Talk me through how that came about.

Well, like a lot of discoveries, we bumped into them.

When I was doing my thesis, I had half my committee believed in plate tectonics and the other half did not.

They said, well, you know, I can understand that when two plates come together and crash into one another, like you have off of India crashing into China.

But how do you make a mountain when you pull plates apart? And one of my colleagues, my co-scientist on the expedition was a geophysicist.

He said, it's a cooling curve.

When the lava first comes out and forms the new lithosphere, the new crust, it's swollen with heat energy.

Tell me about that.

Talk me through how that came about.

Well, like a lot of discoveries, we bumped into them.

When I was doing my thesis, I had half my committee believed in plate tectonics and the other half did not.

They said, well, I can understand when two plates come together and crash into one another like you have off of India crashing into China.

But how do you make a mountain when you pull plates apart? And my co-scientist on the expedition was a geophysicist.

He said, it's a cooling curve.

When the lava first comes out and forms the new lithosphere, the new crust, it's swollen with heat energy.

Tell me about that.

How does it manifest for you? What are your sort of major strengths and weaknesses?

Well, in the first place, I didn't know I was dyslexic until I was in my 60s when my daughter was diagnosed with it.

So it was a discovery to me.

But clearly, I am dyslexic.

I had difficulties reading.

But I found my strength is in the right side of my brain.

You know, dyslexic brains are physically different than non-dyslexic brains.

Each of those

[laughs]

So I put a comment.

I'd never met...

I still had never met this guy, but I put a comment on there, "My dad was named Ed Ballard, and he helped plan the Appalachian Trail in the beginning." It, that was it.

Nothing.

And months later, Brian King-

Yeah

...

Thank you

They're separating, and like a, a living organism, if you tear open, it bleeds its molten blood, rises up to heal that wound from the asthenosphere, hardens, forms new tissue, and, and moves laterally.

But no one had actually gone down into the actual site of boundary of creation, as we called it, into the Rift Valley, till a group of seven of us crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973, 1974, and were the first human beings to enter the great Rift Valley.

We went down into the Rift Valley.

This is, uh, all accurate except for one thing, it's pitch black.

It's absolutely pitch black because photons cannot reach the average depth of the ocean, which is twelve thousand feet.

In the Rift Valley, it's nine thousand feet.

Get started at vanta.com.

To get a picture of what was happening below the surface, Bob and his crew dragged a camera underneath their boat while also looking for any changes in temperature.

And there's a temperature spike.

And so what do we see? Initially, we see barren rock.

Well, no surprise.

And we come to the moment we saw the temperature spike, and it's all clams.

It was just, what the heck is this? Because the deep sea is in total darkness, and we were taught there was very little life in the deep sea.

And then we literally called a submarine that night, "Dive on this location," and they went down and came into this oasis of life.

... giving the scientists a clue.

So you get what you were a double major in chemistry and geology, right at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Double major, double minor.

Yeah, I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I just knew I wanted to commit my life to the ocean.

But oceanography is more of an adjective.

It's like people that study outer space being spaceologists and people on land, landologists.

Oceanography is a general field.

Yeah.