the heyday of the Soviet era. And I went there and visited it as well as going to the volcanoes. And one of the episodes was that I was told about a scientist called Alexei Tsyurupa, who used to work at the institute, and evidently was doing a Ph.D. in the institute in the ’70s, and that Tsyurupa had come up independently with an idea which is now very fashionable in the volcanological world about the importance of gas loss from magmas, making them solidify, modulating the volcanic activity. And this is an idea I’ve been interested in and other colleagues in the U.S. had been interested in. But independently, this chap came up with the same idea working on an eruption from 1970s, Tolbachik. And his interpretation of the rocks at the time had resulted in a disagreement in which the director of the institute at the time had essentially [sacked him]… he’d lost his job.

Doel:

And that was Fedotov?

Sparks:

That was… the director would have been [Sergey A.] Fedotov. And he [Tsyurupa] went and worked in a factory in Petropavlovsk, and he was doing I guess a very humdrum job. And over time, he’d… in particular, I think when glasnost and perestroika came about, people could talk a bit more freely in that part of the world. And so he started to say that he’d been doing this research, and he’d never been able to finish his PhD. And the workers were sort of sympathetic to him, and they evidently paid for him to publish a little book which was basically his findings from his research. And so some of the people, Russian colleagues, asked if I’d like to meet this chap. And I… he must have been probably, you know, sort of into ’70s, late ‘60s, ‘70, something like that at the time. And I went and met him, and he gave me a copy of his book.

Doel:

Which we’re looking at right now. You have a copy you’ve saved.

Sparks:

Which we’re looking at right now. And it’s got… you can see diagrams which… not too dissimilar to diagrams that myself and other colleagues [Jon Blundy and Kathy Cashman] have published. And he clearly came up with the same ideas. So it was very nice to meet him. And it was… you know, it was a little bit of an insight [laughs] into what the Soviet era was really like and how it affected people’s lives.

Doel:

Lives and careers?

Sparks:

Careers.

Doel:

What do you remember most from your interactions with him?

Sparks:

I just remember him being a kind of rather gentle old man… he probably wasn’t—he was probably younger than I am now, but at the time, I remember him being a gentle character, and he pointed… he just… he didn’t speak very good English, so we sort of flipped through and showed me some of his diagrams and results, and we talked as best we could. I had a colleague there who could translate. And we just exchanged pleasantries. They gave us some tea and cake, and looked at the diagrams, and I told them some of these ideas had been taken on. So I suspect he was pleased, but you know, I’m not sure. So it was a nice interaction.

Doel:

And you met at his apartment?

Sparks:

Met at his apartment.

Doel:

In Moscow?

Sparks:

No, in Petropavlovsk. I mean, the only slightly odd thing about the story is that the Institute… after the end of the Soviet times, the Institute had been split into two separate institutes, and there was another… there was one institute which Professor Fedotov had continued to be the director of. And then there was another institute with the scientists who’d been disaffected in a separate institute. And we were sort of… when I went to this chap’s flat, we were actually followed by one of the young scientists from Fedotov’s Institute. [laughs] He sort of parked outside while we were having this discussion. Clearly, they wanted to know what we were doing. So it felt like something from a… of course, in Petropavlovsk, all the buildings are grey, dingy, and in dire need of repair. But it felt a little bit like a John le Carré [laughs] set-up. Of course, nothing nasty happened or anything, but… so there was clearly some… still some residual tensions between the scientists there.

Doel:

Right. How did you know that that scientist who… the person who was tailing you was from the institute?

Sparks:

Oh, I met him, yes, and talked to him. Yes.

Doel:

Oh, okay.

Sparks:

Yeah. Yeah, so we went… we actually met Fedotov on the volcano, slightly strangely, while we were working up there.

Doel:

That’s interesting.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

I wanted to also review parts of the experience you’ve had at Bristol, and one thing I was curious about. You prepared the list of the top twenty or so papers that you had written. And I’m curious. Did that reflect primarily those that you feel had the most citations, the most influence? Were there other publications you thought should have gotten more attention that didn’t?

Sparks:

I think it’s always difficult to make these choices, because I think the… there are some scientists who produce some… you know, clearly blockbuster papers which get both highly cited and are tremendously influential. So the two things commonly are hand-in-hand. But of course, there’s… I think when one’s… I guess my research has been very broad in the sense of doing very different sorts of science and problems. And so it’s very difficult to capture that in just twenty publications. I think I did try and select ones which I think were influential rather than just because they got a load of citations, and also ones where I felt that there was something really sort of very original. It’s very difficult to know… I mean, some papers get highly cited… just seem to get highly cited. Everybody cites this one. I don’t think the numbers of citations necessarily match up to the true influence.

Doel:

I was just curious if you’ve felt that certain papers you’ve published didn’t get the attention you thought they deserved?

Sparks:

I wouldn’t say that they didn’t get the attention, but there was one paper that I’m pretty sure was on the list that I wrote with Lionel Wilson when I was at Lancaster University for the [Journal of the] Geological Society, which was essentially an explanation, physical explanation, based on sort of fluid mechanics—simple fluid mechanical models of how pyroclastic flows of ignimbrites form. And I think it was really the first attempt to produce a physical model. And it doesn’t get as highly cited as some of the later publications with Lionel, and of course, subsequently, there’s… with the huge increase in computer power, researchers can do much, much more sophisticated models, you know, three-dimensional and multiphase and much more complicated. And of course, those models have… I think it’s fair to say that those models haven’t changed the basic idea. But of course, the details and some of the nuances, they’re richer.

Doel:

It’s more fleshed out?

Sparks:

It’s much more fleshed out. So, I think that would be an example of a paper with probably about 300 or so citations [about 370 in 2018]. I don’t know—I can’t remember. It’s probably not… has got as large a number of citations as other papers, which I don’t think probably are quite so significant.

Doel:

Do you recall if that was all on your top twenty list?

Sparks:

It should be. That’s the full list, yes.

Doel:

We can always add that in just to be sure.

Sparks:

Yes, it’s number two. It’s number two on the list.

Doel:

Okay.

Sparks:

And I thought that that was a particularly… I suppose it’s one of my papers I’d really highlight from a personal point of view. It reflects two things. It reflects firstly that the collaboration with Lionel and the collaboration between a geologist and a… that paper required my expertise as a geologist and volcanologist and Lionel’s expertise as a physicist to collaborate together. And in collaborating, we came up with what I think is the basic model of how ignimbrites form, and the first physical model. So I think it’s… to me, it’s a very important paper.

Doel:

Were there any others that you were surprised didn’t get more attention?

Sparks:

I don’t think so. I think all… it does vary. The two highest cited papers I think were important and influential, though. I’ve always been quite surprised at how many citations [laughs] they actually got. I wouldn’t say that they… I think they’re important papers, but I wouldn’t… they probably… you know, in a list… if one was going to make a list, they’d probably… they would feature in the top twenty, but I’m not sure where… if you want… you were forced to rank them, I’m not sure that they would necessarily be near the top.

Doel:

One thing I’m quite curious about. The way in which you write papers to communicate results to your colleagues: do you feel that you were adopting a particular style that helped make the key points visible to your colleagues in ways that perhaps others writing papers didn’t do?

Sparks:

I suppose that… I suspect that that’s been a feature in some of them, being well cited, is that I’m… I think over the years, my sort of skill as a writer of science is obviously improved with experience and making things as clear as they possibly can seems to me a really important point of communicating science, and not just to your own specialist audience, but to a wider audience, so that they can get the idea, too. What’s the famous Rutherford phrase? If you can’t explain the science to your bartender, then it probably isn’t very good. [laughs] I’m paraphrasing.

Doel:

[laughs] Yes.

Sparks:

I can’t remember what exactly Rutherford said, but it sort of… that’s always been a… one of my sort of favorite quotes.

Doel:

I’m curious. When you had papers you wanted to reach particular audiences, did you send out preprints, or in the later days, PDFs, to particular individuals that you thought would benefit from that work?

Sparks:

Yes. I mean, of course, the PDFs really relatively recent.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

You would send out preprints. Occasionally, you would send it out to colleagues you trusted for comment before you actually submitted and get some sort of feedback if you could. And then when the… in the old days of preprints, of course, you sent ‘round your preprints to people you thought would be interested in them, just as nowadays, you send a PDF out to people when you’ve… if you think they’re interested. So yes, I suppose. So I mean, one of the things I’ve always… the anecdote I’ve told my… often my PhD students when they’re writing up papers, is that they should imagine which newspaper they’re going to write their story to, and if they write the same story for the Daily Mail¸ which is a sort of a rather, if you like, low-level paper in the UK, or you’re writing it for the Times or the Guardian or the Financial Times, you would tell the same story in very different ways. And so when you’re selecting, you’ve got your paper, the first thing you sort of think about, what… where does this… what kind of journal does that fit in? And I always start with the title, the journal and the title when I’m thinking about a paper. That’s the first thing I decide on, because then that sets the tone of how you’re going to tell the story. So I think the newspaper analogy is quite a useful one, actually.

Doel:

It’s really quite intriguing. And did any of your students actually write newspaper op-eds or contributions on the work that they were doing?

Sparks:

Yes. Some of them did. I mean, I never either discouraged them or encouraged them. And some were natural… and again, with so many PhD students, there were some who were extremely able writers, and could… and just do it without hardly any corrections, and others who needed lots of help to turn their [laughs] thoughts into sort of decent prose. So write… of course, as a supervisor of PhD students, helping the students write up is, I think, a key role.

Doel:

All that is really quite interesting. And I wanted to get more of an overview of things that have developed here at Bristol since the time of your appointment. And I’m remembering that it was 2006-7 that you’d been at Yale University.

Sparks:

Yes. I had a sabbatical at Yale.

Doel:

How did that come about?

Sparks:

Well, fairly simply, because Derek Briggs, a very well-known paleontologist, was at Bristol, and he was one of my successors as head of department in Bristol. And Derek then got appointed as professor at Yale, and he became director of the Peabody Museum there. And we’d been sort of personal friends. We’ve… you know, his field and mine don’t really overlap very much, but we’ve been sort of personal friends for a long time. And Derek invited me to apply for a James Bass scholarship, fellowship, to go to Yale on sabbatical, which we applied for, and I got. And so I spent… I had two visits, each of about two or three months in Yale in 2007 and very much enjoyed it.

Doel:

What was the experience like?

Sparks:

Oh, it was great. I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was also because I met some of the great characters of U.S. science, like Brian Skinner and Karl Turekian in particular. And I very much enjoyed meeting Karl Turekian. Of course, I vaguely knew him before, but going to Yale, he was emeritus and retired, and… but still extremely lively. And he had a kind of weekly—which, great fun—weekly audience that was sort of called the “court of King Karl,” where he would sort of invite people to… you know, just a handful of people to come and have tea and talk about science. And I remember that being particularly enjoyable, to meet him and get to know him. He’s one of the great U.S. scientists. So that was tremendous. And I got to know Brian Skinner and… I can’t remember. Well, of course, Derek was there, and I got to know Jay Ague very well, who’s currently head of department there. And we had quite a lot of mutual interests with Jay. I went in the field with him looking… in Scotland going… looking at metamorphic rocks with him as a consequence of that. And I met David Bercovici and one of his very bright postdocs, who I’ve written a couple of papers with as a result of those interactions. So it was a great experience. I got to know a new group of top U.S. scientists.

Doel:

Right. And a generation before, Yale was known as the major classical geology department in the United States.

Sparks:

Oh, absolutely, yes. That’s right. And it was still pretty… it’s still, I think, even at that time… you know, when I went there, in classical geology, they’re still quite strong. And of course, they were going through a rejuvenation, because they… some of these sort of wonderful old-guard were retiring or in their retirement, and… it was Bob [Robert] Berner, that’s right, that was the other guy who was there. So… they were recruiting a younger generation. In fact, that year, they were in a massive recruitment drive, which I thought was… actually, I’ve always thought the American system of recruiting is… I think our system is crazy, but theirs is crazy as well. [laughs] I think they had 17 people visiting Yale for four jobs that year, and everyone had to give a seminar. They all had to visit several of the faculty and spend two or three days being… it was this long, long, drawn-out process, whereas in the UK, of course, we would have had them all on one day and [laughs] appointed the next day. So they’re sort of extremes of recruitment strategy. They’re both crazy in rather different ways.

Doel:

Did the Yale experience affect your subsequent research in any way?

Sparks:

Going to Yale?

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

Yes, to the extent that I worked… I worked with Chloé Michaut, who was a postdoc with David Bercovici. She is now a real rising star of French geoscience. So it was a pleasure to work with her and David on mutual problems. It was very interesting to talk to Jay Ague and get to know him, and as I say, I enjoyed… the older guard, like Turekian and Skinner, were great people to talk to. So it was very… you know, it was just very enjoyable. I’m not sure it necessarily took me in anything… any—

Doel:

New directions, but yeah.

Sparks:

All that new directions. We got a Nature paper out on two-phase flow with David and Chloé, which I think is a really interesting paper, and of course, I benefited from their, you know, great sort of physical-mathematical skills in the physics of these flows, so that was great.

Doel:

I was also thinking about the De Beers annual subscription that came into the department here that was supporting people who had interest in mining.

Sparks:

Yes. That was—

Doel:

How did that come about?

Sparks:

Well, that’s real serendipity, because… and I think it’s… what happened was that De Beers, for whatever reason, decided that they would form a… essentially a diamond think-tank of a small number of their more senior scientists in De Beers. And because at the time—this would be 2004-5—they wanted a place which was basically equidistant from Canada, southern Africa, and Russia, where their commercial interests were and where the diamond mining was. And they decided the… it should be the U.K. And then a… one of their senior people, who was going to head this, Wynand Kleingeld, decided that he would… he’d go around Britain and find somewhere he liked. So he drove around and went to the west country, and he decided he liked the city of Wells, which is about half an hour’s, maybe 40 minutes’ drive from Bristol. So he said: Oh, this is a nice little cathedral town. Let’s set up our institute. They rented an office. The people came over. And one of their… they put in that research center a chap called Matthew Field, who’s a very experienced kimberlite geologist and diamond exploration and mining geologist, and they set themselves up, and Matthew decided: Let’s look at the nearest university and—oh yes, they’re got a volcanology and petrology group there. I’ll go and talk to them.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

So Matthew walked through the door, said that they’d set it up, and so that sounds pretty interesting. Kimberlites are basically mining out little volcanoes and sounds very interesting. So long and short of it was that De Beers funded us very generously for about five or six years, working with their research center. And they supported Ph.D. students and postdocs, and we worked principally in southern Africa, but also in Canada. And it was a very productive and interesting episode. And again, a lot of original research came out of that.

Doel:

What happened after that six-year period?

Sparks:

Well, they closed the Wells center—the diamond price crashed. De Beers started… got taken over by Anglo American. They changed the nature of the of the De Beers operation. They, for example, had a research group in Jo’burg. When I first got involved, I think there was 60-plus people, and they downsized it to half a dozen by the time—five or six years later. It was a sort of massive reorganization of the company. They seemed to lose interest in research of this kind, although they were kind enough to write letters saying how influential the work had been. And Matthew left the company and joined another company. He still lives in Wells, and I still keep in touch with him. So, it sort of… it just petered out, really, because of these big changes in the industry.

Doel:

Yeah. Have you had fewer students interested in mining as a result?

Sparks:

No. Actually, it had the opposite effect. We then… we’d done that work, and then I thought that it would be… started to get interest in porphyry copper deposits. And to cut a rather long story short, we started engaging BHP Billiton And we persuaded them, partly on the back of the kimberlite and diamond work, that there would be a lot of merit in seeing how knowledge of modern volcanoes and volcanic processes could assist their understanding of porphyry copper deposits. And so we managed to persuade them that this would be a good place to invest. So we’ve now built up a very sizeable economic geology group, which didn’t exist before 2007 in the department. BHP Billiton have now funded us for six years, and they’ve got another three more years of funding left. They’ve funded a lectureship. They’ve funded PhD students. They’ve funded postdocs. And we’ve got a very vibrant research group going now which is largely focusing on porphyry copper deposits, economic geology… and so now we have a course in economic geology. We’ve got students going into the mining industry and getting jobs there. So out of that… now, I wouldn’t say it was the only factor, but I think the fact that we had demonstrated that we could apply modern volcanology to kimberlites and make some discoveries—I’d get some findings which were of value to the industry.

Doel:

Gave confidence to—

Sparks:

Gave confidence to…

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

…to go into a completely different area, but with the same idea. So actually, we’ve now got a multimillion-pound funding on porphyry coppers. We’ve got a very good relationship with BHP Billiton that’s now BHP, actually, as of a few months ago. And they… and there’s some very interesting research going on in the department now in that… you know, in that area.

Doel:

That’s quite interesting. Are there other parallel outside funding developments that are similar to that here?

Sparks:

There are, but not ones that I’m… been sort of personally involved. One of the big differences from when we… when we started off Bristol, we had a relatively modest amount of geophysics. In the… I suppose about 15 years ago now we made a very purposeful decision as a department to strengthen geophysics. I was no longer head, but it was… involved in the conversations that we should make geophysics a much more prominent part. So, we hired an outstanding seismologist called Mike Kendall, who’s professor here now. And we also hired other people with geophysics backgrounds. So we now have a very thriving geophysics section to the department, as well as economic geology. So I think that’s probably an important thing for the… or aspect of the success of the department is that you shouldn’t just keep on doing what you’ve been doing for… in a few… if you… I suppose the sport analogy comes in. If you’re playing a sport, and you keep playing using the tactics and strategies of 20 years ago, you’re not going to be very successful. You’ve got to adapt.

Doel:

Same in warfare.

Sparks:

Yes. [laughs] Exactly, and politics, probably. And it’s… so we’ve gone into those new areas, geophysics and economic geology. We’ve still got the old… what you might call the areas we strengthened when I first joined with Bernie [Wood]. But now we’ve… the department’s moved into these other areas, too.

Doel:

And when you think back over these years since you were director, head here, would any other kind of patronage or access to instrumentation have been really desirable? Was there anything that you wished you could have done you didn’t get a chance to do?

Sparks:

I don’t think so. I mean, there’s always – there’s never enough money, of course. That’s—

Doel:

No healthy organization ever has enough.

Sparks:

Yeah, that’s right. There’s never enough money or resources. You’d always like to do more than you can. Of course, in retrospect, you can always see—maybe we should have done a bit more of that or a bit less of that. But that’s with a sort of hindsight that you know what happened that you wouldn’t have known when you did it that that’s what would have happened.

Doel:

Yeah. Sure.

Sparks:

So you could have always imagined doing things, you know, a little bit better or slightly differently, but—

Doel:

But that’s different from feeling that you really had wished for something else?

Sparks:

No. I mean, the history of the department with my involvement basically is from 1989 onwards. The department has grown in size and activity and is sort of almost unrecognizable in the sense of size and scale. And most… more important, we’ve risen up the, if you like, the rankings to become I think recognizably one of the strongest Earth science departments anywhere.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And we sort of… we got a very nice accolade on that very recently, because we… we’ve always had this link with Caltech. I mentioned I’ve been to Caltech, and my colleague, Jon Blundy spent some time at Caltech more recently. And we gave Ed Stolper, who’s provost of Caltech up to recently and, you know, outstanding U.S. Earth scientists, petrologists… we gave him an honorary degree. This was just over a week ago. And Ed chose to tell the story that… and I’m sort of rather paraphrasing what Ed said, but the fact that it comes from somebody like Ed is—I think is interesting. And basically, he said he didn’t really believe in all these sort of rankings and league tables anything, but what he said was that he thought that if you ask virtually any Earth scientist in the world who… to list the top fifteen Earth science departments in the world, he said not all those would list Bristol, but he thought the majority would.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And so I think that was a sort of very, you know, independent view of where Bristol has come from since 1990.

Doel:

And that’s an important context.

Sparks:

It’s an important context, so… and we’re not strong in all areas of Earth science. It’s probably not even sensible to try to be strong in all areas, but we… what we try and do… the ethos is to be… choose certain areas and be very good at those.

Doel:

And again, as you think back over the… now near the quarter century since you came here, what’s changed the most about the funding opportunities and patronage and how one gets the research done?

Sparks:

Well, over the years, the European Union started to become very important, sort of fifteen, twenty years ago. It’s become very important, and now I would say the last ten, fifteen years, a significant amount of funding has come into the department through EU, the European Research Council. We’ve been pretty successful in that. So that’s changed. Opportunities for fellowships to support bright young people have improved. The national funding has probably remained pretty steady. There’s more emphasis now on thematic top-down research programs, which I think most of us don’t think is a good trend, but that’s what’s happened. So you have to sort of fit in with the… more with the fashion of the day and much more driven by government… influenced by government than one would like.

Doel:

And is that to say it’s coming from policymakers, not apart [crosstalk]—

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right, to… there’s still blue skies research funded. But that’s shrunk at the expense of thematic programs, which in one way or another resonate with the government, and therefore they’re prepared to dig in their pocket and give the money for those things.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So that balance has changed, and probably arguably in a sort… in a… the pendulum’s swung a little bit too far. But we’ve done very well with the… in the EU, and that’s why, of course, Brexit is [crosstalk]—

Doel:

I was just going to ask about—

Sparks:

—is a real concern. Yes.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

I mean, Britain’s got back for its science budget twice as much as we put in. So that’s a measure of success. We’ve been very prominent in a lot of European science. EU science has been very important, very significant. And this department, like many others in the UK, have benefited from that.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And then we’ve… we didn’t have much industry funding when I first came in, but over… we have… I think we’ve got some way to go, but we’ve… you know, I ought to mention the BHP Billiton. They’ve got links with sort of oil and gas. Our geophysicists have been involved in that. So we’re broadening the range of funding sources. It’s probably necessary in this climate.

Doel:

And you’re talking the financial and the political climate that’s emerging at the moment?

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

Well, that is quite interesting. I wanted to ask just a few more overview questions before we talk about your service activity, which we’ve been holding off. One point is that when you trained the over fifty PhD students that you’ve had so far. One accounting I’ve seen is that fifteen of them went into established academic careers, and seven postdocs at the moment. Ten are in professional geosciences careers. Nine are in other forms of employment. And I’m curious about what those opportunities looked like, and did you have students who didn’t want to go into traditional academic careers?

Sparks:

Yes, I did. It would vary enormously. There were some people who very definitely wanted to go into industry, and that right from the start. There were others who started out thinking academic career was for them, but by the time they ended, they thought something else would be better. It’s a real mixture. I think it’s true that the vast majority of my PhD students have been able to get decent jobs down the road, and as you say, it’s probably around fifteen in academia. I’ve done a recent count of the numbers, but the opportunities seem to arise for them, and if it’s a decision to go into a non-scientific profession, it’s very definitely been… not that they couldn’t have got a job in academia or—

Doel:

But they wanted to be doing something else?

Sparks:

They wanted to do something else.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

And I also noticed at that one snapshot accounting that you had thirty female students.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

And twenty men.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

How difficult or how challenging in the earlier years was it to recruit and mentor female students in this field?

Sparks:

When I was at Cambridge, there were… I think there were two female students, and the rest were male, if I remember… I’ve got the accounting right.

Doel:

I think that’s correct.

Sparks:

And I think that would have reflected the proportion of male to female people graduating in geology or Earth sciences at that time. But that’s, of course, changed very dramatically. I mean, really, it’s been quite a long while now where females have been at least equal in number to males in graduation geology or Earth science school. So there’s more… it’s more… it’s very definitely the balance has changed. And so yes, I mean, it’s been… and you know, I can’t sort of really think of any particular difficulties that that’s—

Doel:

I was just wondering. In the early part of your career, did women have any challenges?

Sparks:

Oh, there were three, I was thinking, from Cambridge.

Doel:

Did any of them have challenges getting on expeditions or getting to do field work, or getting on voyages?

Sparks:

Not that I can think of. I mean, it would be interesting just to think through. One of my PhDs made the choice that she would leave academia and science and she became a chartered accountant. Runs her own business in Worcester. Another went into… was an American, went into science journalism and was a sort of freelance for one of the big environmental magazines in the U.S. for quite a… she’s made a career out of that. She lives in Virginia. And then the third one was a lecturer at Lancaster University, so very different sort of histories, as it were. They went very different career paths.

Doel:

That’s interesting.

Sparks:

But I can’t think of any… I mean, I suppose it’s… well, what’s the word? It’s… I’m not sure quite what the word would have… of course, I’ve done quite a bit of work in Japan, and in doing those projects with Japanese groups in the nuclear industry, some of the female PhD students have been involved in those projects. So it’s sort of… it’s very noticeable that there’s a lack of [laughs] female scientists in Japan. So it’s a… but it’s never really caused any sort of serious issues, I don’t think.

Doel:

Okay. Curious too, again, as you’re looking back over… either over the Bristol period or even more broadly, what skills do grad students, PhD students need now compared to earlier times?

Sparks:

Hm.

Doel:

Has that changed, do you think?

Sparks:

I think it has changed, because I think the… what’s come more to the fore would… I mean, would have been true thirty or forty years ago as well. But what’s become clearer is that the majority of PhD students are not going to become academic professors in highly prestigious universities. And I think when you start out… when I started out, there was an underlying assumption in places like Cambridge and Bristol that you were training the next generation of, you know, sort of high-flying professors. But of course, that was never really true, because there were simply not enough jobs for all the PhDs that were being created. So I think over the years, the realization that you had to… when the people are going towards the end of their PhD, and they’re thinking about: what next? Is it a postdoc? Is it doing something different? Is it going into industry? I think having those… over the years, those sort of conversations on what they do next and where their strengths might lie, you know, and helping them make those sort of… or guiding them, has become more important.

Doel:

And do you do that individually, or as part of group discussions?

Sparks:

No, individually.

Doel:

Okay.

Sparks:

No. But I mean, you might have… as I say, I’ve never really adopted a very formal approach to supervision. Occasionally, with perhaps weaker or less able students or ones having personal difficulties, you might want to sort of… and falling behind, you might want to have like a more regular… say, let’s meet every couple of weeks or whatever it is, you know, Monday, two o’clock. But the majority, if they’re bright students, they just get on with it, and you help them when they need it.

Doel:

Do your colleagues generally feel the same, that there won’t be academic jobs waiting for many of the students, or is there still some sense that [crosstalk]—

Sparks:

I think that… I think… no. I think that that realization has… is permeated everywhere, actually. I think it was always true, of course.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

But it’s the realization that we have to, you know, help the PhD students broaden their horizons about the things that they could eventually do.

Doel:

What other… a few other questions before we turn to your long list of service activities. Were you… were any universities attempting to recruit you during the time that you were here in Bristol? Were there any tempting opportunities?

Sparks:

There was some… there were some sort of nibbles, but I basically put them [laughs]… the odd phone call and things, but would you be interested? And it was always just straightaway “no.” I wasn’t interested, so—

Doel:

Was it because you felt the opportunities here suited you?

Sparks:

I think that yes, everything suited me well here. The department was growing. There were interesting science, good colleagues, you know, a nice environment to work, nice city to work in, so I never felt any urge to go anywhere else.

Doel:

Okay. One other quick question on research. One of the publications you’d listed as one of the most on the top twenty, and more recent one was the one that you wrote with K.V. Cashman on how volcanoes work, the retrospective over twenty-five years.

Sparks:

Oh, yes. Right.

Doel:

Was there something that you gained in thinking about twenty-five years that made this particularly important for you?

Sparks:

Well, it was I think just an opportunity because… well, I… firstly, it was a fantastic coup for the department to attract Kathy to come to Bristol because she was… she’s very definitely a West Coast person and been at Oregon, University of Oregon, for a long time, and had already established herself as the… one of the top, if not the top, volcanologist, academic volcanologist in the U.S. So she was already a sort a star and attracting her here—persuading her to come here for a short while—she came here for… initially for three years but has stayed… was tremendous. And she’s a fabulous person to work with. So it was, I think, natural that when she came and we started talking about that it would be a good… she was actually approached by the Geological Society of America to write this review, twenty-five-year review. And then she invited me to join in with her. And so we wrote it together. And of course, we could pool our joint experience and, I think, produce a richer… a broader manuscript as a result. So it was a lot of fun putting that together. I’d actually had a paper that I’d put in the drawer for several years, which was a sort of review which I never quite got ’round to finishing. And I could take that out of the drawer and say: here, Kathy. Make use of some of this as well in drafting it. But so it was a very good experience, and of course since then, we’ve… Kathy and I have been involved in quite a few joint publications.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So that was a very… as I say, bringing Kathy here was excellent. Of course, she’s still here.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So [laughs] long may that continue. So yeah.

Doel:

What made that paper fit in the top twenty list?

Sparks:

I think because it’s… it is a very synoptic review of where the field’s come from. I think it’s fair to say I’m not sure how much there is there which is original. I mean, it’s the nature of the reviews, that they’re not going to be that original. But except that by combining our experience and knowledge, I think we were able to add value to the understanding of how the field had grown. So yes, I just think it was a natural one to put together as a sort of more synoptic [crosstalk] the field.

Doel:

That’s interesting. We talked yesterday about the mentoring you had about the importance of writing as soon as there was something to write about.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

When—how often—are you writing every day? Is there a particular time you set aside?

Sparks:

No, not really. It’s pretty random. But I do like to… I probably like to start writing something on a piece of work earlier than some of my colleagues are always comfortable with. Because I think one thing I’ve learned is you never know how good the story is until you fully… until you start to try and tell it. And that’s why I mentioned that I’ve had drawers… they’re no longer… they’re e-drawers rather than real drawers, but full of half-written manuscripts.

Doel:

You put your hand on your laptop as you were saying that.

Sparks:

That’s right. And so the point is that you can start to write a paper, and you realize actually the story is better than you thought, and so the paper can be written pretty quickly. On the other hand, you might start writing a paper, and you say: well actually, it doesn’t work, isn’t going to cut the mustard. It’s not ready yet. You can put it in the back drawer to do more research, or sometimes of course, it just falls off the priority list and never gets done. So I’ve got quite a few of those. But the act of writing… I think writing is a very good. I guess I’ve quite often seen the more perfectionist student or scientist who wants to wait until they’ve got every t crossed and i dotted, and it’s a completely watertight story. I mean, it’s a legitimate approach, but it’s not one I think [laughs] that I like—that I guess I can use. But it’s quite common that, you know, those sort of perfectionists, they never actually get written up at all. [laughs]

Doel:

It diminishes the output.

Sparks:

That’s right. So it’s probably better that it’s at ninety-five percent or ninety percent than 100 percent perfect and then it never actually sees the light of day.

Doel:

Perfection is the enemy of the very good. I’m curious: do you still write any drafts by hand, or do you do it entirely on your laptop?

Sparks:

I do it entirely on my laptop, yes.

Doel:

Okay. What I wanted to make sure we also covered was the service contributions—

Sparks:

Yes. Yeah.

Doel:

—that you have made in your career, and I’m thinking first of the Royal Society. And you served on the Small Grants Committee and then Section 5 overseeing the Hooke fellowship. Which service activities were particularly memorable for you as you think back?

Sparks:

I think the ones that have been more recent… I mean, I’ve served on all those, and they’re important for the running of the Society. I did them because I felt that it was, you know, important that you contributed in that kind of way. I think the ones that have been more recent have been actually both more interesting and ultimately probably more significant. I’ve been on council twice. The first time I was on for two years, and it was just sort of… at that time, the president just reported what was going on and said what he was going to do, and that was that. And so it wasn’t so productive. But the second time, when Paul Nurse was President and then Venki Ramakrishnan, that seemed like a much more productive… that the councilors were really participating and running the society to a much greater extent. So that’s pretty interesting.

The ones you’ve mentioned… I think the ones I would probably highlight are the ones actually that I did relatively recently and am still involved in. I think my ability to be a sort of half-decent chair of committees—the experience of chairing committees—has grown. So one of the more significant things I did was to chair the national Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education in schools, which was a Royal Society… it was a joint venture of the Royal Society and the various mathematical societies. So obviously, I’m not an expert in that (mathematics education) in any sense. And so the committee itself was made up of maths education people, and I did that for four years, and it involved dialogue with ministers in government. And so my role was really to chair it. And it’s a contentious area in many respects, or many aspects of school education are contentious, but it was particularly contentious with our… most of the time there was… a very prominent politician called Michael Gove was our Minister of Education at the time. And he was putting through some very contentious reforms that had a lot of debate in the education world. So it was a very interesting time. And I chaired the committee. We made several reports on all aspects of maths education. I presented some of the committee’s views to government, the Department of Education. And so I think we had actually… it’s hard to know, because you’re just advisory. But we certainly had a role in national debate on maths education.

Doel:

Did you feel satisfied with the result?

Sparks:

Well, it’s difficult to say whether you’re satisfied, because you’re getting into the sort of murky realms of politics. And I think one of the things that I’ve learnt, which is a rather curious thing, is often advisory committees like that prevent governments from doing things which are really stupid. [laughs] They still go and do—

Doel:

Do less harm. [laughs]

Sparks:

They do less harm, that’s right. Nobody really knows about that. I mean, there’s two dimensions. One is that a committee like that can take a long-term view.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And you can have a sort of vision for what should happen and can influence things. And so there’s also the influence of nudging the political world into more productive paths, and then you can also by argument and… you can persuade them not to do things that they’re sort of planning to do, because they’re ridiculous. And then you can persuade them that they’re ridiculous, but of course, they’re not going to tell anybody that they’ve stopped doing that, because [laughs] somebody told them they’re ridiculous. They’re more likely to say, “Well, we think this would be better. And of course—"

Doel:

You give them an option to save face?

Sparks:

An option to—that’s right. So what we definitely… there was elements of that. So it was very interesting. That committee is still going on and still having an influence, but it was, I think, a very satisfying activity to be in. I was appointed, I guess, as a member of the Royal Society. But not because of my expertise in the area, but because of the ability to sort of chair and present arguments to, you know, politicians and senior civil servants and so forth. So that was good. I’ve since been… I’m chairing a working group at the Royal Society at the moment, which we’re looking at the case for experimental science, for science education in schools. And also I’m a member of another committee, which is with the British Academy and Royal Society, which is about essentially strengthening the research and education in the UK. And that’s very broad. It’s not just science. It’s also arts and humanities. So that’s… and that’s going to report later this year. So that’s brought me into the educational world. And I found those are sort of rewarding things to do.

Doel:

And I wanted to couple that with a discussion of when you became President of Geological Society of London, which was right at the time that you stepped down as being chair of the unit here?

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. Yeah.

Doel:

And then you served for two years?

Sparks:

Two years, yes.

Doel:

I’m curious about two things. The first: what did you most want to achieve during the time that you were leading the Society?

Sparks:

I think I wanted—at the time, I wanted to integrate the applied and academic strands of the society, because they… it had actually… before I was president, but not long before, there’d been a fusion of the Geological Society with the Institute of Geologists, which was all about applied geologists and people who work in the oil industry, environmental, or engineering geology. So much more practitioners of the world of work and chartering, and chartering came in. Charter status came in. And so there was quite a lot of work when I was President. I mean, two years isn’t very long actually, so you can only do so much. But there was definitely a… I think we made some progress in integrating those two very different strands into a single society. And there was a lot of issues about chartering and then… and so forth at the time. I did something which actually wasn’t successful, but I thought it was worth trying. The Geological Society have had… is split into a whole series of work of groups, and the tendency is for the meetings of the society to usually be a group meeting, but never a whole society meeting.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

We do have the William Smith lectures and all that and meetings, but by and large, there’s… the tradition wasn’t to have large-scale national meetings where all the different disciplines of geology got together. And I tried to put… I actually did hold… organize an annual… what I hoped was going to be a biennial national meeting. And it was reasonably successful, but it never really took off. I don’t quite know—the tradition was just too strong to break, I suppose, and then I was only involved for two years. So it never really took off.

Doel:

It hasn’t since that time?

Sparks:

It hasn’t since, no.

Doel:

Okay.

Sparks:

So that wasn’t… and the Geological Society was in a sort of transitional period at that time because of this amalgamation, so it was more a matter of sort of steering the ship than doing anything dramatic, I think.

Doel:

Right. And then it was just a few years later in 1999 that you became President of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior [IAVCEI]. How did those challenges… what were they like for you? What did you most want to do?

Sparks:

What I hoped was that we could to some extent resuscitate the sort of meetings and also the commissions of the IAVCEI. Again, even the Geological Society seemed fast compared to an organization like IAVCEI. So, although it sounds… four years sounds a long time, it’s not very long, because the only have a meeting every four years.

Doel:

Exactly.

Sparks:

[laughs] So there’s not an awful lot you can do. You can… again, I think it’s sort of nudging. I think during the time we did get the… some of the commissions working better, we put a lot of emphasis on change. The… a problem it… because it’s a voluntary organization, there was definitely a tendency for some of the commissions to be… have leaders who did absolutely nothing but were not very enthusiastic about giving up their leadership, because it gave them some sort of prestige or kudos.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So there were battles like that, and quite a… some important commissions that we… so we did quite a lot of work of trying to rejuvenate the leadership of the voluntary sections of IAVCEI. We put on some pretty… well actually, it was… the thing is that when you’re President, you’re responsible for the next General Assembly [crosstalk]—

Doel:

Meeting. Right.

Sparks:

—when you’re not going to be president. [laughs]

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

So there was a lot of work in planning the Chile meeting. In 2004, wasn’t it?

Doel:

I believe so.

Sparks:

Yeah, the IAVCEI meeting of 2004. So I was working in Chile a lot, so I had a lot of contacts there. And we… so we put a lot of energy in putting on what turned out to be a fantastic conference of the IAVCEI General Assembly. And that’s where Steve McNutt was the Secretary General of IAVCEI at the same time, so that’s how I got to know Steve from Alaska.

Doel:

And what was the relationship like with IUGG in all that?

Sparks:

Well, it was never very easy. We had… IUGG is a very… certainly is an organization which was created in the earlier… early 20th century in a structure which was very inflexible. It’s since changed somewhat, but not that much. So IAVCEI had to be a bit independent. We were the only association to have members. And that caused quite a lot of tension, because they didn’t like us to have members. [laughs]

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So there was always a lot of argument about keeping our membership going. But it was… yeah, it was a good… it was an enjoyable… certainly an enjoyable period.

Doel:

I was curious too. As you took on more and more of these administrative tasks, your research productivity remained about the same.

Sparks:

Reasonably high, yes.

Doel:

Yeah. How did you manage to balance those different tasks?

Sparks:

I suppose it’s because I was lucky to get a succession of funding which reduced—this is after I was head of school, of course—reduced my admin and teaching burden at Bristol. As I say, it didn’t mean that I didn’t do any of these tasks, but it meant that it was reduced. So I got a NERC advanced fellowship which lasted five years. I also got a Wolfson Royal Society grant for another five years, and then I got a European Research Council advance grant. And so somehow or other, over most of that period, I had independent funding, which sort of bought out some of my time, which meant I had more time for research than I otherwise would have.

Doel:

So in some sense, the administrative load wasn’t varying, but you were able to utilize those funds to balance research and teaching?

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Yes. So I kept teaching. I mean, I taught throughout that period. But as I say, my… it would have been a slightly lighter load. I’ve also… in Bristol, we were… because we’ve been successful in getting senior postdocs into the department, we’ve never had very high teaching loads in the department anyway. So they’ve been… compared to other universities that all the staff have sort of benefited from that, because the senior research postdocs could do a bit of teaching and do the odd field trip and—

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

—sort of reduce the—

Doel:

The overall burden from—

Sparks:

The overall burden, yeah.

Doel:

Yeah, from the senior staff.

Sparks:

So, being successful as a research department, I think, benefited everyone in that way.

Doel:

Yeah. And that’s all quite interesting. And I wanted to also ask about your chairing in 2008, the UK Research Assessment Exercise.

Sparks:

Oh, yes. I did that. Yes.

Doel:

Yeah. How did that come about? And I’m curious, because you’d seen some of this from the inside, looking at what Ron Oxburgh had done?

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

How did you think about what you wanted to get done in this [crosstalk]?

Sparks:

Well, I think I wanted it to be fair. It was one of these situations where I think this idea of every four or five years a national assessment of research to inform funding wasn’t going to go away. And although I think everyone had reservations about it, I think also people saw there was some benefits as well, and I think that’s proved to be the case, actually. So I think the… those exercises have actually strengthened UK Earth sciences over the years. I like some aspect of it. The fact that it’s quality, not quantity, of publications, which is the metric. So I thought it would… I was approached to do it… would have liked to do it, and I don’t think I’d thought very long before deciding I would enjoy chairing it. And we created a very strong, balanced committee, which was fun to work with. And so it was very hard work, but I think we did a pretty decent job of fair assessment. I don’t think there were any sort of serious complaints about the outcome. It was a very interesting thing to do, firstly because you had to read an enormous number of papers and assess them. I think myself as chair I read over a thousand papers—

Doel:

My gosh. Yeah.

Sparks:

—and scored them. And we… and as I say, it was a very good committee, enjoyable to work with. And I mean, it was… from everything, from ecology through to hardcore geophysics to applied Earth science. Everything you can imagine within the broad scope of Earth science.

Doel:

Were there any surprises that you remember coming out of that work?

Sparks:

I think if you’d asked people to rank the order, said: here are all the Earth science—you remember, it was very broad, so all the environmental sciences including meteorology at Reading, so we—

Doel:

Right. It’s physical and biological—the entire spectrum.

Sparks:

Yes. It was physical, chemical, biological. The whole spectrum of… it was Earth and environmental science systems, so we had everything from people working on the ionosphere [inaudible] almost this full range of things and more that AGU do.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So it’s enormously broad. So I don’t think there was any major surprises—I think if you’d ask people to rank the departments independently, just on sort of gut intuition—

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

—rumormongering, anecdotal evidence, I doubt if they ought… there would probably be some differences of ordering, but I don’t think it would have been terribly different. I mean, I remember the places—the environmental schools, like University of East Anglia and at Lancaster University being you know, pleasantly surprised by how strong they were. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been, but they were definitely very strong. I don’t think any of the results really surprised anybody. You know, so say you would have… maybe somebody would have said: well, they should be third rather than seventh, or—

Doel:

Yeah. But that’s a smaller range [crosstalk]—

Sparks:

[crosstalk] It’s a smaller range, yes. That’s right. I don’t think there was any department that sort of really surprised that they didn’t do much better or they did much worse. I suppose, yes. I mean, the… yeah, there were… I mean, I don’t think it’s appropriate to mention names, but you know, there were one or two departments which perhaps could have… you would have probably been higher up the ranking than they—if you had just listed [laughs]—than they actually were. But not by a huge amount.

Doel:

Did you achieve all that you wanted to by the end of that time?

Sparks:

Yes, and I was asked to chair the next one, and I decided I didn’t want to do that. It was up to somebody else to do—

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

To do it. I mean, one of the things I’ve been quite strong on is believing that all these sorts of things should be refreshed. The people shouldn’t stick around in these committees.

Doel:

And that’s been a consistent theme in how you’ve tried to manage.

Sparks:

Yeah. Yeah. I think you… people have to refresh, yes, so that… but was, as I say, and of course, you learnt an awful lot. And there was a sort of rather puerile pleasure of having the odd person coming to a seminar, you know, who is a seismologist and not realizing [laughs] that I’d read their paper on the… I can ask them some—

Doel:

[laughs] Something about—

Sparks:

About some question that made it seem like I was sort of really knowledgeable about that stuff. But it was because I’d read their papers in the RAE [2008 Research Assessment Exercise], and they wouldn’t have expected a volcanologist to ask them about some esoteric area of seismology. So I think it’s rather puerile. [laughs]

Doel:

But it is that way in which one gets to know what’s going on in other fields?

Sparks:

It is, yes. And it sort of set me up for doing some of the stuff for AGU like I was… two things subsequently, which I’ve done which… a service, which one was chairing the Macelwane Awards committee at AGU, which as you know, is the premiere early-career award AGU gives. And I chaired that—I was on that committee, and then I chaired it. And I think that experience of having a very broad knowledge of the Earth environmental sciences allowed me to read areas which are far from my field, but at least get a sense of whether their science is strong [crosstalk] —

Doel:

[crosstalk] The strength of the science?

Sparks:

And the strength of the arguments that the experts were bringing to the table, to say whether they should be, you know, given an award or not.

Doel:

That’s really interesting.

Sparks:

And then I’ve subsequently—I’m still on it, actually—have been the last five or six years, I’ve been… no, five years I’ve been on the European Research Council panel, which is giving these prestigious Consolidator awards to sort of mid-career scientists, the elite mid-career scientists in Europe. And that panel involves short-listing and then interviewing, and then of the people we interview, we’d give about less than half… we’d give them an award. And of course, that’s a very huge amount of money. They get €2 million each. So again, that’s extremely broad panel—that same breadth—and so being on that, it’s helpful that experience of reading broadly to support that kind of panel.

Doel:

It sounds like for you it’s a particularly satisfying experience.

Sparks:

Well, it’s always interesting to learn about areas of science you don’t know much about, and occasionally, that you can read some science, which, you know, you can apply to your own interests.

Doel:

Right. And you mentioned AGU, and you became a fellow there in 1998.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

Was that a surprise?

Sparks:

That was quite a surprise, yes. And that was a, you know… a very pleasing award in particular, because you know, obviously, AGU is an enormous family of scientists. I think 60,000 members or something like that. So the AGU fellowship, I think, is a very sort of special kind of award. And of course, being non-U.S., I think… of course, national awards are very welcome, but the awards from other countries, I think, are to some extent, have a value added that you’re being recognized outside your own country.

Doel:

It was a number of years later that… in 2008 that you became the president-elect, and of course, then president of Volcanology, Geochemistry, Petrology, the VGP section.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

What were the particular challenges in that role?

Sparks:

I think they were… I couldn’t say there were challenges as much as one wanted to… I think the main role—at least, I found—that being president was to develop a sense of community. And VGP is very broad. It’s got geochemistry, petrology, and it’s got volcanology. And so the spectrum of things that you… that people are interested in VGP are very wide. And so keeping a balance between those areas, I think, was quite an important thing to do. And so, also promoting interesting sessions, just encouraging people to propose sessions on topical issues for the big AGU meetings. Obviously, the awards is very important item.

Doel:

Right. You were talking just a moment ago about keeping that balance—

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

How did you do that? What were the strategies that you employed?

Sparks:

I think it was right at… of course, we had a newsletter that went out to all AGU-VGP members. It was making sure the committees that did the awards were aware that they were serving a very wide range of topics. You don’t want all the—just the geochemists to get the awards, or all the volcanologists to get the awards. So you want to sort of keep an eye on the balance. And that, of course… who… getting nominations for committees was an important thing, again, to develop balance. And of course, diversity has become more and more prominent as well in that issue. We had a junior voice, we had somebody on the… I think we added in a student rep on the committee so that we got the sort of student voice coming in. And that, of course, led to becoming involved in council, and then becoming part of the council leadership too.

Doel:

Indeed. I want to get to that in just a moment, because I think that’s quite critical. If I recall, Alex Halliday was your predecessor?

Sparks:

Yes, he was. And Bernie Wood was before that. So [crosstalk] we had three Brits in a row [laughs] as the—

Doel:

How much did you talk to them about these matters?

Sparks:

I talked about it because we had sort of similar ideas. And I certainly remember talking to Bernie quite a lot about where VGP should go. And I mean, it’s an odd thing. I mean, when one says… with an organization like that, it’s almost self-organizing, because the fall meeting is such a big issue, big item, that that’s… a lot of the conversation’s about making the fall meeting successful.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

So you need good sessions. You need awardees for the various awards who everyone sort of is going to recognize, and you know, saying, “Yeah, that person deserves that medal, prize, or whatever it is. And you need this sort of sense of balance that, you know, volcanologists don’t feel sidelined or—”

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

—You have to sort of satisfy this rather broad spectrum of interests. And then you have to, of course, think about interactions with other sections. You know, do you want a session with a… is tectonics and volcanoes the flavor of the month? So do we need to have a joint session with the tectonics people and the natural hazard focus groups? So you’re also thinking about how you relate to the other sections in terms of a sort of menu of sessions and activities.

Doel:

Yeah. And your successor was Catherine McCammon.

Sparks:

McCammon, yes. That’s right.

Doel:

Did you have any particular advice for her?

Sparks:

No, not really. I mean, we talked, Catherine, when she was the President-elect. I mean, the structure of it is that the President-elect and the president work pretty closely together.

Doel:

Close, yeah.

Sparks:

So, I would get Catherine’s advice, and just as we got from Alex. And so you would… so we talked. And so we had basically similar kind of goals. I mean, one of the things we did do, which is still ongoing, is we tried to… at the time I was President-elect and President, we tried to forge a much closer relationship with the European Geosciences Union [EGU], which we sort of did. And it’s still going on. We’ve got the [Hisashi] Kuno Award, which is the early-career award, and the Kuno medalist goes and gives a talk at EGU in Vienna. So we try to link up with having joint sessions at EUG, which were AGU/EGU joint sessions. There was a sort of a formal EGU/AGU meeting, but that sort of links was formed about that time and is… so I wouldn’t say it’s strengthened, but it’s certainly not gone away. That link is still there with EGU.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And sort of common interests and things.

Doel:

Yeah. But your hope had been to strengthen that?

Sparks:

Yes, to start to make it stronger, yes, which I think we did succeed in.

Doel:

A moment ago, you were starting to talk about then being involved in AGU council. And you were there at a particularly—

Sparks:

Oh, interesting time. Oh, yes. I mean, that was – that was absolutely fascinating because I’d not really, until I became VGP president, appreciated some of the politics and the sort of evolution of AGU. And I came out—I joined the Council as President-elect just at the time where the revolution was starting. [laughs] So I was… I mean, obviously people like Tim Grove were, and Carol—

Doel:

Finn.

Sparks:

—Finn were very much at the center of that revolution. But there were others, like Marcia McNutt and so forth, who… and so I came in at that stage of the start of the revolution, and I think by the time I finished, before the revolution had been completed, but it was obviously a very dramatic phase in AGU’s evolution as an organization.

Doel:

I’m very curious how you saw this revolution, what was going on, what these changes were?

Sparks:

Well, what I saw—and it was obvious already that AGU was being held back by essentially a leadership which was dominated by the… what do they call Fred? Was he—

Doel:

The executive director?

Sparks:

Executive director.

Doel:

Yes. We’re talking about Fred Spilhaus?

Sparks:

Spilhaus, yes. And Fred had been the dominant figure and had… and of course had seen, and overseen, the growth of a highly successful organization over almost 40 years, I think.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And it was clear that the organization was being held back by his resistance to change. I mean, there’s probably no other way of seeing it. And he’d obviously been an enormously—a huge servant of AGU. So you saw this… that major change was needed so that AGU became… its decision-making process, the whole way it worked, was much more transparent… involved changes which were much more democratic, and where the membership had a much bigger role in the decisions, which were really being… he was the gatekeeper, really. And so it was a very unhealthy situation, I think. And so the revolution was sort of inevitable. And what was, I suppose, sad at the time was that what was done clearly needed to be done, so there was sort of very brave people, like Marcia [McNutt], Carol [Finn] and Tim [Grove] who took, you know… you know, very difficult… made very difficult decisions and pushed through the changes. And so it was very sad though, of course, to see somebody who obviously was a great servant of AGU become very embittered and defensive and obstructionist. So it’s a sort of sad time as well as sort of a very, to some extent, exhilarating time, because it was moving into a new era where these changes just had to be made.

Doel:

How well did you know Fred Spilhaus?

Sparks:

Not very well. I mean, I met him here, as you do, at AGU events. And he was… I mean, I suppose, dramatic was that if you wanted… if you thought of something that AGU should be doing or some direction or some issue, you would automatically go to Fred to bend his ear, because there wasn’t a strong structure of the rest of the membership to do that. So it didn’t exist. It was Fred. [laughs]

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And so—have you thought of doing this? Or, have you thought of doing that? Or, why doesn’t AGU think of whatever? It was Fred who was the man to talk to. And it was… you know, there were lots of issues, but things like spring AGU was clearly becoming a much less successful meeting. And the need to internationalize and engage, he was very tempted to be against developing partnerships with other sister organizations around the world, whereas obviously AGU needed to be much more engaged. So there were all sorts of things where clearly there needed to be changes.

Doel:

Did you also sense that it was the limits on social engagement on larger issues that came into play, such as climate change?

Sparks:

I didn’t get that sense. Do you mean in the sense of his view of that, or—

Doel:

Of not seeing that as an appropriate activity of AGU to address?

Sparks:

I don’t personally remember anything like that. I think it was much more that this is the way we did it, and [laughs] we were going to carry on doing it that way. I don’t recall him having sort of views on… you know, views on where the science should go. But I think it was also… but again, there appeared to be some resistance to creating new groups or new arrangements.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

But I don’t… I didn’t think it was because he didn’t think those were legitimate areas.

Doel:

In terms of engagement in public policy?

Sparks:

Oh, yes. That’s right.

Doel:

As opposed to staying more narrowly with the science?

Sparks:

He tended to be against internationalizing, was suspicious of sort of arrangements with other national societies. Yes, the sense that… and of course, that sort of was an active argument within AGU about the… I mean, different AGU members would have different views on the extent to which AGU should make policy pronouncements. So that’s still an active area of debate. But I think he would have been quite conservative, that AGU was about, you know, the purest science. It was a difficult period, but it was very interesting, and I think it was… there were necessary reforms and that the… I was on the first council leadership team. I was sort of deputy chair for Carol [Finn]. And so I sort of saw a lot of what went on [laughs] from the inside, as it were. And then they made that very difficult… we made that very difficult decision to go to John Wiley and cease AGU being a publishing house itself. That was a very critical decision, but a very difficult one, because it affected people’s jobs and careers.

Doel:

Yeah. Were there any other issues as you think back that were particularly important that you dealt with, with AGU at the time?

Sparks:

Well, I think those are the big issues, was to change the governance.

Doel:

Right. And those were critical. Yeah.

Sparks:

Those were critical, and that’s where a lot of the energy went. There was also, because it was a time of change, there were obviously different views of what that… those are. I think a lot of agreement around that the governance needed to change, but of course there wasn’t as much uniformity of how it should change—

Doel:

Should change. Yeah.

Sparks:

—and what it should look like after these changes. And so that inevitably led to a lot of debate within AGU about what… how those changes should take place and what… and then, of course, the publishing was a sort of very difficult issue, because it had to be very secret simply because people’s… before the decision was made to outsource the publishing, then obviously the staff… while that debate was going on, the staff in AGU who were involved in the publishing would obviously be affected.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

They might lose their jobs. They might… there would be a lot of uncertainty. What were they going to do? And there would have to be a transition period. And then the issue of what different publishers might offer AGU… so there was more than… John Wiley put forward a case. [laughs]

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And I mean, there was issues about EOS and what that should look like, should go… you know, again, what’s actually happened is it’s gone electronic, which was sort of what a lot of people thought it should. But that wasn’t necessarily everybody’s view. AIP, of course, with Physics Today, which [laughs] hardly anybody wanted, but—

Doel:

But it was still part of the membership offer?

Sparks:

Still part of the membership offer. And the membership fees. That was a—

Doel:

That was a key issue too, wasn’t it?

Sparks:

That was a key issue, because basically they hadn’t gone up for twenty years or more. So they were sort of ridiculously inexpensive.

Doel:

Was it kept low in order to increase the membership, or were there other factors?

Sparks:

It’s hard to know. I think it was kept… Fred—it was very much Fred’s view that they shouldn’t be increased. And of course, you then got to the point where it was so cheap… you got to a sort of point where, I mean, financially, my recollection was that publishing was clearly changing, something which had, in the past, made AGU a profit, the publishing was looking less and less likely to make it a profit and could be a real burden around AGU’s neck, of carrying on publishing as a small science publisher in a world of giant publishers. So that was looking less and less viable. And the membership hadn’t gone up, so that was providing less and less income every year in proportion to AGU’s running cost. So it had been kept low so long that it was starting to look sort of just, again, not viable. So I think everyone agreed that the membership fees should be inexpensive to encourage people, and particularly students and so forth. But it was just so low. You know, if you compared it at the time, I mean, you could… was it $20?

Doel:

Yes, it was.

Sparks:

And if I remember, the Geological Society of London is… at that time, would have been about £90, so about $150.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And if you look around other organizations –

Doel:

There were virtually none that were at the level of the AGU?

Sparks:

At the AGU, yes. So it started to just look non-viable, but of course, the issue was how would you correct that without [laughs] annoying too many people? And there were still… there were people who, you know… their view was that it should be very, very cheap to encourage as many people as possible to join, which is sort of a legitimate case. But then, you know, you have… if your main sources of income are starting to [laughs] decline, and the fall meeting is a very big source of income, of course.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

And anything that happened to jeopardize that, you know, a vulnerable fall meeting, it looked vulnerable. I mean, subsequently, it looks like it’s held up, but even so, there’s a vulnerability in relying on one big, giant meeting to make your money.

Doel:

The San Francisco meeting we’re talking about?

Sparks:

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So yes. No, it was a very interesting period.

Doel:

And you also spoke about the larger vision, the question of what AGU would look like after the revolution. Were there any ideas that you particularly favored that you felt weren’t adopted?

Sparks:

I don’t know. I think… I don’t think that AGU has been as… and I don’t think this is intentional. I think it’s perhaps just the difficulty of doing it. I think there was a… certainly we… there was quite a momentum to make AGU more international—there’s always been a bit of a dilemma for AGU, and they’ve, in different times, in different situations, they’ve kind of been a bit ambivalent, I think. I mean, it’s the international dimensions. On the one hand, they want to be the premiere global organization from… for geophysics and have a very strong international membership and presence. On the other hand, AGU is a U.S. national organization, and I think it’s basically not possible for them to be both.

Doel:

Both at the same time?

Sparks:

And so that has—and I still think probably does—still, there’s a sort of certain tension in the organization. I mean, it’s undoubtedly the best Earth science meeting globally and does attract large amounts of people to go to that meeting from all over the world. And it’s got a significant international membership. But I don’t think that that means it can be [laughs] the international organization for geophysics. So I think the area I’ve always felt that they’ve… they should support more strongly, and I still don’t, is the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics [IUGG], because that is the international organization for geophysics. We know it’s got a lot of deficiencies and weaknesses and comes with a lot of historical baggage in the way it’s governed and organized, which makes it much less effective than it should be. On the other hand, particularly under Fred’s leadership—when Fred was in charge, it was sort of almost sidelined. And I think there was a sense, when I was on the… and during this reform period, that AGU would be more engaging with other international organizations. And I think they have moved in that direction. I’m not convinced they’ve moved as far as—

Doel:

Far enough?

Sparks:

Far enough.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

Now, it’s not that it’s an easy thing to do. [laughs] But… and I think the other thing is that I don’t think they’ve quite tackled yet is… I think one of the problems for AGU is the very success of the fall meeting. I mean, it is a lot of people if you—and many AGU members—if you say “AGU,” they mean the fall meeting. They don’t [laughs] actually mean the organization. “Are you going to AGU?” means, “Are you going to going [crosstalk] in San Francisco?” And that’s that principal engagement. And it’s an enormously successful meeting, but it means that somehow, AGU can seem, you know—

Doel:

Remote or separate from the meeting itself?

Sparks:

Well, it’s more that it’s just the dominant thing about AGU and when they have the spring meeting. I mean, I know they have west… you know, the AOGS meetings, and they do collaborative meet… they did one with EGU, so they are becoming more collaborative. There’s no doubt about that. But it just seems that when you complete… you know, an organization which is so dominated by one event, you wonder how healthy that really is. So I still think that’s an issue for them.

Doel:

That’s really interesting. When you think about the fall meeting, are there things you wish you were going on that are not?

Sparks:

No, because it’s already a gigantic meeting with enormous amounts of things going on.

Doel:

In terms of the organization or [crosstalk]—

Sparks:

Yes, that’s right. I mean, I know there’s other things going on. And then the publications, of course, are probably still very important for AGU, the quality of the publications. But I’m not sure they’re… with all the rivalry from Springer and Elsevier and other publishing, the proliferation of journals, they don’t quite play the dominant role in geophysics publication that they would have 30 years ago. And that’s been a gradual change, but people have got alternative options for publishing in prestigious journals, so they don’t have to feel they have to publish in JGR to be known as a geophysicist.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

So that’s changed. So the journals are still a very important part of AGU. They’re probably not quite as they were. So I’m sure the council and board, they’re thinking about these things as we speak, but—

Doel:

Are there any other aspects of your AGU involvement that we haven’t covered that you felt important in this period?

Sparks:

Not really. I think they’ve… I felt, I mean, there’s their honors and awards, there was quite a lot of discussion about how the honors and awards should change, particularly in the context of diversity. And they haven’t changed as fast as perhaps people might have been hoping or thinking would happen. So there’s still a big gender issue, because most of the awards for AGU are for senior folk: the AGU fellowship and the medals. They’ve got… if you take the sections, the sections have all got early career awards, but if you look at the balance, you know, you go to the awards. I haven’t been for a couple of years, but the last time I went, it’s the same. You look at the AGU fellows, and they’re – [laughs] and I don’t know what it is, but seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five percent guys.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

And that’s just, you know, a demographic of the people. It’s probably… it probably will change, because you know, female researchers are now becoming professors, and to a much greater extent. You know, that gender balance is changing dramatically. And so you would hope that that was reflected in people who are getting the awards. But it’s still not there yet. And there’s also, I think, not enough early career and mid-career type awards.

Doel:

That’s an important point.

Sparks:

I mean, it’s much harder. You think about it, it’s much harder to become a medalist than it is to become an AGU fellow. [laughs]

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

So you know, there’s sixty-plus, isn’t there, every year become AGU fellows. There’s five Macelwane awards. So when I was on the… chaired the Macelwane award, I was quite surprised that there was a lot of resistance to the idea of increasing the number of Macelwane. Awardees. I thought that we should be increasing. If you looked at the figures, you go back—they’ve been giving five Macelwane award medalists back to 1980s, earlier.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

They’ve been giving five. The membership in say 1985 was about [laughs] a tenth of the membership now. But they’re still only giving five awards.

Doel:

Right.

Sparks:

So I don’t think that—

Doel:

Was it seen as a question of diminishing the prestige of the Macelwane?

Sparks:

That’s the usual argument: it’s somehow diluting the currency if you give more of these awards. So it takes… to me, it took… my view is that it took no account of the changed membership numbers. It took no account of the demographics, which mean that most… there’s an imbalance of awardees, because they’re mostly senior awardees. But I was surprised. Most of the people—some people on the committee—we were going to make that recommendation, but on the committee discussions, we had a debate, and it was clear there wasn’t a consensus, so—

Doel:

Who were supporting your ideas?

Sparks:

Well, I won’t name names, but there were some people who liked what I said, and others didn’t. [laughs] So there wasn’t going to be a consensus.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And I also get that sense more broadly that that’s the view. So I’ve—I think that’s a mistake. I think they… so I think they could be more ambitious in their awards. I know they’ve got the ambassador. There’s one or two new awards, and they’ve made some changes. They haven’t been dramatic.

Doel:

What I’m curious about—you mentioned a moment ago the role of women within the organization. Did minority participation come up as a topic?

Sparks:

Yes, it did. Yes. And it’s rather similar to… actually, the Royal Society is the same thing. You get this anomaly that, of course, we did have on the board… Afro-American guy, Floyd [Deschamps] on the board. So, there was clearly efforts to populate various committees with greater diversity. But you get the same difficulty which, of course, women face, is that because they’re in a minority at senior level, they get asked to go on. I mean, the vast majority of female senior academics I talk to say they just get overwhelmed with having to sit on innumerable committees, because they’ve got to have a gender balance.

Doel:

It’s a very common concern.

Sparks:

It’s a major concern, and I don’t—I’m not sure what the answer is. But it doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily… in one hand, you’re being helpful if you have it representative of what you think should be the representation of genders or minorities—

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

—you don’t necessarily do that gender or, you know, the females or the ethnic minorities a favor, because they’re spending all their time on committees.

Doel:

On committee service, yeah.

Sparks:

Committee service, which isn’t helping their career. So it’s a bit of a—

Doel:

It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?

Sparks:

Conundrum, yeah. But I think on the awards, they could do something, or myself. I mean, I argued that they should increase Macelwane awards. I mean, if you did it proportionally—

Doel:

Yes, which was your argument.

Sparks:

—you would probably have twelve rather than five.

Doel:

Did any other sections try to do that within—to develop or to create awards that were more proportional to the growing membership?

Sparks:

Not really, because I think the most sections have a senior award and an early career award. There may be other ones, but I think that’s—

Doel:

But that’s been the—?

Sparks:

That’s been the challenge. Well, you see, the number of AGU fellows has grown proportionally with membership, because it’s 0.1 percent of the membership. So that’s increased because the membership’s increased. Anyway, I didn’t win that argument, but [laughs]—

Doel:

But you raised it?

Sparks:

I raised it, yes. Yup. Yup.

Doel:

Before we finish today, I wanted to ask about some of the other awards that you’ve gotten recently. Those include the Arthur Day Medal from GSA, which was in 2000, and then four years later, the Arthur Holmes Medal from [crosstalk] the European Union.

Sparks:

[crosstalk] Yeah.

Doel:

And then more recently—I’m skipping over a few—the 2015 Vetlesen award.

Sparks:

Yes.

Doel:

Which ones, as you think back, were particularly memorable, significant, for you?

Sparks:

It’s… well, of course, each award comes with its own context, I suppose, and at a different time. I mean, I think the Thorarinsson Medal award, which is the top volcanologist one was, of course, one—right in the heart of my field, so that was obviously a very… you know, very sort of happy and honored to get that one. The Vetlesen came as a complete surprise. I’d absolutely no idea. So when I got a phone call from Sean Solomon saying I’d got it, that came as a complete shock. And that, as an experience, was probably the real highlight in the sense that they had that lovely award ceremony in the Columbia campus with, you know, a big dinner and flew my family out. And I then had the opportunity to invite sixty—I think sixty guests to the dinner, and I sort of divided that between academic colleagues and sort of friends who are not scientists. So I had about, besides my family, I had about twenty friends of various sorts, most of whom are not strongly related to science, coming over for that, which was great fun. So I had, you know, the… on the awards ceremony, I had all our friends from Rhode Island, which were a mixture of people from the Graduate School of Oceanography [GSO] and Rhode Islanders who were not scientists we got to know, and people from the UK, and then sort of various colleagues from around the States and Europe who were able to come. So we got, not all, but a lot of sort of close friends and colleagues and close colleagues coming to that. So that was a sort of very memorable occasion. And we stayed in New York for three or four days and had some, you know, fun dinners and things. So that was a great occasion.

Doel:

Were you invited to give a talk at that point?

Sparks:

I gave a talk at Lamont before it. It wasn’t part of the official… but Terry Plank asked me if I’d give a lecture, and I sort of gave a lecture at Lamont, a couple of… then Terry put on a party at Lamont for me a couple of days before the formal proceedings. So that was good fun. And we had, looking out over the Hudson and was at the—what’s the bridge there, in the Hudson?

Doel:

Tappan Zee Bridge?

Sparks:

Tappan Zee Bridge, that’s right.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

The Tappan Zee Bridge, located at the Tappan Zee Bridge, where her house is very close to that. And so that was a very… that was very memorable. And of course, it also came with the addition of some cash. And that was very welcome as well, so that was… so it was all… you know, I had Barry Sharpless there, and his wife came along as well, and we had a lot of people from different stages of my career and life, I suppose, coming to that. So it was… that was a tremendous occasion.

Doel:

Had you known other Vetlesen Award winners? Because that included Tuzo Wilson?

Sparks:

Yes. I don’t think I ever met Tuzo—

Doel:

Walter Munk?

Sparks:

I met Walter Munk, and it was at Scripps. And who was the French guy who got it the year before? I met him, and I was on a panel with him. Oh, I should remember his name [Jean Jouzel]. It’ll come back to me later, but he was the guy who won the prize jointly with Susan [Solomon], I think the year before.

Doel:

We’ll make sure we add that to the transcript.

Sparks:

Yeah. That’s right. I can’t... I should remember his name. Dan—is it Daniel? Anyway, he… I had been on some sort of panel with him at the European Union, so I knew him a little bit, and then—

Doel:

Wally Broecker was also an awardee?

Sparks:

Wally Broecker I met a few times. He was a big friend of Ron Oxburgh, so he was in Cambridge occasionally while I was at Cambridge, and I sort of met occasionally when I was over in Lamont. So yeah, so there was Wally. Yes. Yeah, so it was a… I think a great occasion.

Doel:

And you also had two honorary degrees awarded, at least two that I know of: University Blaise Pascal, and Lancaster.

Sparks:

And the Sorbonne. The Sorbonne.

Doel:

And the Sorbonne.

Sparks:

Yeah.

Doel:

Where do you get those—do any of those stand out as just being particularly special, memorable?

Sparks:

Well, I think the… in terms of the ceremony and the ambiance, I think the Sorbonne has to be the most memorable. I wouldn’t say, you know, it’s a better… get an honorary degree from Sorbonne than anywhere like at Lancaster or anywhere else, but it was just a very fine ceremony. They have a rather different way of doing things in Sorbonne, because it’s a, you know, sort of late 18th century wonderful building that they have this ceremony on, and they had a string quartet playing. And then they… what they seem to do is they give honorary degrees to cohorts in particular fields. The year I went it was Keith O’Nions, Dan MacKenzie, myself, and Stan Hart were the awardees. So we all got… all four of us got an honorary degree together. So, we were sort of… and they rope you all up in sort of… to look like you’re the, you know, the Three Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu or something, in these fine, fine academic robes. And you walk into this, you know, wonderful building, and then you’re around, and then somebody reads an oration. I think Claude Jaupart read mine, in a—and again, in fine, great finery. Back in Louis XIV’s time, sort of the… and then you… I had my photograph taken again, so a very famous picture in the… of Cardinal Richelieu [laughs], and so that was very grand. And you know, there was an appropriately grand dinner afterwards, of French cuisine, which was great fun. And of course, Claude was my host, so he was as usual, a very gracious host. So that was very memorable.

Doel:

Wondering, too—your service activity put you in position of taking on larger public roles. Is there a particular view you have towards the role of scientist as public intellectuals in our time?

Sparks:

Yes. I mean, it’s… I strongly believe that science should have a stronger voice in society than it does, and I’m thinking perhaps more in a UK context than anything else. I mean, I expect it’s true in this USA, but perhaps I’m not quite so familiar with where scientists sit. In the UK, I think we’ve got a very odd attitude to science, which is a sort of cultural thing, and probably very deep-seated. But scientists are sort of… I think scientists are admired, but at a kind of a bit of a distance. The culture in the UK is very dominated by arts, humanities, economics, law, I think at the sort of highest levels. So you can see by the number of scientists in Parliament, for example, which is literally two or three. Margaret Thatcher, with the exception, with the chemistry degree, of course. But you see, public life—scientists don’t participate in public life in the UK as much as they really should, given the, you know, the challenges that society is facing. I mean, it’s… there’s a good, a really good example of that is we have a current affairs program, which is very popular, called Question Time. And it sort of illustrates the culture very nicely, because they’ll… it’s a program—have you ever seen this?

Doel:

I haven’t.

Sparks:

It’s been running for years and, you know, decades. And it’s once a week, and you have a panel in front of a live audience. And there’s usually four or five panelists. And there’s—

Doel:

Thematically arranged panelists?

Sparks:

Well, what happens is, the… it’s a current affairs thing. So it’ll be the… lots of the questions will be from the audience. And the audience participates, because they can join in the debate. And the chairman sort of manages the debate. So it could be on anything, but you know, this week it would be: what do you think of Trump’s latest tweet? Or [laughs]… or do you think—what should we do about the Russians? Or, usually at the moment, it’s usually about Brexit in one form or another. But it’s about… it’s… a lot of the questions are political, about current affairs and matters of the moment. And of course, the panel will always have at least three politicians to represent the main parties or main strands of political thinking. They’ll commonly have a journalist or a pundit of some kind. They quite occasionally have—actually, quite often, they’ll have somebody who’s, say, they’ll have a comedian or a sports personality, somebody who’s there because they’re… it’s almost because they’re famous rather than—

Doel:

For having an expertise [crosstalk].

Sparks:

[crosstalk] Yeah, that’s right. So they might have the political correspondent of the day from the Daily Mail. They might have somebody who’s a very good columnist or blogger. But it is… they almost never have a scientist. I’ve only seen one program that I can remember where they have a scientist, and I remember one which aptly epitomized this. They had a question on climate, it was the Denmark climate change meeting in Copenhagen a few years ago.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

Where, you know, the one before Paris, where… and they had a question about climate change. I can’t remember what it was. The, you know, the quality of the debate was absolutely woeful, because, you know, they knew this question was coming up. They didn’t have a scientist on the panel. They had a journalist from the Daily Mail who is virulently a climate change denier, talking just a lot of complete nonsense.

Doel:

And the Daily Mail’s published a lot of—

Sparks:

Talking about polar bears that, you know, and so forth. And then the two or three politicians were completely clueless. And the only one who talked any sense was a sort of slightly left-wing comedian [Marcus Brigstock], who actually wasn’t a scientist, but he sort of knew more about what [laughs] he was talking about. And he was a comedian. So they had no scientist. And that—it’s a little snapshot, but it absolutely epitomizes the UK’s way that science is—

Doel:

Is handled [crosstalk].

Sparks:

Is handled. Yeah. [crosstalk] And the media, you know, when you get into the media and the establishment. So it’s pretty frustrating, I think, because you don’t get the scientist voice in the debate who might know about any topic where science has a relevance. And then you’re kind of putting scientists on the… you know, it’s more important to have a pop star or a [laughs] a comedian than it is a scientist.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

And that’s… I don’t know whether that’s true in the US, or something analogous. [laughs] But I rather suspect it is.

Doel:

[laughs] Curious. Are you doing outreach here at the university that addresses some of these [crosstalk]?

Sparks:

Yes. Outreach is a much, much bigger task, and it actually… I mean, it might be something to bring the conversation up, really up-to-date. One of the major projects I’ve been involved in, is that I about, nearly three years ago now, I got some money from the World Bank. I applied for the World Bank to get a challenge fund to create film—public information films for volcanic hazards, to explain volcanic hazards to communities around the world. And we particularly had in mind volcanoes which hadn’t erupted in living memory or perhaps hadn’t even erupted historically.

Doel:

Yeah.

Sparks:

Because we know that statistically, there’s going to be one volcano like that erupting somewhere on the Earth every two years. So… and those are usually the biggest volcanic crises, because the populations have absolutely no idea. They often don’t know they’re really living on an active volcano. And when it… even if they did, they don’t know what happens. So they’re very ill-prepared, as are the governments, because they’ve never had that volcano in their thinking. So I got this money from the World Bank, and I also put some of the Vetlesen prize money into the project. And I’ve had a project which is essentially about working with colleagues around the world. So we’ve got a partnership of several countries and organizations. And we’ve created now a portfolio of—we’re using this money—a portfolio of short YouTube and Vimeo films which are essentially about the different sorts of volcanic hazard and what people, ordinary people, if you like, would do if they were faced with these hazards. So we worked with film companies in the UK to produce the films. We worked with New Zealand, USGS, Seismic Research Unit in Trinidad, Vanuatu, Democratic Republic of Congo, IPG Paris, IMGV in Italy. So we created a partnership, and we produce films at the moment in five different languages. And we’ve got fourteen films that we’ve made. And then if you multiply that by the five languages, it’s… we've now got a… and you can basically download these films for free on the internet. And we finished the project out two or three months ago now, so we haven’t got any more funding. But so far, they’ve been extraordinarily successful in the sense – we got 2.5 million views of the Spanish version on pyroclastic flows, because of the Guatemala Fuego crisis. So this is a way of getting a sort of authoritative—

Doel:

Information out and available.

Sparks:

—information out and available. Each film lasts two-and-a-half, three minutes. And we’ve made slightly longer films included in them, so we have a film which tells you what the hazard is, a film which tells you what it does, and a third film, which is people, ordinary people, around volcanoes explaining what they experienced when they… so we’ve got people in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Monserrat, Indonesia, explaining what it was like, what happened, when they faced the hazard on their volcano. So they’re explaining… so these are… sort of experiences. So we’ve created all these films, and I get a big effort and sort of outreach. I can send you the link, if you’re interested.

[https://www.iavceivolcano.org/new-public-information-films-on-volcanic-…]

Doel:

I want to make sure it’s part of the transcript when it’s put together.

Sparks:

Yeah. And these… so these films are… and I sort of got into that through Monserrat, because I worked with a film producer in Monserrat. We produced educational films, more aimed at geology education than—

Doel:

And that was a theme covered in depth in the first—

Sparks:

That’s right. Yeah, yeah.

Doel:

—big interview that you did.

Sparks:

So that’s something that’s very recent, that we’ve been up to.

Doel:

Are you thinking of another effort of that sort?

Sparks:

I’d like to get more funds to support more films, do more languages. We’re trying to make—at the moment, we’re trying to explore different options. It’s, hopefully, it’s a bit of an organic thing that because we’ve… now we’ve got… it’s an international partnership, and so some of our partners are starting to do films for this project out in their own resources. So it’s still going on, probably at a lower level.

Doel:

It’s stimulated other efforts.

Sparks:

Yeah, they’ve stimulated other activity. Yeah.

Doel:

And in terms of, shall we call it contemporary history, it’s just been this year that you received the Royal Medal for physical sciences from the Royal Society.

Sparks:

Yes. Yes.

Doel:

And I think it’s this year that you became “Sir.”

Sparks:

That’s right, yes. [laughs] Yes, that’s right, and saw the Queen. Yes, I did.

Doel:

I’m curious what these events have meant for you?

Sparks:

Well, it’s… again, it’s so interesting that the… to people in the public, getting something like the Royal Medal or the Vetlesen Prize means almost nothing, so it’s very… these are very prestigious in the science community, of course. But for the public, the only thing that they know about in prizes is the Nobel Prize. That’s really all they know about. So even the Vetlesen has to kind of badge itself as the Nobel Prize of Earth science, because that’s the only science prize anybody actually knows about out there.

Doel:

It’s because of the limitations in the Nobel Prize structure.

Sparks:

That’s right. But of course, in the UK, and even I think abroad in America as well, getting a knighthood and being “Sir somebody” is—everybody knows about that. And so that means a lot to the general public, or you know, sort of friends who are non-scientists or relatives who are non-scientists. So that means much more. It’s a sort of, a-ha, that’s a sort of recognition. So it’s very different kind of psychology. And of course, the getting… again, going back to wonderful ceremonies, the ceremony for getting a knighthood is sort of very… I was lucky enough to have the Queen, who doesn’t give very many, because of her age. I guess she’s delegated a lot of the honors to other members—younger members of the royal family. So she doesn’t do very many, but I was lucky enough to get the Queen. And so that was in Windsor Castle, so that was superb. And I haven’t actually got the Royal Medal yet, so I’m going to a ceremony in London in the end of October to get that.

Doel:

How do you anticipate these awards may change your career from here on out?

Sparks:

I don’t think it’ll make much difference at all, actually. [laughs] Because I’m… I mean, I’m going to be carrying on doing research and being active for the foreseeable future, but of course, I am winding down responsibilities. I’ve reduced… I don’t have any Ph.D. students anymore. I’ve got two postdocs left, and they’ll… I’ll finish all research, formal research grant funding at the end of next year. I’ve sort of got three projects that I’m funded for, but my aim is not to do anything after the end of next year.

Doel:

And that’ll be when you’re seventy?

Sparks:

That’s when I’m seventy, yes. But I mean, I’ll expect to fully be involved in doing research and things, but I won’t have any sort of research group anymore after that, after that point. And so, I mean, I think they’re… I suppose there is a difference that I have been invited to do a couple of things which I’ve turned down, and I think that’s almost certainly the effect of being knighted that led to those offers. So there may be things which… these are ones which I decided I didn’t want to do, but—

Doel:

There may be some that you will choose to do.

Sparks:

—there may be some that I will choose to do, so it could make some – they could open up something that I hadn’t thought of.

Doel:

When you think back over the course of your life, were there any religious or other strong convictions that you feel have been a powerful continuing influence?

Sparks:

I think the… in a strange way. I’m not religious. I would probably regard myself as an agnostic, and so religion doesn’t really enter into my day to day life, but it probably had a very large influence, and that sort of goes back to my sort of upbringing.

Doel:

Right. Your family of origin?

Sparks:

Yes. I mean, if you look back, my great… my grandfather and… four generations before them were all clerics in the Church of England. So if you go over to Wales, there’s a little parish church where my great-great-grandfather George Davis Sparks, with some Welsh connections, had eleven children: nine boys and two girls. All the boys became clerics, and the daughters, I think, married clerics. So [laughs] there’s a very… and then, of course, my grandfather—who I never knew, because he died in 1941—was a vicar. And my father was a very strong churchman. He was an organist. He went… very regular churchgoer. And of course, in my younger days, I went to church. So and of course I had enormous admiration for my father as a person. And so I suppose I’ve learnt a lot of sort of better traits from him, and I think that that, in a way, it’s sort of religious, because he was clearly very religious—his way of life was very influenced by sort of Christian traditions in the church and church music, strongly into church music. So I’m sure that a lot of that sort of, that ethos or sort of moral compass has come from that upbringing with my father. So I suspect that that’s informed a lot of the way I’ve sort of behaved and done things, even though I’m not personally religious.

Doel:

Are there any other issues, topics, that you’re thinking about that we haven’t had a chance to discuss, that weren’t already covered in-depth in that first interview?

Sparks:

I don’t think so. I mean, you never really… you haven’t… there’ll always be things that come up. I mean, at the moment, because I’m a grandfather as well, so I’m sort of very much enjoying having two young grandsons to play with, so that’s sort of entering my life, as it were, in quite a big way. So but I can’t really think of anything. I suppose more of my energy has gone to the film projects like the film project that I mentioned. I’m involved in a very interesting area of… you know, I’m getting involved in things which are—involve science but are different. I’m on the Board of Trustees at the Natural History Museum in London, which is a very interesting thing and we’re getting involved in other areas, like exhibitions and public outreach and issues related to that and getting involved a bit in sort of the art/science arena. We’ve just had a – that’s working with—

Doel:

You’ve passed over to me a large brochure: “Creative Destruction: Volcanoes Inspiring Art and Science.”

Sparks:

Yeah. So that’s a collaboration between me, Kathy [Caashman], and a very well-known printmaker called Emma Stibbons, who’s a Royal Academician and very fine artist. And we put on an exhibition which is currently in Rochester Art Gallery at the moment.

Doel:

Yes.

Sparks:

It was at Eton College but has now moved to Rochester. And so we’re trying to sort of fuse – and you’ve probably seen the exhibitions in the department.

Doel:

And you pointed to the ones that are [crosstalk] the main hallway.

Sparks:

[crosstalk] Yeah. So I’ve got sort of quite interested in this area of collaborations across the arts and sciences and trying to get sort of different perspectives on science. So those are areas I’ve kind of started to move into.

Doel:

And all these may be good topics to continue this interview. But I do want to thank you so much for this very long set of sessions that we’ve had today. And we will—and this should go on the digital recording, not release the recording or its transcript without your express approval in terms of the forms—

Sparks:

Right.

Doel:

—the release forms that you’re going to be receiving for this effort. And I want to thank you so much.

Sparks:

Okay. Thanks very much, Ron.