IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Stephen Sparks Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1379/89

IMPORTANT

© The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document.

Oral History

The British Library 96 Euston Road

London NW1 2DB

United Kingdom

+44 (0)20 7412 7404 oralhistory@bl.uk

Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral

History curators.

3

British Library Sound Archive

National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet

Title Page

Ref no: C1379/89

Collection title:

An Oral History of

British Science

Interviewee’s surname:

Sparks Title: Professor

Interviewee’s forename:

Stephen Sex: M

Occupation:

Volcanologist Date and place of birth:

15th

May 1949,

Harpenden,

Hertfordshire , UK

Mother’s occupation:

Housewife Father’s occupation:

Civil servant (valuer)

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 18/10/12 (track 1-2), 19/10/12 (track

3-7)

Location of interview:

Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol

Name of interviewer:

Dr Paul Merchant

Type of recorder:

Marantz PMD661

Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz

Total no. of tracks:

7 Stereo

Total Duration:

9:12:47

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance:

Interviewer’s comments:

Stephen Sparks Page 4

C1379/89

Track 1

4

Track 1

Could I start by asking you then when and where you were born?

I was born in Harpenden on 15th

May 1949, in Hertfordshire.

And anything you can tell me about the life of your father.

Yes, I can. My father was a civil servant most of his life. He worked for the Inland

Revenue, for their valuation office. Of course, his life was interrupted by the Second

World War, of course, and he – well, he served as – in the army and – but he spent

most of his life, as I say, in the valuation office and ended up as district valuer in the

sort of Peak District of Derbyshire.

And what did you come to know about his childhood, if anything?

A little bit. I mean, I know a fair amount. He was born in South Africa, Piet Retiet,

and when he was – I think he left – he has no memory – he had no memory of South

Africa. He’d left when he was two and came back here in his – he – the family comes

from a long line of clergymen so his father was a clergyman and therefore moved

round the country. I know they lived in Portsmouth for quite a while and then they

moved up to Yorkshire, near Bradford, and I think they then moved into sort of the

north of London, to a place called Northaw, round there. So he had a sister [Gabriel],

who he was very close to, a younger sister, quite a lot younger than him, who died of

leukaemia when she was in her thirties. So, you know, I – so, you know, as far as I

recollect – he died sort of twelve or thirteen years ago now [13 November 1995] and

he was – he was – my impression is he must have had a sort of reasonably happy

childhood and he was a sort of – an amateur but a fairly good musician, so – and that

– so he played the church organ and he used to play in jazz bands and things [He has

his own jazz band called Ken Sparks and the Livewires]. So he was – yes, so I – as

far as I remember of what he told me, it was a sort of fairly happy childhood. [He was

also close to his other sister Joan throughout his life.]

Stephen Sparks Page 5

C1379/89

Track 1

5

[2:26]

And the life of your mother?

I don’t know so much about my mother, she died when I was twelve and she did have

some sort of [mental] health problems. And she was a twin. She came from a place

called Northaw, again in Hertfordshire, north of London, and she was, as I say, a twin

from a really large – quite a large family [2 sisters and a brother]. And they – I guess

they married sometime in the early ‘30s. My father was born 1912 actually, yeah, so

that would have been in the early ‘30s [actually 30th

April 1937: later than I

remembered]. Yeah, so I don’t – and I don’t recollect so much about her because, as I

say, she died when I was twelve and she’d been in and out of hospital, so she was – I

didn’t see her particularly when I was – perhaps [during] her last few years, I didn’t

see quite so much of her. So I was sort of brought up in a sort of bachelor household

in a way. I have a brother, an older brother [Marshall].

[3:29]

What time then did you spend with either set of grandparents, can you remember?

Very little. The only grandparent I spent – in fact I even remember much – I’m not

sure about the – I think they may have all died very early when there was – I very

vaguely remember my maternal grandmother but that must have been – I must have

been an infant, been very small, when she died. And then my father’s mother – we,

you know, ‘cause obviously he had to look after her when she got – and care for her

when she was old, was – I knew her till I was in my sort of teens, I would say about

sort of fifteen or sixteen, I think, when she passed away [my memory is inaccurate

here: she died in June 1973].

Do you remember anything in particular done with her or conversations with her or

…?

Stephen Sparks Page 6

C1379/89

Track 1

6

Not a great deal. She was – she was a slightly – I think sort of difficult woman, as I

remember her, but of course that’s the sort of memory of a teenager rather than what

she was really like. But she was – she was in homes in Cheshire for a while and –

before she died. So I don’t remember an awful lot about her except that she was – she

was – I think she was quite a – the impression I got from sort of speaking to the

family was that she was quite a sort of controlling person and sort of liked to control

what my, you know, father did and didn’t do, even when he was in his sort of fifties

and sixties [laughs]. So I don’t really remember that much about her. She must have

died when perhaps I was sixteen or seventeen, something like that.

[5:23]

Thank you. Could you tell me – I realise that the time spent with your mother was

limited by the fact that she was, as you say, receiving care and that sort of thing.

Yeah.

But what memories do you have of time spent with your mother up to the age of

twelve, things done with her, places gone with her, to give us a –

Very little actually, very little, you know, and I don’t know why that would be. But,

as I say, she was – she did have sort of mental health problems. I know she was in

hospital a lot and she was, you know, certainly in the last few years of her life, she

was very ill. And so actually in practice I was brought up even from a very early age

by my father and my – with my brother. We lived in Chester. So I don’t, you know,

I’ve got pictures of her and of course I remember what she looked like, but I really

don’t remember hugely that much interaction with her actually.

Was she well enough to sort of take you to school and play with you?

I think when I was very young, yes, I do remember that, but it’s only very vague.

[6:28]

Stephen Sparks Page 7

C1379/89

Track 1

7

Mm. Could you then talk about time spent with your father then as a young child.

Well yes, that’s much easier because he would – I mean, we – as I say, I was born in

Harpenden and when I was about five we moved up to Chester because of his job.

And we lived in a sort of – pretty well a bachelor – really myself and my brother lived

in a sort of bachelor household to many respects, even when my mother was alive.

Yeah, so I mean, he was a very nice man and he, you know, I think he was obviously

– of course I didn’t appreciate it at the time but sort of looking back, he was obviously

having a very ill wife to deal with as well as two sons to bring up, so – and a job to

do, so he was obviously under – must have been under an awful lot of sort of stress.

But he did an awful lot for us. He took myself and my – I was very keen on sport, so

he used to take me to – regularly to see football matches. We used to go and see

Liverpool, Everton, Manchester United principally, and that – so we used to go to

there. [Test matches too.] Of course he had a great keen interest in music and he took

me to concerts and, you know, musical things of all kinds. So I mean, it ranged from

going to sort of symphony concerts to going to see Duke – one of the very – a rare

live performance of Duke Ellington and his band in Liverpool. We went over to see –

I remember going to see that and seeing the Duke in person and things, which was –

which was wonderful. So he took, you know, I think there sort of – the love I have

now of music in particular is – probably derives largely from his influence. He played

the church in the organ – sorry, the organ, and he was also quite strongly associated

with Chester Cathedral. In fact I think he had thoughts that I might become a

musician or get musical, ‘cause he – when we were in Chester he – I went to the

Chester Cathedral Choir School. [Note: My first school was Abbygate Primary,

Chester; I went to the Cathedral school at age 8.] That was one of the sort of – it

wasn’t the first school but it was the early one, and so he sent me there, but I didn’t

really turn out to be very talented in the musical direction at all and so I never got into

the choir or anything there. But of course we went to the cathedral for – quite a bit

and I remember sort of church services, and again, liking – sort of liking sort of the –

of course the music there was pretty high quality, so – the sort of evensong and the

hymns and the – and the psalms and then – and so forth. So we had – he had quite an

Stephen Sparks Page 8

C1379/89

Track 1

8

association with Bristol – sorry, Chester Cathedral and we’d go there quite a lot. [He

took me to symphony and choral concerts.]

[9:45]

Was that bound up with any religious faith, the cathedral going?

For him, yes, yes, for him, yes, that’s right. He was very much an Anglican to the end

of his life really and continued to play, you know, the organ in local churches in

Chester. So he was – he was really quite – yes, quite religious.

What do you remember of him at home?

I just remember that he – I mean, I guess I remember all sorts of things about him,

that he was obviously, you know, very keen to help us [my brother and I]. I mean, he

helped where he could in sort of things like homework. He, as I say, encouraged sport

– myself and my brother to do sport. We both [my father and I] had a great love of –

he had a great love of cricket and so I sort of gained that. Actually I was quite

reasonably – not great but reasonably good at cricket and so he sort of encouraged

that. He was – he also taught [me to cook] – because it was a bachelor household, of

course he did all the cooking, so we – he taught me how to cook. In particular he’d

served in the army in India so he had a great passion for curry and India from his time

in the Second World War and so he – that was one of his sort of more favourite meals

was cooking curry. You know, at a time before there were millions of Indian

restaurants everywhere, he was a sort of enthusiast and a very, you know, reasonably

good cook. So I sort of learnt that from him as well. So yes, and he was, as I say,

very – always very encouraging at school. Obviously he must have – again, I

probably didn’t appreciate it at the time, but of course he – I took the Eleven Plus and

I failed the Eleven Plus and I must have been a fairly difficult child from a sort of – at

least from a sort of physical point of view because before I was eleven I kept – I kept

having sort of accidents. I seemed to be very accident prone. So I had a very bad

burn. I got caught – when I was about seven I got – I was caught on fire by a bonfire

and all – and I was in hospital for six months and I almost lost my leg.

Stephen Sparks Page 9

C1379/89

Track 1

9

Gosh. How did that happen?

We were – we had a garden and I was playing with a little girl next door [Name:

Emma Carson] who was the same age as me. We must have been about – I think I

was about seven at the time. And we’d made our own bonfire and my trousers I think

just caught on fire and then a neighbour leapt over and put it out, but my left leg was

very badly burnt and I had to have – I think about seven skin grafts all together for

about six months. I was in hospital [Alderhay hospital, Liverpool] for six months.

And then later I broke my – I can’t remember which limb, but I broke both my arms

and my leg but all at different times, before I was eleven. I think one was climbing

out of a tree, one was having some sort of a scrap at school and the other one was

playing football, so I was seen to be very accident prone and always [laughs] sort of in

plaster or in hospital. And that likely had an influence on my schooling because –

particularly the six months I was out of school and so forth, so obviously he looked

after me at that time. And then when I passed – sorry, failed the Eleven Plus, he then

sent me to a little sort of private school [Wellington School, since closed] in a place in

Bebington near Birkenhead, which was an interesting place. It was – and that’s where

I did all my secondary schooling up to the sixth form [I was in the lower Sixth at

Wellington until moving to Yorkshire]. And that was – and that school, I think, did –

it had its oddities but it had – there were certainly some influential teachers there and

that – I guess I was seen as a late developer and then I started to show some talent in

certain areas and that then sort of – but again he obviously had to sacrifice salary and

things to send me to a private school.

[14:28]

Did you get any sense of the reasons for the sort of interest that he’d shown in your

performance at school, what was behind sort of the encouragement or the support,

which seems to be quite significant really?

Yes, I think it’s the – I mean, he had a – he and – I mean, it’s probably worth just

going back because my mother had two other children before I did – before I came

Stephen Sparks Page 10

C1379/89

Track 1

10

along and they both died at a very early age as very young infants. So one had, what

is it, hydrocephalitis and died when he was one and I think the other died – I can’t

remember the reason for it. But the other one died again within a few months of birth.

So I think they had a very traumatic family period and perhaps that had an influence

on my mother’s later illness, but sort of very tragic. And then they thought that they

weren’t going to have any children themselves so they adopted my older brother

[Marshall] and – who’s eight years older than I am. And so they adopted him in 1941

and then I came along – I’m not sure whether it was a surprise or not, but I came

along eight years later in 1949. So I guess, you know, as I say, with the – I’m sure he

felt that he had to sort of devote a lot of his sort of energy to both of us.

[16:18]

Before we get to this school with its oddities and influential teachers, could you just

say as a younger child what you tended to play with inside?

Oh, erm – ooh, that’s difficult to – let’s think about that. I mean, I was very active. I

mean, I loved sport, so I liked soccer, I liked cricket, running. We lived in a house

with a small orchard. You know, I liked doing things outside in general. And, you

know, I used to – my peers would tend to be people who liked doing things outside.

Erm, I suppose I read a fair bit but not, you know, I wouldn’t say anything more than

the average child of that, you know, that period, you know, the sort of Just William

books and all those things that were around. And I’m not – I don’t think I – that era,

as you say, pre eleven or twelve, pre being a teenager, a younger child, I wouldn’t

have – I don’t think I would have necessarily taken a huge interest in science or

anything like that. I read – as I say, I read a lot. But I think my sort of, you know, the

interest in sport and things was probably predominant. I mean, I quite – I quite liked

to take things apart, so I do remember taking a typewriter completely apart and then

not being able to put it back together again. So I did like sort of fiddling around with

things inside but on the whole I just liked to be, you know, as I say, sort of outdoor

and active really.

Did you have any toys?

Stephen Sparks Page 11

C1379/89

Track 1

11

Er … yes. I think – I’m sure I had a train. My older brother was – I mean, I’m not

even sure whether it was mine or his. We did have a sort of train – Hornby 00 train

set, but he was much keener on that sort of thing than I was. And, you know, we had

Meccano sets and jigsaws and all these sort of things that you – but, you know, I’m

sure I played with them in all sorts of ways but on the whole I didn’t – I wouldn’t say

I, you know, there was nothing that really grabbed me. I liked listening to music. I

mean, I liked – perhaps this was a little bit later. I had an old gramophone record, you

know, player and started playing sort of – when they came out, the sort of vinyls and

singles and things like that.

So you had a preference then for being outside. Other than sport, what were you

doing when you were playing outside, whether it’s in the orchard or elsewhere?

I suppose they would be imagination games of various sorts, you know, sort of the

cowboys and Indians scenario or things. In fact, I think that’s how I got burnt

[laughs], we were doing that. So I suppose they were sort of, you know, sort of games

of imagination, I suppose.

Were there particular outside places that you went to a lot that were significant?

Not really because we had a – we had a nice garden in – we had a really nice house

with – a semi detached but quite big and it had a – we had our own – it was called the

Orchard and we had at the back an orchard and that was a good place to play. And it

was not in Chester but on the – it was in a place called Upton. And there was a golf

course there and there were some woods and things, so it was really quite easy to get

out into the sort of, you know, into woodland and countryside and things like that, and

places to play and friends to meet and so forth.

[20:02]

Thank you. Could you then tell me about the oddities of this school, Bebington –

Stephen Sparks Page 12

C1379/89

Track 1

12

Oh yes, it was called Wellington School but it’s not the Wellington [laughs]. It was a

Wellington School. And it was – I mean, I – one has to say, they did me proud in

many ways, particularly individual teachers, but it was, I suppose, a – it was a – a

school that was – it doesn’t exist anymore. I think it was closed about fifteen years

ago. But it was a school developed in Bebington, which, as you probably know, is on

the fringes of Birkenhead. I suppose it really was servicing people like myself who

were having difficulties with, you know, couldn’t get into grammar schools because

of the Eleven [Plus] – there were quite a few people who hadn’t passed their Eleven

Plus or people who – and so it was – we had a bright green uniform, which sort of led

to a lot of sort of, you know, sort of – er, if you like, abuse from the local secondary

modern kids [laughs], who thought we were a sort of bit of a target. And we – it had

sort of pretentions for being a sort of public school. You know, rugger was the – it

preferred rugger to soccer, so we – which – I didn’t like rugby particularly and

preferred to do soccer but the school liked rugger. And they still had sort of corporal

punishment and things that teachers could do, which they couldn’t possibly do these

days. And it was a boys’ school, so it was single sex, and the – I used to take the train

from Chester to Bebington, which is about twenty-five minutes, with quite a few other

kids from the same school, and get off and go there. And it had this sort of – as I say,

this sort of slightly public school ethos. They had houses. They had a school song

and a Latin motto and, you know, you did – Latin was regarded as really important.

So I think they had – and the headmaster was this – who founded the school, was

called Mr Fogg. And so he was a very – yeah, I mean, he was – the school was his

life and it was – my recollection was that it was – I mean, you know – I’m sure this

isn’t, you know, this is just my perception looking back, but actually it was very

enjoyable. I mean, I made a lot of good friends there, some of whom I’m still – one

or two I’ve still got or keep in touch with. It was a bit of a sort of, you know, being in

the sort of fringes of Scouse land, it had some sort of real characters in the, you know,

as part of my schoolmates, who got up to all sorts of odd tricks.

Tell me about some of them and what they got up to.

Well, they would – I mean, I suppose the main thing was of course the – I’m sure this

is a tale that’s told in many schools. You know, if there was a teacher who showed

Stephen Sparks Page 13

C1379/89

Track 1

13

any sort of sign of weakness then they would take advantage of that person [laughs] in

a sort of fairly merciless, you know, in hindsight a very merciless way. And they – so

the good teachers of course knew how to keep the class under control and – but, you

know, we – I mean, one of the things we – just to give an example. We had a French

teacher who – well, we actually had a succession of French teachers who were all

hopeless disciplinarians. And we had one poor teacher who came in who had no real

idea how to teach a, you know, sort of – we must have been thirteen or fourteen and

he had really no idea how to keep us under control – the school under – the class

under control. And of course people would mispronounce it, you know, monsore, si-

vu-plate, you know, purposely they would sort of mispronounce all these things to

sort of hoots from the class. And even persuaded the teacher to take us – oh yeah, and

this teacher had – I think for very unfair reasons, the class decided to call him – they

thought he looked like Count Dracula so they called him the Count, sort of typical

Scouser humour, you know, we were going to have, you know, French from the

Count. And so he got this idea, which of course was a disastrous idea, of taking – he

said, you know, he would take some of the class, or the class, to some sort of event

that – and then we’d write about it in French. So they persuaded him to take them to

one of the old Hammer Horror Dracula films [laughs] down in Hamilton Square in

Birkenhead. So the class went down there of course and watched this Dracula film

and then wrote about it. So he had absolutely no discipline, so the headmaster had to

occasionally, you know, come into the class because it was sort of essentially

completely out of control. And, you know, like a lot of, you know, as with boys,

some of the kids would sort of make strange sounds during the lessons to, you know,

sort of distract things as far as possible. So it was, you know, it was a sort of school

where – yeah, some, you know, as I say, they would take – they would be fairly

merciless.

[26:10]

You said that at this school you started to show sort of promise in various areas.

What were those?

Stephen Sparks Page 14

C1379/89

Track 1

14

I think principally – the first thing that I think gave any hint that I had some – I used

to do – I started to do quite well in mathematics and we had an exceptionally good

teacher there, who did – unlike this other chap, had really very good discipline and

knew how to keep the class in control. And I started – we had the maths classes from

him and – Sidney Johns was his name, and he – and it became quite – quite quickly

after I – I went there when I was about – yes, I guess I was – yeah, I must have been

thirteen when I joined there, it was in the second year. So started to do, you know,

maths classes and things like that and basically I caught onto the maths very easily

and started to get things right and pretty soon I was sort of the top of the class in

maths. So he recognised that and his teaching was very – really excellent, and he got

me through to O level at the time. And of course the other kids, sort of going back to

this thing, of course, they were pretty keen to sort of plagiarise my [laughs] stuff if

they could. And I started to show quite a lot of promise in, you know, English and

history, I think largely due to the fact we had good teachers. So the – my recollection

is if we had a bad teacher, like French or Latin, I didn’t do very well and the other

kids didn’t do very well. If we had a good teacher who could keep discipline then we

started to do very, you know, generally people would do much better. And I then

started to find the niche. We had an okay chemistry teacher. We had a nice chemistry

lab. Again, things happened which – he wasn’t quite such a good – well, he wasn’t

perhaps observant because the, you know, I’m sure this would not be allowed these

days, but we had an enormous chemistry lab with old fashioned benches and reagents,

acids and bases and all – and indicators, lined along. So you were sitting there. So

you could grab a sort of bottle of hydrochloric acid or something like that just like

that, and then we would do experiments and things like that. But of course the – the

nature of the kids there would be that they’d, you know, when the teacher wasn’t

looking they’d sort of pour one [laughs] thing into another and then he wondered why

his experiments didn’t work very well [laughs]. But he was a good teacher, you

know. I think I got – I started to get interested in chemistry at that time. So, you

know, a little bit of the science started to come through.

What about the teaching of other sciences at the school?

Stephen Sparks Page 15

C1379/89

Track 1

15

There was no – there was – my recollection – I don’t think we did any physics at all

that I can remember. I certainly didn’t do physics O level or anything. And – what

else would we have done? We did maths, chemistry. We did biology, that was

alright. I mean, I think at the time I found it a bit boring ‘cause it seemed to be

learning things off by heart in rote. We had a very good geography teacher [called

Brian Bristow].

Could you tell me about the content of geography as you remember it?

Yeah. Well, I think that was pretty good because that was sort of getting into – we

had a good geography teacher, a man called Mr Bristow, and he was – I wouldn’t say

he was inspiring but he could keep discipline but also he knew how to systematically

go through things and some of the things were just intrinsically – you do in geography

are just intrinsically interesting, like, you know, glaciers. That’s, I guess, the first

time you actually get to know something about, you know, volcanoes and landscape,

morphology. Those things start to come into the class, you know, sort of economic

things, you know, sort of steel production in Belgium in 1962, or something like that,

becomes part of the things you learn about, which are not necessarily wildly

interesting, but – all of it, but, you know, geography is a – there’s parts of geography

which I remember really enjoying.

Do you actually remember specifically him about volcanoes and –

Yes, I do, that’s right. In fact I remember doing an essay that was about, you know,

the sort of structure of volcanoes and doing quite a good job of it. I mean, I wouldn’t

say at that time – ‘cause I know other colleagues in my field said they wanted to be

volcanologists since they were five. That wasn’t the case, I mean, it was just – I

wouldn’t say that, you know, I was any more interested in volcanoes or glaciers or

bits of history, for that matter, or finding it satisfying to do maths, you know,

proficiency in maths. So those are all things that – so I enjoyed things generally. So

yeah, so that’s sort of an influence of school.

[31:28]

Stephen Sparks Page 16

C1379/89

Track 1

16

But of course the other thing was that when I became a – the other thing my father did

for me, which again I’m sort of very indebted to him for, and my brother, is that he

sent both of us every summer, for me for about four years when I was a sort of, you

know, early mid teenager, and my brothers had the same, to a sort of place in Bangor

in Wales where they had something – have you ever come across the Crusaders?

Yes, a Christian …

It’s a Christian [organisation]– that’s right, it’s –

Youth group.

A youth group, that’s right. And the Crusaders – my brother was a member of the

Crusaders, again I guess under my father’s influence. I wasn’t but I got – they took –

they sent my brother to this sort of – it wasn’t really a camp because it was actually in

some sort of halls of residence place in Bangor. And I went there and you met kids

from all over the place. It was probably about ten days in the summer and the main

thing they did was essentially outdoor pursuits, sort of canoeing, mountain climbing,

coasts. So you got a little bit of – not real science but, you know, you would be going

along beaches. But the main thing, actually the highlight, was, you know, climbing

the Snowdonian Mountains. So the leaders of this group were, you know, good, you

know, knew what they were doing in the hills and the mountains and a little bit of

very basic rock climbing and things happened. And I went on that for about four

summers in a row and thoroughly enjoyed it and that really led me to, you know, I

suppose because I had already a natural propensity for being outdoors, that then led

me to a sort of real interest in sort of – in climbing and mountaineering and getting in

the outdoors. And later the – later, when I made friends at school both in Bebington

and later in Yorkshire, I, you know, did quite a lot of caving. I did – I was involved –

because Chester’s a Roman city, when I was probably around fifteen, this is still at

school, I got – I went – I was sort of taken to the Museum at Chester and I got

involved in a bit of a dig round there to do, you know, get Roman stuff out of the

ground. And I remember that was really interesting. And we started to go into –

Stephen Sparks Page 17

C1379/89

Track 1

17

again with my friends, into North Wales and we started going down some old disused

Roman mines and started doing a bit of potholing, got interested in that, and picking

up minerals and fossils and getting interested in those. I think that was sort of – that

process sort of led me to this interest in, you know, in geology actually. So I – and

again, doing things probably which would be completely – [laughs] would get sort of

health and safety people going mad these days.

[34:59]

Could you describe some of the most memorable moments over the sorts of things that

you’ve just described, from the sort of Crusaders outings to these subsequent outdoor

activities with friends? You may well – the person listening to the recording may well

not know what potholing involves or even very basic –

Yeah, and I think – yes, I can sort of do that quite – I mean, Snowdonia of course has

some – a wonderful mountain range of peaks. There’s thirteen of them over 3,000

feet. And one of the sort of – at this Crusaders camp, one of the things was to climb

at least three or four of them during the course of the trip. And we went up a

mountain called Tryfan, which is one of the more interesting peaks in Snowdonia.

It’s quite precipitous so you don’t need ropes or anything but it’s quite an adventurous

walk. I mean, it’s a little bit more of a walk in places that you have to sort of

scramble and climb up. And we – I remember those very vividly, climbing that

mountain for the first time, I must have been about fourteen, I would say, something

like that, and thinking what a sort of wonderful thing it was and then getting to the top

and seeing the spectacular views over the mountains. So that was – that was pivotal.

And then I remember going with my mates – we decided to go into a place called

Hawarden in North Wales, near Flint, where there is quite a lot of – it’s limestone.

There’s sort of – there’s caves but there’s also old mines, lead mines, there, which go

into caves. And we went – we just went and we got – we bought ourselves carbide

lamps and stuff and went into these mines. I’m sure it was terribly dangerous. I

mean, nowadays they’d be probably fenced off and, you know, keep out, but then you

could just go into them. And at the time there would be lots of, you know, on the

moors round the mines you’d still have lots of – which you wouldn’t have these days,

Stephen Sparks Page 18

C1379/89

Track 1

18

‘cause they’ve probably all been picked up, but at that time there would be big

nuggets of galena, lead ore, which you’d break open and there’d be this fantastic

silver colour and then there would be bits – because it was limestone you’d have bits

of fossil, crinoids and brachiopods and all these shelly things in the limestone so you

could see these fossils. And then you’d – and zinc, bits of zinc ore. And so, you

know, as a teenager I’d sort of get interested and look up books, you know, simple

mineral identification books or fossil identification books and say, what’s that, and

sort of look at it and be able to identify it. And same with, you know, even in, you

know, being in Chester, you could actually dig in your own garden and find old

things. And so I got that sense of being in the outdoors but also seeing lots of

interesting things around, which – and then the sort of adventure of going down an old

mineshaft with sort of carbide lamps and torches.

How small did it get as you were going –

Erm, not really. We – at that stage, I mean, when I – we were never trained. I mean,

we never went to an outdoor centre like you would these days and people taught you

how to do this properly. It was just a group of lads going into the countryside and

finding this hole and saying, well, let’s go and see what’s in there. So later on, when I

was in the sixth form in Yorkshire, I used to go – I got some friends and we did, you

know, some more, if you like, you know – what’s the word, more – not professional

but, you know, we did some potholing where we sort of knew more what we were

doing [laughs] than we did when I was a kid. But as I say, I remember that being

very, you know, very interesting, and I think that was actually what sparked my

interest in becoming a geologist.

What was the – for those who haven’t done it, what’s the appeal of going into holes

and –

I suppose curiosity and exploration really. I mean, what’s down there, what’s round

the corner. There’s these stalactites or flowstones and you’ve nice structures, maybe a

bit of water running down or a waterfall. You know, it’s the sort of capturing of this –

I suppose it’s a combination of, you know, the interest in the natural world and the

Stephen Sparks Page 19

C1379/89

Track 1

19

curiosity of finding out what’s round the next corner, I suppose. I suppose it’s sort of

a – a bit of, you know, sort of adventure, and quite physical because obviously if

you’re climbing mountains or going down caves you sometimes have to do quite a lot

of physical effort.

And these things that you picked up, whether they were fossils or bits of ore, did you

take them away?

Yes, I sort of started a bit of a collection at home. It wasn’t a terribly well organised

one but I just sort of kept bits and pieces of fossil and mineral at home and sort of

started to find out what they were.

Can you remember where and how you collected them together at home, whereabouts

they were in the house?

I think they were just in my bedroom actually, probably in drawers. As I say, it

wasn’t – it wouldn’t look like the Natural History Museum [laughs] collections at all.

It was sort of fairly random, fairly random. I didn’t – don’t think I organised them

terribly well.

[40:41]

What was the nature and extent of your own religious faith, given that you were going

to Chester Cathedral and also going to Crusaders?

Yes. I mean, of course I was exposed through my father’s faith and things like

Crusaders to a lot of religion. I think probably when – sometime in the sort of – in the

mid teens, I think it was still while at Wellington, we had religious studies and myself

and one or two other people in the class – I mean, we sort of started to talk about

religious things and basically decided we didn’t believe a word of it [laughs]. So I

think my, you know, sort of – if you like, I’ve been an agnostic all my life and I think

that view came really quite early, you know, as I say, when we were getting this stuff

Stephen Sparks Page 20

C1379/89

Track 1

20

at school and we basically didn’t believe much of what it – [laughs] what we were

being told.

Is there anything in particular about what you were told that you didn’t believe? Or

was it about, I don’t know, what faith implied about what people should do in terms of

their own conduct or was it the stories of religion?

I think it’s the stories and that they didn’t really ring true with what one sort of

intuitively understood about the world. And – I mean, I couldn’t say it was a sort of

passionate interest. I mean, I guess we were too busy doing all sorts of other things to

worry. But, you know, when we were exposed to religion it didn’t really – I mean, it

never – I don’t think it ever actually meant very much to me.

[42:28]

Now that you’re an older child, at this age, what sense did you have of your father’s

sort of political outlook or –

He was a, I would say, sort of a liberal – he probably voted Conservative most of his

life, which is – he possibly voted Liberal one year, which – with his second wife. He

remarried when I was sort of about – I guess I was about seventeen [eighteen] when

he remarried. But he was I think politically probably quite Conservative but not –

certainly not rightwing. He was – so I think he was, you know, he was – as I say, I

would describe him – his behaviour and views and attitudes were much more sort of

Christian than they were informed by any sort of deep political – I don’t – I’m not

sure he actually had deep political views or wasn’t as – I don’t think that meant as

much to him as, you know, his religion and Christianity.

What affect did the latter have on his behaviour, his religious faith?

I think that he was always a very considerate person. People – on his tombstone

actually my brother and I had – and the other members of my family thought – I’m

trying to remember the exact words, but sort of ‘here lies a gentleman’. And that’s

Stephen Sparks Page 21

C1379/89

Track 1

21

what everybody said about him, that he was very gentlemanly, very considerate to

other people. You know, I think he sort of lived his religion in many ways and a sort

of kind person, very helpful and, you know, supporting other people rather than

himself. I think that’s, you know, I would describe him as a sort of very unselfish

person in many respects.

[44:21]

Thank you. What happened then at the end of the Wellington School in terms of

decisions about what to do next?

Yes. Well, I think – what happened then was – I did my O levels there and then I did

the first half of my sixth form there. And I did geography, chemistry and maths as A

levels. I decided to do geology O level on my own and so that’s what I did. I didn’t

have any schooling, I just read up geology and looked at the syllabus and I told the

school I wanted to do the exam at the end of the sixth form. And I took a geology O

level and passed that. So of course by that time geology was – had really become

quite a big interest and I’d sort of – and then I think I had – a very pivotal moment for

me was that I – still really grateful to the man happened, was – as I say, in the lower

sixth I thought that geology might be an interesting subject, so it was suggested I went

to Liverpool University where there was a very eminent professor called Wally

Pitcher. And Wally Pitcher is one of the – of course I didn’t know that at the time but

I now know is the one of the great British geologists. And he was the professor at

Liverpool and I went over to see him, just to, you know, just to have a conversation.

And we had maybe a half an hour talk with him, just sort of careers advice and, you

know, if I wanted to do geology what would he advise. And so he said, ‘Well, go to

Imperial College. That’s the best …’ He was an Imperial College alumni and he said,

‘Apply to Imperial College. That’s the place to do geology,’ which – at the time it

was undoubtedly one of the two or three best places in Britain. And so he – I got that

advice and that was fine. And then I thought, well, that’s what I’m going to do, I’ll go

and do geology at university. Again not – volcanoes weren’t really, you know, it

wasn’t that I sort of got passionate about volcanoes that time, I just liked the natural

Stephen Sparks Page 22

C1379/89

Track 1

22

world and could see it was an interesting career with possibilities of travel and being

outdoors.

[46:50]

And I went then to – my father then moved from Chester and he got a job in Bradford

and so I then – and then by coincidence – his father lived – was the vicar of Baildon

[Yorkshire], which is a little village between Keighley and Ilkley and Bradford, and

we went to live in Baildon. And I then went to Bingley Grammar School. I did go to

a grammar school then, I went to do the second half of my sixth form and finished my

A levels there. So I went to Bingley Grammar School, which is Fred Hoyle’s old

school, and John Osborne’s old school I think as well. And that was a very good

school. I really enjoyed – it was only a year but I really enjoyed that. And that’s

where I made a lot of, you know, another lot of very good friends, some of whom I

still, you know, keep in touch with. And that – and then of course that was in the

Yorkshire Dales. As I say, when I went to the sixth form I immediately sort of linked

up with people who liked the same things as I did, and particularly caving, so we

started to do a lot of caving in the Yorkshire Dales at weekends and things like that.

And that was really great fun. And I – that’s when I sort of, as I say, applied to go to

Imperial.

[48:29]

What was your sense at this time of what geology consisted of? And a linked

question, what was the appeal for you of it as a subject?

Yes. Well, I think it’s – I think it was – I got the sense that it was about the history of

the earth, which I found very interesting, and how the earth worked. I wouldn’t say it

was uppermost in my mind was that you could get oil out of the ground or minerals

and things like that. So I did do it – I think I got interested in it really because of the

curiosity, the fact that I’d learned to sort of see minerals and fossils and thought these

were interesting. And so sort of some of the science questions, you know, about

geological processes started to occur to me in a very sort of primitive way and so I

Stephen Sparks Page 23

C1379/89

Track 1

23

thought it would be an interesting degree. And of course I knew by that time that if

you did a degree in geology you got lots of fieldwork and you went to interesting

places on field trips and that would be fun. So that all looked quite attractive, you

know, as a subject to do. And then, as I say, Wally Pitcher had said Imperial was one

of the best places. By that time I think my prediction – I don’t think they predicted A

levels at that time. I mean, you just did them and you got a result. But the – and

when you went to – actually when you went to Imperial they interviewed you and

then they offered you three Es at that time, because they did it essentially on the

interview. They weren’t – they decided whether they liked the cut of your jib or not

and then offered you three Es, so – which of course is easy to – was a bit, you know,

wouldn’t really have been a difficulty of achieving that. So I got the maths, chemistry

and the geography A levels and then went there.

What was the – what were your impression of – is it Walter Pitcher?

Wally, yes.

Wally Pitcher. I know you only had a conversation with him for half an hour but how

did he strike you as an individual?

He was a very kind man. I mean, I knew him of course much later from –

professionally. So I, you know, he died a number of years ago now but, you know,

through my career I came across him. And of course – I’d be interested to look at the

dates actually ‘cause as a teenager, when I met him I think I thought of him as a sort o

fairly, you know, elderly guy. He was probably about forty or something like that

[laughs], I suspect, maybe fifty. But I just remember him being very helpful. And of

course he’s another person who’s very well known for being very sort of helpful to

students and other – younger scientists and things like that. He got that reputation in

his career for doing that. And so my recollection was just of a, you know, sort of

relatively – in my – from my perspective of being a teenager, a relatively sort of

mature guy who, you know, may be about my father’s age or something like that.

Stephen Sparks Page 24

C1379/89

Track 1

24

What was your father’s view of this interest in geology and now this decision to read

geology?

Oh, he supported – I mean, he liked the idea of, you know, he thought I could do

whatever I wanted really. He didn’t put any sort of barriers or – in my way or, you

know, sort of – not really directed me at all. I mean, as I say, in the sense of, you

know, he didn’t have a view of what I should do. He – when I got this interest and

wanted to go to university – he’d not been to university, so – I think of course he was

in a generation which – people going – many people going to university didn’t exist.

So he was fine about that.

And what do you remember of the interview at Imperial?

Not very much, I’m afraid. I just remember going there [laughs] and that’s about it.

I’m afraid I’ve got very little memory of that.

[52:40]

And when did you go up to Imperial? What year was it when you –

Well, it was immediately the – it’s 1968 that I went, I went to Imperial, started it.

Could you describe – sort of take us on a tour of Imperial Department of Geology at

this time in 1969 when you arrived?

It was absolutely fantastic I think for – I mean, it was very, very exciting. I mean, you

were going to London in the, you know, sort of it was the same year as, you know, the

anti Vietnam demonstration, students in London were sort of rioting, you know, sort

of – there were rock concerts all over the place with, you know, what now are sort of

iconic names, and it was just very exciting to go there to London as a city. The

department itself was, you know, it’s in a gigantic – I don’t know if you know it. It’s

quite close to the Albert Hall, but it’s – near the Royal School of Music, but the Royal

School of Mines is this absolutely enormous, you know, mid Victorian building with

Stephen Sparks Page 25

C1379/89

Track 1

25

huge lions at the gate and all very impressive. And, you know, when I got there it was

great. And they had some fantastic professors at the time and there were two or three

who were sort of extremely influential and superb teachers. So it was all very – at the

time it seemed all very exciting. And then of course you, you know, meet lots of

students from all, you know, you make new friends and so forth, and I thought, you

know, it was tremendous actually. It was very impressive. I mean obviously nothing

quite like that – experienced nothing quite like that before.

So sort of standing at the doorway to the Department of Geology at this time, do you

remember it well enough to sort of take us on a tour of what the department consisted

of?

Yes, very similar now actually, I mean, if you go in there, ‘cause it’s one of these

ancient buildings, like this one, that you really can’t do very much. I mean, this

building will look the same in – there’ll be detail differences inside. But it’s a giant

building with four big floors, huge Victorian stone stairs going up from floor to floor

and, you know, offices and labs with students and sort of coffee areas and cabinets

full of rocks and fossils and things, so really not dissimilar to the geology department

today, obviously of the time. But, you know, it was very impressive. And a nice big

lecture there for the sort of first year lectures.

[55:24]

And what was the content of the first year?

Well, we did – we did mostly geology, very traditional – now in retrospect very

traditional, but really good, you know, really good well taught geology, I would say

eighty percent geology. We did a couple of subsid courses [subsidiary subjects] and I

took chemistry and maths as subsids, ‘cause I’d enjoyed those. And that was fine. So

we – and we had, you know, sort of a classic menu of lectures and labs and things like

that.

Stephen Sparks Page 26

C1379/89

Track 1

26

Could you tell me about sort of the individual lecturers, how they presented, what they

–

Oh yes, yeah. Yes, I mean, the people who were outstanding – there were three –

there were two big professors who were, as I say, very famous and even at that time

had already made their fortune and name, reputation. And then there was a lecturer,

who I’ll come back to because he was sort of perhaps the key person. But there was a

chap called John Ramsay, who was an FRS, still alive, lives in France, and he was a

structural geologist. And he was world famous for his – at the time he was probably

the world’s greatest structural geologist. And so to translate that into sort of, you

know, for somebody who isn’t a geologist, basically he was interested in how you

formed the Alps or the Himalayas and how you collide continents together and you

build mountains up and what are the mechanisms of doing that. And he was a

brilliant lecturer. He was very pivotal for me, for my career, because he was the first

person who showed me very directly how you could use mathematics and understand

the way the world works. And so a lot of his work was really cutting edge stuff. And

he would use a lot of mathematics. And in the very first lecture he ever gave us at

Imperial, he was there to show us wonderful pictures of the Greenland Mountains and

the Alps and saying about the basic geology, but then he would show – the lecture

was really to show us how you could use mathematics to understand this.

And how could you, for people outside?

Well, you know, for example, if I’m squashing together two continents and I’ve got,

say, a fossil in the mountain somewhere, and that fossil’s got a certain shape, let’s say

it’s – we’ll say for argument it’s like an echinoid, it’s a sphere, okay, so it’s a sphere.

Now if it’s part of a mountain being crushed together, that sphere gets deformed into a

flat plate, just like you’d take some putty, a ball of putty, and if you squashed it, it

would deform and it would change its shape. Now that’s called strain and if – to

describe that strain you need some mathematics and you need to understand the –

describe the geometry of that object in some way and you then usually use – you can

use matrices. I mean, matrices is a quick way of sort of understanding the strain or,

for example, the stresses which cause that strain, sort of stress tensors and so forth.

Stephen Sparks Page 27

C1379/89

Track 1

27

And so you can use sort of calculus and matrices to understand that deformation and

you want to know how much that squashing of that little fossil is telling you also

about the – how much the mountains on a large scale have deformed together. So you

can link this sort of small scale feature with a very large scale phenomena, you know,

how you form a mountain. Now it’s a bit more tricky than that because most fossils

or objects that you can see are not nice spheres but they might be, you know, like a

cockroach or something like that, a fossilised cockroach, and so when they’re

deformed the length of the cockroach might get lengthened and – or it might get

twisted, and so you have to know about the angles. If you know what the original

fossil looked like and you now see how it’s distorted, you can then work out how

much that fossil’s been squashed. And so that was the sort of thing he was talking

about. So it was really showing – and then if you go to faults, you know, in big

mountain belts, you get these gigantic faults where one bit of Africa pushes over on a

bit of Europe along a great big crack. And in order to understand that you have to

know about mechanics, you have to know about elastic theory, so you start to link

basic mathematics and physics with what you’re seeing in the field, you know, as a

geologist, what you see when you go up to the rocks. So that was very exciting and

he explained that very early on. And he was a wonderful lecturer in all sorts of ways

and hugely influential on me in terms of, you know, I suppose, you know, I could now

see that I could – the sort of mathematics that I seemed to be quite good at, I could

now see how I could, you know, use it to – link it up – I mean, I’d never – probably at

school, I’d never thought that maths had anything to do with rocks and fossils in any

way at all, so this was a sort of bit of a revelation by him. And so I – he was one of

the – as I say, a hugely influential teacher.

Could you – for the non mathematical listener, could you – that was a brilliant

description of how you can use sort of the changing shape of a fossil and you can try

and describe that change in shape mathematically to try and infer something about

the forces more widely than –

Yes, that’s right.

Stephen Sparks Page 28

C1379/89

Track 1

28

But what is the role of matrices in that? What are matrices? How do they work

mathematically to allow you to describe the stress on something and the effect on its

change of shape?

Yes. Well I mean, it’s just a – of course it’s just a mechanism to define the – say, for

example, the stress, you know, the stress in three dimensions, for example, or to find

the relationship between stress and strain. So it’s really just a – I mean, in a sense it’s

a mathematical method, isn’t it, to – that you’re – that’s the – if you like, the easy

mathematical method to apply to a problem like that, or in elasticity. So I suppose –

and I think another bit of a lesson that I learnt, that, you know, mathematics is there –

I mean, I suppose I enjoyed solving mathematical problems and I know some

mathematicians liked the sort of beauty of mathematics. I’m not sure I was that way

inclined. I just saw it as a sort of – a tool for understanding what I was seeing as a

geologist, I think.

Had there been – I know that you said that you’d kept – you’d understood geology

and mathematics as separate before this at school and so on.

Yeah.

But had you – had maths been applied in any way before this? In the maths that

you’d done before, had you used maths in a kind of applied way?

I can’t remember doing that at all at school. I mean, we might have done the odd

billiard ball bumping into another billiard ball problem, you know, in mechanics.

We’d probably have done some things about velocities and tangents and Newton’s

law and things like, you know, sort of things like that. But my recollection of doing

mathematics at school was that it was taught partly in terms of procedures, partly in

terms of proofs. I remember doing, you know, proofs as sort of an – it was almost

like an abstract intellectual exercise, you know, rearranging equations, you know,

obviously geometry but again fairly abstract. I can’t remember the maths I was taught

at school being terribly linked to the practical world. It was a, you know, I enjoyed it

because I was quite good at it and so I could do it and that was, you know, that was

Stephen Sparks Page 29

C1379/89

Track 1

29

sort of interesting. And then sometimes you’d solve a, you know, be given a maths

question and you’d solve it and would get it right and that was sort of – there was a

satisfaction about that. But I don’t remember a, you know, before I went to

university, really sort of seeing how it actually linked up with, you know, the real

world [laughs].

[1:04:29]

Thank you. So John Ramsay, you said was one of these key people at Imperial.

Yes.

Who would you –

John Sutton was – he was the Head of Department. And John Sutton and his wife

Janet, Janet Watson, first female President of the Geological Society, she was – they

were the two big figures of the time in Precambrian geology. And so he was a very

good lecturer and so was Janet. And they taught us about the geology of Scotland, the

Scottish Highlands in particular, where they’d made their names, and took us on, you

know, we had field trips up there and they – they were very good at the sort of broad

brush – broad brush, if you like – the big picture geology. And he would teach sort of

very general stuff in his first – in his first year lectures he would sort of – well, I

suppose this is still done, that it tends to be the big professor, the famous professor

teaches the first year students and gets them enthusiastic. And he was very – really a

very good lecturer. And at the time we were sort of enthralled. He was sort of, you

know, he was – he was sort of put up on a sort of pedestal of being sort of one of the

great outstanding geologists of Britain and so we wouldn’t have sort of seen John

Sutton and Janet Watson perhaps in any different guise than to John Ramsay. I mean,

again in retrospect, you’d have to say John Ramsay was the real giant, you know,

intellectual giant of the time, but at the time, you know, John Ramsay was a superb

lecturer. There’s an interesting science tale but I’ll probably leave that for a little bit.

I mean, what actually I now know of course is he was telling us stuff which was really

Stephen Sparks Page 30

C1379/89

Track 1

30

behind the times [laughs], but at the time we thought this was fantastic, you know, it

was really sort of inspirational stuff.

[1:06:42]

Yes, I was going to ask – this is 1968 and I wondered to what extent at this time plate

tectonics was influencing what you were –

Well, it’s very interesting, we hardly got taught – in Imperial from ’68 to ’71 we

hardly got taught any plate tectonics at all. So at the same time the revolution was

going on in Cambridge and, you know, in France and Scripps and the plate tectonics

revolution was happening – I think we were told a little bit about – we were certainly

told about Holmes and Hess and the seafloor spreading hypothesis, but it was very

much in the sort of – the old Harry Hess, who was the great Princeton [professor], you

know, sort of lead, you know, sort of, if you like, the John the Baptist of plate

tectonics in a way. So we were taught something about seafloor spreading, but I think

in the third year we were still being taught what I think was broadly an out of date

picture of the earth, where plate tectonics didn’t figure an awful lot. And I remember

we actually – in the third year at Imperial College we actually went to – I remember

going to the library to read up about plate tectonics. It wasn’t part of – [laughs] you

know, the bits we were reading weren’t – it was about subduction, it wasn’t actually

part of the course. So my recollection of it was that we were being taught very high

quality material. At the time as a student you didn’t know any better. As I say, in

retrospect you’d have to say that it was, you know, that Imperial College missed out

on the plate tectonic revolution that happened in other places.

When you were talking about John Ramsay’s first year lectures, you were talking

about plates squashing together, was that –

Well, mountains squashing together.

Ah okay. So he wouldn’t have been talking in terms of plate collisions and –

Stephen Sparks Page 31

C1379/89

Track 1

31

Not really, no, because, you know, sort of 1968, it wasn’t really part of the

vocabulary. You were talking about mio-geosynclines – I mean, this is getting

technical, but you were talking about sort of basins that – there was quite a lot of

thinking about vertical tectonics. I mean, we were taught about Wagener’s ideas and

continental drift, but the whole, you know, the – and polar wandering and all these

things, which suggest, you know, continental drift. So we were being taught about

aspects of collisional tectonics but it wasn’t called – it wasn’t in that language and it

wasn’t in the language that the plate tectonic revolution created. So I mean, if you

looked at some of the things that were going on, yes, there were continents colliding

together and bashing into each other and so forth and there was quite a lot of up and

down things going on as well, but the whole framework of thinking which plate

tectonics created for earth sciences wasn’t really in place at that time, or it was only

just emerging. So the revolution was happening but it wasn’t permeating [laughs] – it

hadn’t sort of permeated extensively, I don’t think.

And so when you were in the third year going off to read up on it yourself, what were

you looking at?

I just remember reading the – there’s a classic paper, one of the very early papers, by

Isacks, Oliver and Sykes, and that’s in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which

was one of the very first really good descriptions of subducting plates. And I

remember reading that and thinking, you know, how that explained volcanic arcs and

big earthquakes round – in Japan and things like that. And I remember that – being

very influenced by reading that. And so we were sort of semi self taught because, as I

say, the – we were being described stuff but it was sort of six – it was pre tectonics

concepts, I think, of how the earth worked.

[1:10:48]

Thank you. So John Ramsay, John – was there any – you mentioned that Janet

Watson was the first female –

President, yes.

Stephen Sparks Page 32

C1379/89

Track 1

32

Was there any comment on the fact that she was a female lecturer or any kind of self

consciousness about that in her own –

Not that I could remember. We weren’t taught a lot by Janet actually at the time, it

was mostly John Ramsay, and we were – we weren’t really exposed to her much. We

had a few lectures. But I think she’d – again, I don’t know, you know, I don’t think I

really have any knowledge of exactly what, you know, what her employment contract

was. I suspect she did a lot more research than she did teaching, so she wasn’t sort of

held up as, you know, sort of the – at the time she wasn’t sort of held up as, you

know, sort of the role model for young female geologists, ‘cause actually there were

only two in our year and one of those dropped out, so we had one female and about

twenty-nine boys in the geology class. So it was a, you know, so still very extremely

male oriented.

How did that one female undergraduate sort of cope or –

I don’t really remember. I mean, she struck up a very close friendship with one of the

other students, they went out together, and I don’t think we really – I don’t think it

ever really was a sort of issue. I mean, I guess because there’s only one – I mean, at

the time it of course didn’t occur to us that was a bit odd [laughs], but that was –

Imperial College generally was very male dominated and there were very few female

teachers. I mean, Janet – I’m struggling to remember whether there was any other

woman at Imperial at the time who taught. Oh … what was …? Yes, er … There was

another one, a lady, and I’m just trying to remember – I didn’t get taught by – oh, it’ll

come back later. Yes, there was one other [Gloria Borley]. But it was, as I say, a

very male dominated situation. And it was the Royal School of Mines, so the other

big ethos at Imperial College was this sort of tremendous idea that Imperial College

and the Royal School of Mines had sort of populated the world’s mining companies

with geologists, so quite a few of our year did mining geology as a specialism. And

so there was a very – at the time there was a very strong link with the mining industry

and with the oil industry too, but very – particularly the mining industry. It was the

Royal School of Mines so it was the – essentially it was still under sort of the post

Stephen Sparks Page 33

C1379/89

Track 1

33

empire, you know, it still viewed itself as the place that was supplying the world’s

geologists – the geologists for the empire, sort of thing. And there was still the sort of

– not, you know, not overtly said, but there was a sort of sense of that, that it was still,

you know, the big, you know, that if you came from RSM and you, you know, they

were – people are now – chief executives or senior managers in big mining companies

at the time were Imperial alumni and there was a big network of, you know, of people

who – so mining geology was a big issue, a big aspect.

[1:14:23]

Thank you. And other significant lecturers?

Well, I was going to say, the one who was the most significant by a long way was a

chap called George Walker, a lecturer at the time, and George was a really quite

brilliant scientist and a superb teacher. And he taught us mineralogy but most

significantly he taught us – he was at that time just starting to – he’d worked on

volcanic rocks, on the minerals in volcanic rocks, but he was just starting to turn

himself into a volcanologist and getting interested in volcanic rocks and processes in

young volcanoes. And so he taught us about minerals and he taught us about

volcanoes. And he was a quite brilliant teacher and that’s really the time – George is

the time when volcanoes I think sort of, if you like, came into my life, that I sort of

started to think this was quite interesting.

Are you able to say why, what about the way that he talked about them?

Well, I think it – it’s – I’m – what was pivotal was that in the first year I made three

new friends there [Clive Newhall, Ian Boughton and Geoff Wadge], three of the other

geology undergraduates, and we – the four of us decided that we wanted to go to

Iceland and look at volcanoes. And we decided – these are first year students. And

we hatched a plan to have an expedition to Iceland and we went to the Royal Imperial

College Expedition Society and the Royal Geographical Society and we put in for

some money for a student expedition, and George – it was George who said, well, you

know, we went to – we knew he was interested and did a lot of work in Iceland so we

Stephen Sparks Page 34

C1379/89

Track 1

34

went to ask him. He said, ‘Well yeah, that’s a really good place to go and I can advise

you …’ so he said, ‘Well …’ He showed us maps and he said, ‘Well, this is a really

interesting area in the south west of Iceland, why don’t you do your expedition there?’

And he suggested some things we might do. And so we planned the expedition. We

went and raised funds. We got some money from the Royal Imperial College

Expedition Society, we got a bit of money from the Royal Geographical Society. We

went round to various manufacturers and got bits and pieces of stuff that we could

take with us. We got Vango, the tent people, to give us a tent, a couple of tents. And

we planned the expedition and we went there and we spent six weeks of the summer

of ’68 – sorry, ’69, I should say, it was ’69, in Iceland. And we went to this area

[Oraefaj�kull in southwest Iceland] where there was a big glacier and there were

some interesting volcanic rocks and we mapped the volcanic rocks. And we also went

– had a bit of a trip as part – we were there six weeks. We went to this place for four

weeks and we spent the other two weeks going round looking at the volcanoes of

Iceland. So I think that was probably the pivotal moment. I mean, that’s when I

thought this is a really interesting area.

Could you describe – take yourself back to that time and describe the landscape that

you saw when you were on this tour, looking at the volcanoes of Iceland?

Yeah. Well, of course Iceland’s like the moon. I mean, it’s a, you know, for a – as I

say, it’s so totally different from anywhere in Britain. I mean, it’s a wild rugged

landscape, very little vegetation. There are glaciers and then the rocks are black and

red and it’s all bare rock and gravel and big rivers and waterfalls. So it’s a sort of

spectacular – it’s a lunar like landscape, or that’s the way, you know, at the time we

sort of felt about it. And then the place we were in was pretty remote and so we had

very little – we were camping up near the glacier and it was, you know, there was

fulmars and skuas around and, you know, just spectacular scenery. And quite – at the

time quite difficult to get to so we had to sort of hike in. And so – and then there were

hot – in other places there were hot springs and rocks coloured by hot water, you

know, a reaction with hot acid waters and things so they’d all gone yellow and orange

colours. So very spectacular landscape. And, you know, for somebody like me and

my three friends, we were sort of, you know sort of – absolutely thought it was a

Stephen Sparks Page 35

C1379/89

Track 1

35

wonderful place. It rained all the time but then that was, you know, almost part of the

fun.

Why?

Well, you know, you’re in sort of an expedition to – you feel you’re in some sort of

remote place and you’re battling against the weather and you’ve got the rain beating

on your tent and trying to cook food in a, you know, sort of horizontal rain sort of

thing is – I mean, it can be a bit miserable but on the other hand it’s a sort of, you

know, it’s – if you like, the outdoors, that’s part of the deal really. So it was very – it

was – that was a fantastic expedition.

[1:19:47]

Tell me more then about George Walker’s sort of teaching and influence on you.

Well, George, he eventually became my PhD supervisor of course. That’s the reason.

He had a group of research students who were doing volcanology. But that’s, you

know, later on. At the time he was a very careful teacher. He did beautiful diagrams,

you know, sort of hand drawn diagrams of minerals in 3D that he would show us and

he was very good at explaining some quite difficult concepts about minerals, ‘cause

you – I mean, you have all sorts of things about symmetry. Again, getting a bit

conceptually mathematical because you’re dealing with things like symmetry and

reflections and rotations, which explain why the minerals have particular shapes. And

he was really very good at that explanation. And then when we started to look at

rocks, which are aggregates of different minerals, and we’re starting to use what’s

called optical microscopy, where we look at very thin slices of the rock. And if you

were a geology student in the ‘60s you would do an awful lot of this. You would get

these, you know, sort of little – I mean, we still do it but they don’t do it as much as

they used to. But you’d get these little thin slices of rock, which I’m showing you,

which are – make – you slice the rock and you make it transparent and it’s now about

– this is about thirty microns of rock, so it becomes transparent to light. And then you

put it down a microscope and you can essentially – from the optical properties you

Stephen Sparks Page 36

C1379/89

Track 1

36

can tell what minerals there are. And so a geologist in the late ‘60s would have done

an awful lot of that in their practicals. And he was very good again at explaining

things like the refraction of light and why we were getting these strange interference

colours. So, you know, that would go into the way light interacts and refracts and

breaks up into different colour bands and so forth. And we – and he was just really

good. Now at the time we really enjoyed it. And I know in hindsight that this is one

of the more – a lot of students find this really boring. I mean, it’s one of these

subjects that you do at university that people find, a, difficult and, they don’t find it

terribly interesting. And so it’s actually quite a skill for a lecturer to really bring this

aspect of mineralogy to life and he was really superb at doing that. So he was, you

know, people really regard him as one of the – probably the – along with Ramsay,

probably the best teacher of the – in the school.

[1:22:38]

What was he like as a character, as a person?

Oh, completely eccentric. But I mean, you know, we’d – as I say, his eccentricity and

getting to know him later in life when I was a PhD student and professionally, you

know, at that time of course he just came across as sort of a very scholarly man, quite

quiet in a way, but just gave his lecture with the sort of upmost clarity and every –

really all the students thought he and Ramsay were the two best teachers at the time.

In what way eccentric, as viewed by an undergraduate at this time?

Well, I don’t think we necessarily thought he was eccentric. I mean, again, I think

you – at the time you would see – I think you’d probably regard, you know, because

it’s all so new, you’d probably regard quite a few of the lecturers as eccentric [laughs]

in one way or another. He was very – he was quite quiet and, you know, you don’t –

as an undergraduate you don’t really get – I mean, possibly except for Cambridge and

Oxford where you’ve got the very strong tutorial system, you don’t really get to know

the staff that well, you know, personally. You probably do on field trips. Probably

field trips are the place you get to know the staff a bit more. But, you know, I don’t

Stephen Sparks Page 37

C1379/89

Track 1

37

think you would have – at the time I would have thought of him as necessarily

eccentric.

[I should acknowledge Dr Malcolm Foost who was my personal tutor. In my second

year I had a crisis of confidence and nearly dropped out but Malcolm helped me to

overcome these doubts in my ability.]

[1:24:08]

Could you then tell me about what was – the field work aspect of the Imperial College

degree, what did it consist of, perhaps a field course in the first year and then –

Yeah, that’s right. That would be- typically you would do a field course in – I think –

did we go to Arran? That’s probably Arran. Oh no, sorry, we went to the – oh, that’s

right, we went to Skye, the Isle of Skye, for the field trip. And I remember that was a

wonderful trip, because basically you’ve got a group of sort of twenty-five, thirty

mostly young men sort of who were going to, you know, liked the outdoors, liked

geology but they also liked, you know, the good times in the bar and sort of, you

know, in retrospect the lecturers have to sort of keep an eye on things getting out of

control. But I remember that – the field trip to Skye was tremendous. That was our

first year. Then we went to Spain for three weeks and I remember that being a great

trip, going round Southern Spain, looking at the Betic Alpes and the rocks on the

coast near Malaga and Rio Tinto, the big mine in Southern Spain, and that was – I

remember that being really enjoyable.

What was – what did the work consist of on these field trips?

Oh well, you’d get trained to – and this is still the case. I mean, the nature of these

trips really hasn’t changed much over the years. I mean, the basic skill of a geologist

is to do [make] geological maps and you’ve got some electronic gadgets which help

you these days. But the basic idea is to depict on a map, you know, where the

different rocks are and interpret their relationships, you know, one’s younger than

another, one’s being deformed into a geological fold or there’s a fault. And you have

Stephen Sparks Page 38

C1379/89

Track 1

38

to show where these are on the map. And then you have to have this sort of 3D to – I

mean, that’s one of the big skills in geology is this 3D – you can look at a geological

map, which is a 2D pattern, and you can – you learn – you’re taught and learn to think

of it in sort of three dimensions. You can see it as a three dimensional object in a

way, although it’s just a 2D map. Same way as you look at a contour map, if you’re

used to topographic maps you can see the mountains and valleys and so forth. And so

we did a lot of geological mapping. We did some what you might call look and see

interesting bits of geology, just go up to an outcrop and see some rocks and one’s blue

and the other one’s red and there’s something in – there’s a contact and you – with the

teachers you discuss what this might be. And you’re taught, you know, to look at

different sorts of geological relationships and, you know, tell a lava flow from a

limestone from a granite or whatever, so very basic geological skills. You’re taught

how to – a lot of geology is about again three dimensional structures, so you’re taught

how to record the geometry. Again, bringing mathematics in, you’re taught how to

record the geometry, which might be a plain, the orientation of a plain in space or a

line in space, and then you’re – if you’ve got a lot of measurements of different lines

and geological contacts and structures and lines, you’re then taught how to reproduce

those on something called a stereogram, which is a way of plotting geometric data on

a single graph. And then you learn to interpret that in terms of how the rocks are put

together on the larger scale. And then if you have observations from several places

you can sort of then reconstruct a larger scale picture of the sort of structure. So these

are all the sort of basic skills that you learn as a young geologist and it’s still the case.

I mean, it’s not that different nowadays.

How do stereograms work? What are they?

Yeah. Well, it’s a – it’s basically projecting onto a circle. You have a sphere and you

have a plain cutting that sphere and the way it cuts that sphere creates a line. And

then there’s a normal to that plain, which you can plot on the sort of, you know, on

this circular graph paper. You plot it on the circle. So if the plain’s vertical, the

normal to it will plot on the edge. If the plain is horizontal, the normal to it will plot

in the centre. And so you can instantly see, depending – just a single dot on this type

of graph paper will tell you whether it’s a horizontal plain or a vertical plain or

Stephen Sparks Page 39

C1379/89

Track 1

39

something that’s got an angle of fifty degrees or whatever it is. And again they still

do that. I mean, as I say, nowadays you’ll probably have computers and things. You

know, there are lots of electronic aids that students can use these days which, you

know, mean it’s a bit – the education’s a bit different, but there’s still the – it’s still

the same fundamental thing of understanding structures in three dimensions really.

Did you take any instruments into the field?

Yeah, but very simple ones like compasses and what we call a clinometer, which is

something you measure the angle of a slope or a – the orientation of a line. You

would take a hand lens, obviously a hammer to bash the rocks. You’d need to see

what’s inside the rock. You’d take a hand lens, which is really a small magnifying

glass, so that you could – if the minerals are too small to distinguish by eye you’ve

got some hope of seeing the different minerals with the magnifying glass. So that

would be – you might take a tape measure. But very simple things, nothing fancy.

[1:30:19]

And to what extent did you begin to specialise throughout your undergraduate course

or to focus on particular kinds of geology, or perhaps to exclude certain kinds of

geology?

Well, I think that was interesting for me that I did the – I did the course – after this

Iceland trip, that’s when I really sort of saw, you know, volcanology as something I’d

really get interested in. And I was also interested in a field called igneous petrology,

which, again for the uninitiated, is really the study of rocks and their mineral

constituents and understanding both the chemistry and the physical arrangement of

minerals which then give you clues as to processes which created that rock. And

that’s the field called petrology and it’s actually the art of looking at a rock under a

microscope when it’s got this very thin slice and that – that had fascinated me as well.

And I thought, well, I wanted to do – in my third year I wanted to do – oh, that’s right,

I’ll take a step back. I got interested in this area and with another three students we

went to Portugal, just north of Lisbon, to do – another thing all geologists will do is

Stephen Sparks Page 40

C1379/89

Track 1

40

what’s called an independent mapping project. You go somewhere and you create

your own geological map and you usually do that in about – six weeks would be

typical. And it’s almost – again, this still happens. That was between the second and

the third year. So the summer between the second and the third year we went to

Portugal and we – and I did my independent mapping. So it’s a bit of my own work,

doing my own geology, and then you come back and you get some of the rocks

you’ve taken and you slice them up and you look at them and find out what the

minerals are and so forth. And that was – I was also influenced by that. That was an

interesting trip, a different sort of geology. And so I wanted to do igneous petrology

as my third year option. You could specialise. And then they did mining geology,

they did structural geology, which is the area Ramsay specialised in, and they did

fossils, sediment course. So there was a number of things you could specialise in and

igneous petrology was one of them. But I was the only student who wanted to do this

so they didn’t put the course on, so I had to do the structural geology, the sort of

second choice. So I didn’t do much on volcanoes at all in the third year, I was just

doing this sort of structure course, or that was my main speciality.

[1:33:15]

And then could you tell us about the transition from undergraduate degree to PhD,

how that happened?

Yes, that was very straightforward. George Walker was building up a sort of – a

research group and I didn’t know this at the time but he was shifting his – he’d – for

the previous two or three years he’d been shifting his research direction to

volcanology and young volcanoes from his earlier fieldwork, which was dealing with

the geology of Iceland and minerals. And so he was starting to build up a sort of

school of research students and researchers and so myself and another colleague,

Geoff Wadge, who’s now professor at Reading, we both – both of us who’d been on

the Iceland expedition together, we both sort of signed up to be his PhD students. So

he took us both on in sort of 1971.

Stephen Sparks Page 41

C1379/89

Track 1

41

Before we look at the content of your PhD, could you just tell us where you were

living at the time that you were an undergraduate?

Ah, right, yeah, that’s – that comes back to a bit of family aspect. When I first went

to university my father had been transferred from Bradford to Stockport and where

he’d been promoted to the sort of – the chief valuer of the Stockport office, so they

were dealing with bits of Derbyshire and that part of Derbyshire. And so he – about

this time he had remarried, or in – had he remarried? No, he hadn’t remarried exactly

then. He’d certainly met Trixie [Beatrice Greenwood], who was my stepmother to be,

and she lived in Birkenhead, so he actually lived in Birkenhead and commuted to

Stockport for his work. So my father at the time [that I first went to university] was

living in Birkenhead. And that was – yeah, I mean, that was a pretty interesting

aspect of family life, to then inherit a whole new family of really rather sort of

flamboyant characters. And so he’d started a sort of new family life in a way. And

then when he married Trixie they moved over – around 1970, so while I was at

university, they moved – I think that would have been my second year, they moved to

a place in Derbyshire called Whaley Bridge, which is just on the Derbyshire side of

Stockport, so that they – he then – he married and moved into a new house. So that

was my – at that time that was my place I’d go home to.

But where did you live while actually – in term time?

Oh, firstly had digs, which I didn’t like at all, in Streatham Common, which was

terrible, so within – during the first year – first term, I didn’t like it and we – I got

together with some of the friends and we moved into South Kensington, into a flat, a

sort of student flat. We had that for the year and then the following year we moved

into a flat in Gloucester Road, where I stayed I think for both the second and third

year.

And what did you do when you weren’t doing geology at this time?

Erm, we were, well, doing all the sort of things that you’d expect [laughs] students of

the ’60s to have done, I think, basically. We were, you know, going to rock concerts

Stephen Sparks Page 42

C1379/89

Track 1

42

and gigs and playing sport, you know, I still continued to like sport, played soccer.

And, you know, sort of the usual things students do. And, you know, we – it was a

sort of, you know, we lived in a sort of slightly anarchic flat and that was, you know,

my recollection is great and some of the people I lived with are still again good

friends. And I guess we had a pretty good time actually [laughs], that’s my

recollection of it.

Were you lived with geologists or …?

There were – the flat had seven – we had a flat with seven people in it, three of whom

were geologists, including myself, and the others were doing all sorts of other things, I

think estate management, civil engineering, what was it? There was one doing

economics, I think. Not necessarily at – there was one guy who was basically just sort

of camping out. He was not doing a degree at all, he was just sort of, you know, he

wanted to be in London. Another was doing teacher training. Yeah, so it was a bit of

a diversity of people.

How was geology viewed as a subject by undergraduates studying other …?

I don’t think I really thought much about that. I think the, you know, they could see

that people like myself and my two friends in the flat who were doing geology were,

you know, pretty interested in it but, you know, no more than, you know, another – a

civil engineer would be interested in what they were doing or a, you know, and people

were interested in what they were doing. But I mean, I don’t think that really played a

big part of the sort of social …

You mentioned that this was London at a particular time, the student demonstrations

and things.

Yeah.

What did you see of that kind of thing happening?

Stephen Sparks Page 43

C1379/89

Track 1

43

Well, I remember that there were lots of student, you know, we – there was certainly

a, you know, sort of student grants demo and there was the – and I remember seeing,

you know, the big – was it – where’s the US embassy, the one in – they were in the

Vietnam times. I remember sort of seeing people walking through the, you know,

walking through the streets then for that. So it was a, you know, it was that sort of era

of – the late ‘60s. So, you know, you’d go – and again, fantastic memories really. I

mean, I went to – I remember going to the very first rock – proper rock concert that

I’d ever been to, which was Jethro Tull and a group called Spooky Tooth and another

sort of obscure underground band called the Eclectic and Joe Cocker. And there was

a sort of – this was at the Albert Hall. That was sort of the first proper big rock

concert I’d been to. And then later we went to see the Cream’s last concert, you

know, the famous one that’s on the – do you know that one?

I don’t. I know who Cream are but, no, I don’t know –

No, they had a famous last – Cream’s last concert, which was at the Albert Hall,

which is a, you know, there’s a documentary film on it. It’s a bit like Live at Leeds

with the Who. It was a fairly sort of iconic concert. I remember going to see that.

And then there were Hyde Park concerts, where, you know, some of the sort of first

super bands like Blind Faith were playing. So there – I went to see the first

performance of Dark Side of the Moon [Pink Floyd] in Hammersmith. So that was a

fantastic time to be, you know, a student. I mean, the – I mean, it was, you know, it

was that sort of period, I suppose.

Good music.

Good music, yeah, that’s right. And I suppose that’s one thing I think my father never

really understood, because he’d taught me to love classical music, which I still do, but

of course he really couldn’t understand all this sort of [laughs] rock stuff that was

emerging, you know, and, you know, found it very difficult to understand the music at

all. So that was a sort of generational thing. So yeah, so it was a very lively time to

be a student in London. I’m not sure how good that did our studies, but … [laughs]

Stephen Sparks Page 44

C1379/89

Track 1

44

[1:41:59]

And the content of your PhD, what was the PhD on?

PhD was on a volcano – an old extinct volcano in the middle of Italy called Bolsena,

B-O-L-S-E-N-A. And it’s about 100 kilometres or so north of Rome. It’s a big –

what we call a caldera volcano. It’s very – it was a very violent volcano and the

eruptions were very large and when the eruptions happened there was so much

material came out of the earth that the ground collapsed and formed a huge circular

lake we call the caldera. And it’s a very beautiful place. And my task that George

gave me was basically to map these – the volcanic deposits around this lake and try to

make sense of them but in a very – actually in a very innovative way. I mean, that’s

not my innovation, it’s George’s thought that there was a very different way of

looking at these rocks than anybody else had done before and so he suggested to me

and my other student colleague to work in – called Steve Self to work in – we worked

in the Azores. So he [George] had these sort of ideas that he wanted to promulgate

through, you know, the detailed research of students and that’s what I started to do.

And so I sort of went there and camped around the lake and started doing this

mapping project and looking at the – what we call stratigraphy, which is sort of

basically – you have a number of eruptions, each of which produces a layer, and you

want to trace these layers round and find out what – where they went and what their

characteristics are, and then try and interpret those observations in terms of the

eruption.

[1:43:55]

What was the innovative way that he was looking at this – the results in this manner?

Yeah, the innovation – I mean, if you said this now, you probably would – nobody

would think of it as an innovation. But the fact was that at the time, this was late ‘60s,

if you were a really top notch geologist then you were going to be doing plate

tectonics. You know, you were in the revolution, you know, so – or in the structural

areas. As I say, in Imperial you would have been in a structural – structural geology,

Stephen Sparks Page 45

C1379/89

Track 1

45

the things that Ramsay did were, you know, sort of regarded as sort of a really big

thing. And a lot of people around the world were doing these sorts of things. Now

for volcanoes, for reasons which I suspect are just historical, the people who had been

looking at volcanoes very largely had been thinking of them as chemical systems.

They were interested where these lavas came from, why did you melt the earth, why

does it have – why does the lava have a particular chemical composition, why does it

have particular minerals in it, what do those minerals tell you about the depth from

which the lava’s coming. And that was the big interest. And it came at the time of

plate tectonics, so, you know, people were asking the questions, was the chemistry of

the volcanoes the same where the plates pulled apart and where they pushed together,

and of course they weren’t. And so the questions that were being asked were largely I

would say sort of chemical questions about, you know, why the – big scale pictures,

why the volcanoes – how do they relate to the plate’s chemistry. What George did

was he said, well, particularly with pyroclastic rocks, which are the products of

explosions, where you have an explosion and you produce layers of volcanic ash,

what on earth are these, you know, what – how did these form, what are the physical

processes that formed these and how can I make some observations that help me

understand what went on. And that was what he was interested in and he realised that

the thing to do was firstly to collect a lot of data in the field. So he was very much a

scientist who was of the opinion that data is the king. He really – he knew, you can

have a lot of talk but unless you’ve got some data to back up what you’re saying then

that’s really not a very useful thing to do. And so his view was you just collect lots of

data but not blindly, you – his great skill as a scientist was he had a real intuition for

what sort of data would give him insights into – into what had happened. And he – he

was at the vanguard of this idea of making physical measurements in the field and

then trying to relate these physical relationships – observations to physical processes

rather than chemical processes. And that’s what he did. And, you know, it sounds

like it – you should have, you know, the science had already been going for seventy

years so you would have – you might have expected people to have done this, but they

actually hadn’t. Very, very few people had really looked at volcanic rocks and said,

well, these are produced by physical processes, even though it’s completely obvious.

And now that dominates the – it has a huge, you know, it’s like an enormous, you

know, thousands and thousands of people are doing that sort of work nowadays, but in

Stephen Sparks Page 46

C1379/89

Track 1

46

those days it was really just George and one or two other scientists round the world

who were thinking that way.

[1:47:59]

So you were in this particular field region and you had layers of volcanic deposits.

Yes.

And you had to in some way map these and try and infer from whatever data you were

collecting, the physical processes by which this had all come down.

Yes, that’s right, yes.

Rather than just looking at the chemical properties of the magma or the exclusion at

that place as opposed to this other place.

That’s right, yeah.

So let’s have you sort of in the field. What do you do day to day to collect this?

Yeah. I mean, the – some fairly obvious things that you might do, and we did. I

mean, if you have an ash layer from a particular eruption you might simply go and

measure the thickness of the ash layer around the volcano and then contour up a map

and from that map of thickness and area you can get a volume. You can find out how

much was erupted. So you need to do [more than] just measuring the thickness. If

you want to know how powerful the eruption might have been, well, maybe the more

powerful the eruption, the bigger the rock fragments you see in the deposit at a greater

distance from the volcano. So if you go around and you measure the size of the

fragments then you – all other things being equal, you would sort of expect – and I’m

sort of simplifying a lot here, but the concept is you’d sort of expect a bigger volcanic

explosion would – you would get bigger fragments further from the volcanic vent. So

you would go around and you’d make measurements of the largest fragments you

Stephen Sparks Page 47

C1379/89

Track 1

47

could see and you would then plot those on a map and contour them and try and

interpret that. And then you might – if it’s a deposit, a very young deposit that’s been

from a new eruption, that hasn’t been turned to a rock yet, it’s just loose ash or loose

volcanic fragments, you can of course take a sample and you can do a grain size

analysis, find out the distribution of grains. You can look at the physical shape of the

grains, are they rounded or are they angular. So if they’ve been broken up in an

explosion so they’re angular or they’ve been rounded by some flow process, you

know, like in a river but in a volcanic current. You can measure the shapes of the

fragments and the inside – if it’s a piece of pumice you can look at the gas bubbles

that have formed, are they big, are they small, what can you tell from that. So you can

measure the physical attributes of the deposit. If there’s a volcanic current

transporting deposits, just like a wind forms sand dunes, then the volcanic deposit can

form a sort of sand dune and geologists will then – if you’ve got this sort of dune like

structure you can measure the angles of the sand dune, is the sand dune like that, a

sort of sharp, you know, sort of something that sticks up in the air, or is it a low

amplitude thing which is low and thin and not very tall. So you can make a

measurement like that. And then you can say, well, what does that mean, how can I

interpret that. So those are – and that’s really what George fundamentally did, I

mean, these very straightforward measurements where all you need is a ruler, a map, a

hammer and a hand lens, the simple instruments of a geologists, and take some bags

to take the samples and that’s – and you go away and do it.

And how did you get access to sort of sections around this particular caldera?

There are quarries, there are road cuts. There are little cuts in farmer’s fields, all sorts

of places where you can go. There are rivers cutting the rocks so that the rocks are

exposed, all sorts of ways. There are lots of – that’s part of the world where, you

know, it’s really quite easy to find what we call outcrops. I mean, places where you

can take samples, make measurements.

Did you do any sort of coring in order to cut through yourself?

No.

Stephen Sparks Page 48

C1379/89

Track 1

48

I see.

But of course you could do that. You know, in a PhD, you know, unless you’ve got

access to a mining company or something like that, you don’t – no, these would be all

very simple measurements made on the rocks that are available.

[1:52:29]

What relations did you have with local people during this fieldwork?

Oh, it was quite interesting, ‘cause it’s in rural Italy and you – in a wonderful part of

the world and, you know, because people are always very curious about what you’re

doing and so, you know, occasionally somebody would drag you into a farm to get

you to taste some rough wine or give you an egg or something strange, or, you know,

people would just ask you and you’d try and answer them in sort of very bad Italian.

And that was, you know, that was part of the sort of charm of the area. And it’s a

beautiful area ‘cause there are all these wonderful little medieval villages stuck on

some of the hills, which have, you know, sort of hardly changed since the fourteenth

century and so it’s a – just a fantastic area.

To what extent were local people useful in pointing out where you might find outcrops

or – I suppose it’s a general question about the role of local knowledge in doing this.

Yes. I mean, occasionally you would – and I mean, I’m not, you know, since then

you occasionally find local knowledge is really very helpful. You know, you sort of

explain, you know, a cava, I want a sort of quarry to – and they’ll say, well, there’s

one down that road. So it can be useful on occasions. But by and large you’re sort of

just tramping round the countryside and you’ll see these places and maybe there’s

some rock in a farmyard and you’ll ask – obviously out of politeness you’ll ask the

farmer whether you can go and look at it and they usually say yes. So yes, so that’s

interesting. I wouldn’t say it was very – in that particular case, very strong, the

Stephen Sparks Page 49

C1379/89

Track 1

49

interaction with the local people apart from just, you know, to sort of just say –

passing the time of day really.

And how did you find the experience of doing something which from the outside might

seem quite solitary, if you like, you know, mapping an area alone?

Yeah. Part of geology is quite solitary. I mean, you’re there wanting to make the

measurements and you of course get absorbed by those – that work and you want –

and so often the days pass quite – can pass quite quickly. And then of course if you’re

camped at the time – I was camped on the lake, so you could go back and cook some

food and have a nice swim or something like that, and so it was a nice – it was a sort

of really nice environment to do. And not much rain, like Iceland, so it was a very

different sort of fieldwork.

And what did you come home with? What was the – in physical terms, what was the

product? And if you can give us a sense of the amount of it, you know, so –

Yeah. Well, there’d basically be plastic bags full of grey and white powder. So I did

have an interesting time at Rome railway station, explaining to customs what these

bags of white powder might be, but fortunately was able to explain that that’s – they

were volcanic ash so they were – it didn’t cause any problems. But I know of other

geologists in the same field who’ve had sort of incidents of trying to explain what

their bags of white powder actually are [laughs]. But – so that’s what you do, you

bring them back to the lab and you pass them through some sieves to get the range of

grain sizes, and you might measure the density of the particles and things like that.

Again, fairly physical – simple physical measurements actually by and large.

And what came back with you in terms of written records or notes or maps?

You’d come back with a field notebook, a location plotted on a map. When you got

back to Imperial College you’d do a neat version of the map with the field locations or

maybe the thickness of the, you know, the map showing the thickness of the layers or

Stephen Sparks Page 50

C1379/89

Track 1

50

the size of the fragments. So that – yeah, that’s what you’d do. Again, pretty simple

physical measurements.

And were you able, based on this data, to make any arguments about the physical

processes that must have been involved in using this sort of spread of debris, if you

like?

Yes. I – oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, we – I think at the time, myself and my fellow

student Steve Self, we – with George, we wrote a couple of very – now regarded as

sort of seminal papers on the subject. And we discovered a lot.

[1:57:07]

And I think that’s probably where I would think of myself as having really put some

of my own, you know, obviously the style of research and the methodology and the

intuition that George had had an enormous role in guiding, you know, sort of young

inexperienced students in the science. So we obviously – those papers have an awful

lot to do with George’s brilliance. I think where I really – I really sort of made a

significant contribution at the time, is in two ways. One is – and this is – I’m not sure

I ca properly explain this easily. The first thing is, you probably noticed I didn’t do

physics at all at school, but I realised that I had to learn some of the appropriate

physics to understand what I was looking at, physics of flows and physics of how

rocks fall through the air and so forth, because we were trying to interpret the geology

in terms of essentially fluid mechanics and physics. So I had to firstly learn a lot of –

quite a lot of relevant physics. The second point was George was not a very good

mathematician at all. He didn’t think – in fact his maths was really rather poor, and

he didn’t think in any way mathematically, he thought intuitively. And so he was

rather curious in the way that he had his intuition about physical processes and he had

really deep insights into physical processes, but he didn’t think about them in any way

in a mathematical sense, as a mathematician would. He didn’t think about describing

the things he was suggesting. And a lot of his suggestions turned out to be completely

right. He didn’t think about describing those in mathematical terms, it was much

more intuitive, you know, this is like a river or it’s like a waterfall or it’s – so by

Stephen Sparks Page 51

C1379/89

Track 1

51

analogies sometimes. He also had a tremendous ability to get data and then find the

right way of plotting that data or presenting or analysing that data in a way which was

very insightful. He seemed to have a real knack of choosing the right way to present

data. And again it was this intuition. But it has to be said, he wasn’t a great

mathematician at all and yet I’d got an interest in maths and I could start reading up

some of the sort of physical aspects of this and started to teach myself a little bit about

physics. And then the other thing I realised was – I took up a very old suggestion that

these volcanic flows were what – were analogous to what people call a fluidised bed.

I don’t know if you know anything about those, but if you – if you get, say, a cylinder

of sand or salt and you have a porous base and you pass gas through it, or water, and it

flows up through the spaces between the grains, you’ll get to a condition where the

upward flow balances the friction of the particles and you get to what’s called a

fluidised bed, where the sand or – will behave just like a fluid, absolutely like a fluid.

It’s like a quicksand, you know, there’s analogy with quicksand in an estuary. And

this is used hugely in industry for chemical engineering in particular because you get

very fast reactions between gases and solids by passing a gas through a bed of solids

in a fluidised condition. Or if you’re in a factory, you’re looking for fast food

transport, in order to transport frozen peas quickly, you fluidise them because then the

particles lose their friction between them and they flow just like a liquid. So this is a

very dramatic effect. And I thought that this is a really good idea so I went – as a PhD

student, I went round to the chemical engineering department in Imperial College,

where they had one of – some world class engineers, who did fluidisation engineering,

and I sort of looked at their apparatus and they showed me some of these phenomena

in the lab and I thought, well, this must be what’s happening and I can interpret my

data from the Italian volcano in terms of these processes. So I then built up my own

apparatus. I got a cylinder and I got some gas and I started playing around myself. I

did some experiments at the time and I tested out a couple of ideas and they worked

really well. And I could then use the understanding of the physics of these fluidised

beds to interpret what I was seeing in the geology.

Wow. Can you describe those – firstly describe the simple apparatus that you made

in order to –

Stephen Sparks Page 52

C1379/89

Track 1

52

Yep, it’s just – if you imagine a plastic tube, which is about, say, eight inches across,

maybe two foot tall, so it’s just a cylinder, at the base of it I have a porous plate, so in

order words a plate which holds the solids. It’s a solid base but it’s got little holes in

it, which then – if I pump gas through the bottom, the gas will go through the holes

and then will flow through a bed of sand that you put in the bed. Okay, so that’s – if

you then have a gas cylinder you turn the gas on and you pump the gas through the

bed of sand. It will fluidise and it’ll show this behaviour. Now to give you an idea, a

more graphic idea, what would happen would be, if I had this bed of sand and I put a

– before I put the sand in the cylinder I put a plastic duck at the bottom of the sand,

fill it up with sand and then I put a rock, a heavy rock, on top of the sand, they’re

going nowhere very slowly, they just stay there. The strength of this bed of sand is

sufficient that, although the rock’s heavier than the sand, it won’t fall through the sand

because the sand is behaving like a solid material. Now if I pass a little bit of gas up

through the sand and it reaches this point where it fluidises, where the friction

between the sand grains, which is making it strong, disappears or it goes down to

negligible values, the whole bed of sand becomes like a liquid and it behaves just like

a liquid. So the duck floats to the top of the sand bed and the rock goes to the bottom.

So the heavy particle’s gone to the bottom and the light one’s gone to the top, almost

instantaneously. So when I go in the field and I’m measuring these deposits in Italy,

what I’m observing is – very commonly I see deposits which I know have been

produced by a flow of particles, volcanic flow of particles, and it contains lumps of

pumice, which is [are] light, and then rock fragments, which are heavy. And then

when I look I see that the pumice is all at the top and the rock fragments are all at the

bottom. Now if that was – if that was just the volcanic ash just like a bed of sand,

then how can I have got these heavy and light particles to have separated. And of

course the answer is fluidisation, that the flow had volcanic gases in as well as ash

when it flowed and these gases escaped, fluidising the flow and therefore the pumice

could float and the rock fragments could sink. And then of course as the rock

fragments sink they get – the bigger ones sink near the volcano, the smaller rock

fragments sink a bit further from the volcano and the little ones go to the end, a long

way from the volcano. And therefore when I do a map I see that the big rock

fragments are close to the volcano, I see that’s what I observe. The pumices, which

float, of course they never fall out at all because they carry on, they’re just floating.

Stephen Sparks Page 53

C1379/89

Track 1

53

So they go – really big lumps of pumice are transported right to as far as you can go,

you know, twenty, thirty kilometres from the volcano. And you still see them there

and that’s because they floated. So I could explain what I saw from these simple

measurements in the field very nicely through – by combining a physical experiment

and thinking about the physics of that process. And I think because I had some – as I

say, some basic mathematics and a slight interest in it and I’d also been, you know, I

could see that mathematics and experiments were going to help me – I mean, George

did very few experiments, he wasn’t an experimentalist. So again, I could – I sort of

brought that into the milieu of the ideas that were coming around at the time. So I

could bring in these sort of physical ideas and the mathematical analysis, the physics,

to help explain the geology we were seeing.

[2:07:06]

How – when you started exploring sort of physics and engineering as a way to try and

understand what you were seeing in the field, how long did it take to hit upon

fluidised beds as the explanation among all of the other kind of physical processes

that you might encounter if you’re starting to look at literature in physics? Was it the

first – sort of the first thing you hit upon?

No, it wasn’t, no, not in any way. I think I started thinking this way probably towards

the end of the second year of the PhD. And both myself and Steve Self, who was

working in the Azores, and another student [Adrienne Bond] who was working in

Greece, we’d all seen these things and George had seen them in different volcanoes,

so we were pretty sure that, you know, the things I was seeing in Italy weren’t just

sort of some oddball thing but they were something very general that you could see in

all the volcanoes round the world. And so we were sort of trying to think what this

could mean. And I’m not sure I can really remember quite why I thought fluidisation

might be – I started reading some of the old – I think probably it was – there were a

couple of early papers, one in the ‘50s, where a female geologist called Doris

Reynolds [wife of Arthur Holmes] had sort of vaguely suggested that fluidisation

might occur in nature and, you know, explained various geological phenomena. And

I think it was almost like a throwaway line that this might happen in volcanic systems.

Stephen Sparks Page 54

C1379/89

Track 1

54

And then there was a later paper by some Americans, which would have been early

‘60s, where a guy took – he heated up some powder in the laboratory and he put the

powder down a shoot and he noticed that the powder when it was hot was [travelled]

much further than when it was cold. And he said, well, this must be some sort of

fluidisation. It was a bit vague but it was – so the sort of embryonic idea was already

there in the literature. And at that time in the early ‘60s, this is an interesting aspect

of science, I could read absolutely everything that had been ever written about this

particular topic as a PhD student. If I took this same topic and I asked a new PhD

student to read everything that had ever been written about this same topic, they

would need ten years to do their PhD. So, you know, at the time there was a really

rather small literature, something that – a single PhD student could get to grips with

everything that had been written. And these two sort of rather vague ideas had been

put forward that fluidisation might partly play a role. And so I think that’s probably

why I decided – and then I knew that the chemical engineers, you know, I’d sort of

found the chemical engineers at Imperial were really top notch and they actually had

apparatus where you could see this happening, so I went over and sort of talked to

them.

[2:10:22]

What was George’s view of what you were doing?

I think he really liked it. I mean, he really liked having PhD students who were sort

of independent and had their own ideas. He never imposed ideas on people. I mean,

he was quite – he was, you know, he was a person who had very well thought out

views and arguments and so it was – he would, you know, he would – against some

inexperienced PhD student he would essentially [laughs] know an awful lot and so –

but he didn’t – he didn’t impose his ideas on people. And I think he liked the fact that

his PhD students were coming up with sort of new ways of thinking about things.

And how then did the PhD develop from there?

Stephen Sparks Page 55

C1379/89

Track 1

55

Well, we published the paper – well, two of the papers, which subsequently – the first

paper was in Nature, a little paper, and then one in Geology, which was sort of in and

around the ideas I’ve just described. And then I had a sort of more conventional map

on the geology of this area. And then – I mean, I should say that there were quite a lot

of – that that pumice and rock fragment, there were quite a few other things that we

observed and deduced, which have turned out to be really important at the time. So

we published this paper in Geology, which has subsequently been very highly cited,

and I then – and the last year of my PhD, I – George thought, okay, you’ve done this

work here, and you should go to Santorini in Greece, where the big eruption happened

in the Bronze Age, and you should look at the deposits from that eruption. And he

had another PhD student who was working on that topic. So I went over to Santorini

with a girl called Adrienne Bond, who was another PhD student at the time, and we

did – the beginning of my third year, we did some – quite a lot of work on Santorini.

And we mapped – did the same sort of stuff and we saw the same sort of

relationships, but it also got me into unravelling the story of this huge late Bronze Age

eruption, which was supposed to be cataclysmic for the ancient world and it’s, you

know, there’s all the archaeological story and mythical story around it. And I got

really interested in that so that sort of took me in a slightly different direction. And

that actually determined where I – what happened next, as it were.

How – in what way then is this site different from the previous site, Bolsena?

Not – in general not very different, similar sort of volcano, very big explosive

eruptions which happen infrequently but when they do they produce sort of gigantic

deposits.

So it was the stories and the archaeological evidence around this one that was

significant?

No. The only reason I went there was to see – look at another volcano and see if the

same things that I saw in the Italian one were going on. But in going there and then

sort of getting involved in studying the late Bronze Age eruption of Santorini,

inevitably you were drawn into other areas of endeavour, like the myths around

Stephen Sparks Page 56

C1379/89

Track 1

56

Atlantis and the archaeology site that had been discovered there and the Minoans and

all that aspect. So it sort of brought you into a different arena of – where volcanology,

you know, I suppose it was my sort of opening – well, I’ve got one sort of story that

we should include in but I’ll – if you remind me about Iceland and Heimaey, I’ll come

back to that. But just to continue with Santorini, it just got you into a different, you

know, other aspects of volcano eruptions, what the impact of eruptions – how huge

eruptions had played into human history, things like that. So I just got interested in –

that interested me.

[2:15:01]

What I should say is that probably my biggest – one of my biggest breaks in hindsight

during my PhD was that George – George had a research assistant who was another

very eccentric man called Basil Booth, and whenever there was an eruption – they’d

go – whenever there was an eruption somewhere Basil and George would go and sort

of go and watch the volcano and make measurements directly on the eruption. And in

1973, so this would be in the sort of second year of my – well into the second year of

my PhD, the island of Heimaey in Iceland erupted, south of Iceland, and there was a

significant volcanic eruption there. It happened in January and George and Basil

would undoubtedly have gone to make observations on the eruption if they had been

around, but they were off in Tenerife doing some fieldwork, their own fieldwork, and

so they were away when this eruption started. And so myself and Steve Self, my

fellow student, we sort of talked to John Sutton, you know, the professor, and he’s an

FRS and big noise. It was the sort of time when – the Royal Society still does sponsor

urgency responses to sort of natural phenomena, but at the time it was sort of – it was

a bit more, you know, sort of not quite so formal, the ways of applying. So John

Sutton said, ‘Oh, you lads should go out there and see this volcano.’ So he went to

the Royal Society, got these two young students – he said, ‘George isn’t around, we

can’t ask him, we should have a sort of British presence of some sort.’ So he got us

some money from the Royal Society, this is John Sutton, and so Steve and I went out

in the first week of the eruption and we spent a few days on the island watching the

eruption and making observations.

Stephen Sparks Page 57

C1379/89

Track 1

57

Firstly could you – from a sort of spectator point of view, what did it – if you take

yourself back there, what did it look like, for people who haven’t seen?

Well, it’s really – well, the first thing is we arrived in Reykjavik – and this is the

middle of January where it’s dark virtually all the time apart from between about ten

thirty and three in the afternoon. And being pretty naïve and inexperienced, we

hadn’t really – we sort of went to the local institution and asked whether we could go

out and see the volcano and they were very reluctant to let us go out at all. And

eventually we managed to persuade them that we should go out – we could go out for

three or four days, and they eventually agreed to that. And so we went down to the

south of Iceland and then – the only way of getting to the island was by about a five

hour tug ride across in incredibly rough weather, so we were both horribly seasick,

got into the port at Heimaey, and then of course you see this spectacular thing. The

volcano at the time was very active and you’ve got these spurts of – like a giant

firework display, spurts of molten rock going two, three hundred metres into the air

and this great huge cone of volcanic cinders and bombs being deposited, forming a

new volcano. And so we came in of course in the dark and it was absolutely

spectacular. And it was really, as I say, sort of – I’d never seen an erupting volcano

before, it was my first experience, so it really was, you know, sort of an awe inspiring

thing to see. And we only had about three days on the volcano and we slept in the

local museum and we really hadn’t brought much – we’d brought some sleeping bags

with us. And the Icelanders – they were evacuating the town and it was sort of really

a volcanic emergency. And so they really weren’t going to spend a lot of time with a

couple of young Brits who’d arrived sort of largely unannounced. And so they

allowed us to sleep in the museum but we had to sleep in sleeping bags on a hard

floor, and I remember – there were earthquakes going on and I remember we didn’t

get much sleep ‘cause we were – we were in this museum with lights in the cabinets,

with sort of stuffed seagulls and herons surrounding us, and at the same time there

were little earthquakes going on and then there was ash sort of – not really fine ash

but really quite large lumps of volcanic fragments a few centimetres across landing on

the roof of the museum at times. And there was – often you could hear the

explosions. Now of course we didn’t get much sleep too ‘cause we just wanted to go

and look at the volcano and we did quite a lot of volcano watching, but then during

Stephen Sparks Page 58

C1379/89

Track 1

58

the daylight hours we would – I did some filming, I’d taken some film with me, and I

took some film from a known position, and then Steve and I went round and we made

the same measurements – exactly the same measurements I’ve been describing from

Italy with the size of the fragments and the thickness, and we went around during the

eruption measuring the deposit on the ground. And so we came back with two very

nice pieces of data or information. One was the film of the explosions and the other

was the particles. Now actually it turns out that despite – for reasons – well, I don’t

know what the reasons are, we published the only ever map – published map of that

eruption of the grain size. And so we saw the volcano. But unlike the work I was

describing before where you’re trying to reconstruct what happened in an old volcano,

which you – what the processes are but you’ve never actually see them, here we had

an opportunity of making the same sorts of measurements but we’re actually seeing

what sort of activity is creating those deposits. So we could link the deposits on the

ground with the activity of the volcano. And that’s really what we did and what I’ve

been doing a lot of ever since. You know, you obviously have a lot more information

about the physics if you can see it happening and so we could do that. And then we

had the film and these – we made – I took the film back. I didn’t do it during my PhD

but in one of my post docs I – I actually digitised the – not digitised, that’s what you

do now, but I looked at them frame by frame and I followed individual particles and I

worked out the – I knew where the camera was so I could work out – and the scale, so

I could work out the trajectories of the particles and I could measure – by inference I

could measure the velocity of the jet coming out of the volcano and that led to making

some of the very first observations of volcanic jets. And then of course you could use

those measurements to look at the physics of the jets. Now that came later but I got

the information during those three days. So that was very pivotal because, as I say,

that was a wonderful opportunity for two young scientists to see a real volcano.

What could you see in terms of sort of – I understand that from a distance you can see

stuff coming out of the top, but what could you see in terms of flows or ways in which

stuff was being distributed and deposited? What could you see of that?

Well, you could see – as I say, you would get these – you’d get discrete explosions,

bursts and then a little bit of quiet and then another burst happening every few

Stephen Sparks Page 59

C1379/89

Track 1

59

seconds, and every time there was a burst you’d get a jet of hot molten rocks and ash

coming out of the volcano at 150 metres per second, spurting up to perhaps a couple

of hundred metres in what we call a fire fountain. And then as this jet, hot jet, mixes

with the air, it all cools down and you get a big black cloud rising above that and then

a lot of the bigger fragments then fall down by the side of this jet and build up this –

what we call a volcanic cone. And further away from the volcano the particles land

and they get smaller away from the volcano, that’s what we measured. And then

sometimes you’d get continuous – for several minutes you’d just get continued

roaring, like sort of a continual jet coming out of the volcano, and you could hear the

roaring and hissing of this jet just like the back of, you know, an aircraft engine. So

these things were really quite noisy, yep, and just very spectacular.

Is there a particular smell associated with it? We’ve got the noise and the sight of it.

Yes, there’ll be a bit of sulphur dioxide that you can sometimes get a sniff of if the

wind’s blowing in the right direction, so you could smell some of the sulphur.

And you were measuring particles that were actually landing?

No, not at the time. We tried to avoid that. Again, I think we might have worn hard

hats, I’m not – yes, we did wear hard hats. I think again, the health and safety people

these days would probably have kittens about what we did. But we went round and,

you know, when the volcano was quiet or the wind was blowing in the other direction,

we would go to the side of the volcano where nothing was landing and we’d look at

what had landed.

Sort of the previous day or –

The previous day or night, and then we’d make measurements of that, and take

samples, of course. So that was, as I say, a great experience. Scientifically it was

important because we could then go one step from looking at things where we didn’t

know what exactly had happened and we were trying to infer what had happened, to

Stephen Sparks Page 60

C1379/89

Track 1

60

looking at things where we could see what was produced but we could also see what

happened to produce it.

Were there other volcanologists there?

There weren’t, no, not – I mean – sorry, there was the Iceland team, the emergency

people, but they really didn’t worry too much about what we did. They were too busy

dealing with the emergency.

[2:26:25]

Thank you. So what’s the next stage in the – this happens towards the end of the PhD,

this –

This is about January 1973, so it would have been roughly halfway – just over

halfway through the PhD. And it wasn’t included in the PhD, none of this – we

published a paper, it wasn’t a chapter in the PhD or anything. So I then started to get

this interest in physics of volcanic eruptions and I very nearly got a job in the Rabaul

Volcanic Observatory in Papua New Guinea. I was offered a job there at the end of

the PhD and I was almost going to take that but I also applied for a fellowship from

something called the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. I don’t know if

you know about that.

I know a little bit about it, only because John Dewey is –

Oh yeah, he’s on their board, isn’t he?

Yeah.

That’s right. So that’s the, you know, the Great Exhibition of 1851, made an

enormous profit from – and that money was invested in science for the

commonwealth so you could – and you can still apply for fellowships. So I got one of

those for two years and I went to Lancaster University. And the reason I chose to go

Stephen Sparks Page 61

C1379/89

Track 1

61

to Lancaster was that there was a young physicist called Lionel Wilson, who was a

lecturer there. He was certainly, you know, old compared to me but at the time he

was sort of – in his sort of early stage of his career. And Lionel was interested in

planetology and he was interested in physics of eruptions and eruptions. And he had

done some work with George, so George was sort of aware that he [George] wasn’t a

mathematician himself and that also he wasn’t, you know, experiments weren’t really

his thing. But he got together with Lionel, this was while I was doing my PhD, and

they did some interesting work, like throwing bits of pumice down the lift shaft of

Imperial College to measure the velocities. And Lionel was a pretty, you know, a

pretty good physicist and he started to get interested in volcanic processes in physics.

And [coughs] I chose Lancaster because I thought Lionel would be a good guy to

work with. And so that’s what I did, I went up to Lancaster and started a very strong

and productive collaboration with Lionel. I learnt a tremendous amount of physics

from him. And I learnt some important skills. I learnt how to code in FORTRAN and

run my own computer programmes. I learnt how to do finite element difference sort

of calculations, simple – at the time simple numerical calculations. And so Lionel and

I worked quite closely – very closely together and over the two years we – I think we

did probably one of the most important step forwards in volcanology in hindsight and

we published those papers and, as I say, we just – it was a very good strong

collaboration. And I also started – did some work with a chap called Harry Pinkerton,

who was a young geologist up there at the time, and we worked – we did – we went

and did fieldwork on the lavas of Etna together and we did quite a lot of work

measuring lava flows in the field. So I did two [coughs] main things. I worked with –

well, three actually. I worked with Lionel a lot. I worked with Harry on lava flows.

And I worked – I developed my own model of bubble growth in magmas.

[2:31:10]

So if I sort of deconstruct that a little bit for you, the work I did with Lionel was

explaining why volcanoes have two fundamental styles of behaviour. I mean, these

have been known for a long time. But really surprisingly, they hadn’t been explained

by any physical process. And Lionel and I realised that, if you have a very high speed

jet going into the Earth’s atmosphere, you can get two outcomes. One is that the jet

Stephen Sparks Page 62

C1379/89

Track 1

62

heats up enough air that the whole mixture becomes buoyant and therefore you get a

gigantic eruption column going up to the stratosphere and all the fragments fall out

over a wide area. Or the jet can come out of the volcano and although it mixes with

air, it’s still denser than the atmosphere and so when it runs out of – it’s going up just

like a sort of thrown cricket ball in the air, it eventually runs out of potential energy,

gets to a height and if that mixture’s then denser than the air it all collapses like a

fountain and flows along the ground and produces these very devastating flows. Now

the phenomena had been recognised for sixty or seventy years but there’d been no

physical explanation at all, literally none. And what Lionel and I did was we did very

simple fluid mechanical models, which showed how this worked quantitatively and

physically, and then we obviously published the papers. But that was explaining

probably sort of one of the big issues in volcanology, why you’ve got these two styles

of activity.

[End of Track 1]

Stephen Sparks Page 63

C1379/89

Track 2

63

Track 2

Could you describe in as much detail as you can, sort of step by step, what’s involved

in producing what I think you called fluid mechanical models to explain why jets have

these sort of two fates, either the high atmosphere or the low.

Yeah. Well, what – I mean, what got us thinking about it was observation again,

because we had observed these two styles of activity and Lionel and I started to think

through why it would behave one way or behave the other way. And we realised of

course that the fundamentals – and this was a little – I mean, it does link back to the

fact that we went to this Iceland volcano and I filmed these jets and it became obvious

that the stuff coming out of the volcano was a bit like, you know, the stuff out of the

back of a jet engine. It’s a really fast turbulent flow of gas. And we realised that the

fundamental feature of that is – of these volcanic jets is that they’re not just pure gas,

they’re a mixture of gases and particles, and so they’re what fluid mechanicists would

call a two phase mixture. And these mixtures – we knew from the – when we looked

at the fluid mechanics literature, and there’s a very long history of fluid mechanics

about jets and plumes, that these flows – if it was two phased then it was really

different from what most people had studied in fluid mechanics, which would be pure

fluids or pure gases. And at the time there was work in the fluid mechanics literature

on two phase, you know, mixtures of solids and gases or mixtures of solids and fluids,

but nothing that we knew of that was sort of directly applicable to the volcanoes. So

what Lionel did, who was, as I say, a very fine physicist, was he looked at the basic

equations which describe jets, how they behave, and we realised that these high speed

jets would be very hot but they would mix with cold air. And the thing that slows a

jet down, makes it stop, is the fact that the jet has to drag in bits of air which are at

standstill and has to accelerate them into – the eddies and the turbulent motions of the

jet drag in air and this slows down the jet, so that makes it stop. On the other hand,

this air, the cold air, is now being heated and cold air when it’s heated expands

dramatically when it’s at high temperature. And this of course makes it lighter, lower

density. So we’ve got two counteracting things, we’re slowing down this jet, which is

essentially losing energy. At the same time we’re heating up the air from the hot

volcanic particles and that’s actually creating energy because we’re taking heat from

Stephen Sparks Page 64

C1379/89

Track 2

64

the particles and we’re heating air and that’s creating an energy. And so those two

things are competing and I suppose you could say that the volcano behaves in – if the

heating is the winner then the whole mixture coming out of the volcano is going to be

lighter than the atmosphere and it’s just going to go up, you know, going to go very

high in the atmosphere. Whereas if the dragging in of the air wins and the energy loss

associated with that is more important than the heating then it will run out of energy

quite low in the atmosphere and then it’ll just collapse because it’s denser than air and

it’ll run – it’ll then just be like a river that’ll run down the volcano as a hot current,

something we call a pyroclastic flow. So those are – now okay, to understand that

more quantitatively you have to of course do the sums. You have to put up the

equations which describe the energy balance and the momentum balance of the flows

and the energy exchanges that take place. And when you – and then you can basically

do a calculation to say when the volcano will behave in one way or another way and

that’s really what Lionel and I did. I mean, as I say, I would say Lionel took the lead

in looking at the right equations to describe this and I took the lead in sort of

converting – putting the right parameters, you know, putting the right numbers into

the equations, which I thought were appropriate for a volcanic jet. And so then Lionel

ran the computer codes, you know, developed the computer codes to solve the

equations. I put in the numbers or would suggest the numbers that should go – the

appropriate numbers to go in, and then we mapped out when the volcano behaved in

one way or the other. And that’s really how it happened and that led us to sort of the

basic – this basic idea that – and then we did one other thing, which is – for the case

where the heat wins and so the volcanic eruption turns into what we call a giant

plume, the physics is very, very like the smoke coming out of a factory chimney or

smoke above a bonfire. The bonfire is heating the air, making it lighter and therefore

it rises high in the atmosphere. And the physics of a volcano is – in this particular

case, you know, the one where the heating wins, is just like that. And then you can

predict how high for a given energy flux – in other words, if you have a little bonfire

then the smoke won’t go very high. If you have a big bonfire the smoke will go a lot

higher in the atmosphere. And we applied that same physics and the mathematics

behind it and we worked out the relationship between the intensity of the eruption, the

explosion, and how high it went in the atmosphere. We then looked at all the data that

we could find and we found this theory worked extraordinary well and we published

Stephen Sparks Page 65

C1379/89

Track 2

65

another paper, which is you know, sort of, I think, you know, sort of the first – the

first establishment of the sort of physics of volcanic plumes.

[07:04]

Where were you doing this work? Can you sort of describe the place where this going

on?

Well, this was all in Lancaster University, which was a sort of modern ‘60s building

with sort of, you know, all modern buildings. I mean, we were just in sort of regular

old, you know, not old but new offices of a ‘60s university. Yeah, so sort of not – but

not particularly extraordinary an environment to do work. I mean, it’s a nice

university and a good university but –

And where was the computer that was being used?

Oh, well this was a giant old mainframe, which is probably 100 times less powerful

than, you know, your iPod or something like that now, but one of these sort of giant

things with cards, you know. We had these punched – in those days you wrote your

card, FORTRAN code, by punching, you know, writing the code, getting a series of

cards – I don’t know whether you’re going to be seeing these. But you then put them

in a kind of relay and the machine reads off – you punch in and it produces holes in

the card and you put it on the machine and the machine just takes the cards and reads

them sequentially for the code and then a day later you get your output. And then you

find it’s all gone horribly wrong and you’ve done some mess up with the code and it

didn’t work very well [laughs] and therefore you have to do it again. So it was – as I

say, the power of the computer there, I’m sure there’s a sort of – I don’t know, it’s

probably – I’ve got a Mac in the office, a Mac laptop, like everybody and that’s

probably infinitely more powerful than that whole code [I meant Lancaster computer

system].

Was it actually on site?

Stephen Sparks Page 66

C1379/89

Track 2

66

Oh, it’s on the site, yeah, as you went into the computer centre and you submitted

your cards and they got fed into the machine, the reader, and you got your paper print

output.

[08:59]

And what did the model tell you about what – I don’t know, what initial conditions or

what conditions as this eruption develops determine whether it’s going to be –

Yeah. Well, that was the key thing, that we found some very nice simple

relationships. We found out that if the amount of gas in the magma was quite high, it

would promote the behaviour where everything goes up because there’s less hot solids

and more gas, so it’s lighter. And so we found that – and also if it had more gas in it

was a stronger jet. The gas gave the energy to the jet, so a bigger amount of gas

meant more expansion in the atmosphere, a faster jet. And so that would promote the

style which went up to very high levels, the plume model. If the vent was very wide –

the wider the vent had the opposite effect because if you have a volcanic nozzle or a

volcanic vent and you make it wider then it takes longer to mix the air into the jet

because it’s simply wider and therefore it runs out of energy before it can take in

enough air to heat up, and therefore that promotes the collapse. So we found these

simple relationships. And there’s also a pressure effect as well, the pressure of the jet

makes a difference. But we found some very simple rules and those simple rules

amount to – that the more powerful the eruption, the more the tendency is for

producing the collapse – the unstable eruptions and the collapses and these flows that

go along the ground.

The more powerful the eruptions?

Yeah, on average the more powerful. But it’s not a sort of simple linear thing. I

mean, it’s not that weak eruptions produce one and powerful ones produce the other,

it’s much more to do with the geometry and the gas content, but on the whole bigger

eruptions are more likely to produce these collapsing columns. But we – so – but we

also were able to explain the geology very nicely and when we, you know, if I took

Stephen Sparks Page 67

C1379/89

Track 2

67

you to Pompeii and Vesuvius and you looked at the layers that had buried Pompeii,

the first thing you would see would be a layer of pumice, which forms from one of

these very high columns where they form – the heating wins and the column goes up

very high. And you go to Pompeii and you would see this deposit at the bottom. And

then you’d see that Pompeii was wiped out by these horizontal flows from Vesuvius,

where the column collapsed, and that happened later in the eruption. Now we see that

all the time in the geology, that sequence is a very common sequence, and it’s quite

nicely explained by the model because early on in eruption the gas tends to have

accumulated early on at the top of – in the early stages of an eruption there tends to be

more gas, but the conduit tends to be very narrow because it’s early in the eruption

and this favours the high column. As the eruption goes on the bits of the crater wall

fall in, bits of it get broken off and the volcanic conduit, the nozzle, if you like,

widens and sometimes the gas goes down a bit. But the main thing is the conduit

widens as the volcano continues to erupt and as it widens it gets more and more

favourable to the collapse model. So we go – and when it gets too big or too wide

then the column cannot go very high, it has to collapse and has to go down. So you

go to Pompeii and you can see the layers of pumice and ash and you can explain –

you can give a sort of plausible explanation for what you see.

[13:16]

What did the output of the model look like? You’ve described there the sort of – the

findings the model and the way that the model explains reality –

Yeah.

But what were you actually faced with when you’d – you went back a day later and

you got the output?

Well, firstly to have checked that there weren’t any bugs or there weren’t any errors

or it actually worked at all, which of course – as all computer programmers will know,

it’s usually the case that there’s something wrong or it doesn’t feel right or it just

doesn’t convert – the algorithms just don’t converge or whatever it is. So most of the

Stephen Sparks Page 68

C1379/89

Track 2

68

time you’re sort of trying to find the bugs in the programme. But of course when you

do get the results and you’re sort of reasonably confident then of course you can start

plotting out the results and mapping out the behaviours and the regimes. I mean, it’s

worth just – again, it’s probably worth if – these days everybody is fascinated by

impact, you know, everybody’s got to demonstrate that the research they do has

impact. Now when the forecasts were made for the volcanic ash the last couple of

years from Iceland, the Met Office and all the other – whenever there’s an eruption

around the world, have to do a forecast of where the volcanic ash goes and that

forecast involves a simple model of the volcano and a weather forecasting model,

which takes the ash where the weather takes it. The volcano bit is essentially based

on that bit of work that Lionel and I did, that they still use now. So it’s measuring the

height of the eruption column and the volcano, knowing that that height is related to

the amount of ash that’s being driven into the atmosphere, in other words the energy

flux, and then working out how that height relates to the energy flux, so that you can

then – knowing the height, you can know how much ash is being put into the

atmosphere and then you can put the weather on that and find out where it’s going to

go. And so that ’78 work actually is – if you want impact, that work now is the

method that everyone uses in the world to forecast volcanic ash.

What did you feel about the value of the work at the time?

Oh, we were just – well, that’s the point I was going to make. We would have really

no idea that it would have any impact. I suppose it was sort of vaguely, but we

weren’t thinking about impact like as we’re being asked to do at the moment. We

were just doing it because of trying to understand how volcanoes work. And so it was

purely curiosity research and, you know, there wasn’t any sense that this was being

done for the good of society or whatever. The sense was that we just wanted to

understand what these – what volcanoes do.

[16:26]

Did you give this model a name at the time?

Stephen Sparks Page 69

C1379/89

Track 2

69

No, not particularly. And, you know, I probably overstated – because like all science,

you know, there’s a very – there’s a tendency – and I perhaps probably strayed over

the line of sort of thinking of all science in terms of sort of eureka moments, where

the sort of – the one or two scientists think of something. I mean, that science was

built on some fantastic research done in Cambridge by applied mathematicians in the

1950s, who understood the physics of plumes and jets. And we – our science was

essentially to some extent derivative. We read up their papers and we looked at how

they described jets and plumes and we applied that same physics to volcanoes. And

we added in the observations so we could compare the predictions of these models.

But fundamentally, if you plot the heights of ash plumes against the intensity of the

eruption and you then draw a line produced by – a theory produced by a great

mathematician called GI Taylor and his students in the 1950s in Cambridge, you’ll

see you don’t have to fit the data to any line, it just – when I show the plot other

people will say, well that’s – is that the best fit. But it’s not the best fit, it’s their little

empirical equation that they derived in 1956. So in a way, you know, the science

builds on previous scientists. I mean, science is in many ways incremental. I mean,

almost the fluidisation story – somebody had that idea and then you build on those

and you make sort of jumps that – it’s sort of a more progressive thing than being just

sort of, you know, distinct eureka moments.

[18:30]

Thank you. Could you now describe the work with – is it Henry –

Harry Pinkerton.

Okay, on the lavas of Etna. What was involved both in the field and not in the field?

Oh well, that was a fantastic time. Harry was a geologist but he had a very – Harry

had two great strengths, certainly one that I don’t have. One was he was – he loved

designing and building scientific instruments and he was very good at it. He had a

sort of engineering bent and he was a very sort of intuitive and systematic scientist.

He was a bit, you know, pretty well the same age as I was, just slightly older. And

Stephen Sparks Page 70

C1379/89

Track 2

70

Harry was very interested in the viscosity of magmas, magmas being molten rock and

lavas. And so when I got up to Lancaster Harry and I started talking and we decided

that we were really interested in measuring how lava flows work. And Harry built

some equipment which was to essentially measure the viscosity of lava in the field.

So it’s – viscosity just being a measure of how sticky a liquid – how fast liquids flow.

And so we wanted to know whether, you know, lava – measure the properties –

viscosities of property, which describes how sticky it is, whether it’s honey or water

or very sticky tar or whatever. And Harry built this apparatus and he also built some

other apparatus to measure some temperatures. We had some thermocouples. And

Harry was the person who could, you know, make the instruments and make them

work, make them do good measurements. And so Harry and I and our two wives

went out to Etna and we camped on a snowdrift surrounded by active lava flows for

two weeks. So we took our tents and we took all this kit, and there was a lot of it, up

the mountain. We hired some guys to help us get it up the mountain and we set up

camp on a – the only place to camp on the volcano was on the snowdrifts because

everywhere else was sort of lava rubbles so you couldn’t camp on it. So we camped

on the snowdrifts and then we spent two sort of wonderful weeks making maps of the

lava flows as they actually formed and then we made lots of measurements of the

rheology using Harry’s instrument. And that was a very productive time. We

published a couple of Nature papers from it, one of which was one of the – essentially

some rather rare direct measurements of the properties of – rheological properties of

the lava, the viscosity. And we looked at how the lavas had placed and we started to

think about the physics of lava flows and how – obviously they flow along but they

cool and they solidify and that eventually makes them stop and we wanted to

understand how that happened. And we also got an idea which has turned out to be

very important. I don’t think we can be sort of credited as either the first people or

perhaps the – again it’s rather incremental, but we – that work – we realised that a lot

of volcanic processes, including the ones we’d seen, were not governed by cooling but

they were caused by gases – magmas – molten materials, magmas, losing gas and then

solidifying as a consequence. And we realised that and we published a little paper in

Nature on that. So that was a really great experience because again it was fieldwork

coupled with some sort of – trying to do some sort of physics on it and making some

measurements that we would then use.

Stephen Sparks Page 71

C1379/89

Track 2

71

[22:46]

Could you say sort of step by step how you took the measurements in the field of these

lavas?

Well – yeah. I mean, the instrument that Harry produced, and sort of Harry should get

complete credit for this, was what’s called a piston rheometer. What that means is

basically it’s a long steel instrument, about two and half metres long, and at the end of

it is a piston which you push in against a spring of known strength. And then what

you do is you plunge this instrument into the lava flow, you release the spring, which

gives you a known force, which pushes a piston, a cylindrical piston, into the lava.

And then you record – on a chart recorder you record the rate at which this piston

pushes into the lava. And that – if the lava’s more and more viscous and more and

more stiff then obviously for a given force it’ll go in slower, whereas a more fluid

lava, it’ll go in faster. So the rate at which the piston goes into the lava is a measure

of the viscosity. So what you do then is you have to calibrate it. You go back to the

laboratory and you get maybe some honey and golden syrup or tar, things of –

anyway, you get fluids of known viscosity and you push the instrument into those and

you do the same measurements and then you calibrate the instrument and then

interpret the data you got from the field. Now the – I wouldn’t – well, the fun bit of

this is that in a lava flow, obviously if you’ve got a cold steel pushed against the lava

it’ll instantly freeze, so you actually have to pre-warm the instruments. So you have

to keep pushing it into the lava and taking it out and pushing it in so that the steel

becomes very hot, because you don’t want the result to be contaminated by the

cooling effect. You don’t want it to solidify. So you have to keep putting it in. So

you push it into the lava, you walk down the lava for as far as you can stand it and

then you pull it out. And then you go back again and do that until you think it’s hot

enough to make the measurement. And we got Pilkington’s, the glassmakers in St

Helens, to give us the sort of – we had clothes there which were the same clothes that

people use going into blast furnaces, for the glassmakers, Pilkington’s in St Helens,

and they gave us some of the clothes that would protect you from the heat. So that’s

basically what we did.

Stephen Sparks Page 72

C1379/89

Track 2

72

[25:26]

And what was the role of your wives, who were also there with you?

Oh well, they sort of watched and helped and sometimes – I think they went down – I

think they went down into the town a couple of times and left us to it for – I think, if I

remember it right, and they helped. But they also went on walks. Both wives were

keen walkers so they sort of went wandering around.

When they helped what did they do?

Oh, I think they just sort of helped with notes and taking photographs and things like

that, as – so it was, you know, it was really quite – as I said, it was quite a fun period.

What does it feel like to be doing that work that close to a lava flow?

Well, it gets very hot of course and that’s the thing you have to avoid. That’s why we

wore these protective clothes.

And what does it look like on the ground, the lava flow?

Well, it’s just like a stiff sticky liquid. It moves about a centimetre every second so

it’s very sort of creeping. It’s tangibly moving. The flows on Etna move between one

and ten centimetres per second and they move slowly. As I say, it looks slightly like –

it’s obviously a liquid but a very sticky liquid. And it’s sort of incandescent and

obviously quite spectacular at night because it’s sort of red hot and – it’s sort of red

hot liquid essentially that you’re dealing with.

[27:07]

Thank you. And I think you said that the third type of work that you were involved in

at Lancaster involved images of bubbles inside –

Stephen Sparks Page 73

C1379/89

Track 2

73

No, it was – what that was, was – we – if you look at any volcanic material, like

pumice or scoria, I mean, you, you know, you – the most obvious thing is it’s

absolutely full of – many volcanic products are just full of bubbles. And so volcanic

eruptions – one of the main effects of a volcanic eruption is for the gas that’s

dissolved under high pressure in the earth to come out of solution. So when the

magma full of gases dissolved deep in the earth comes up to near the surface, you get

foaming or bubbling. So it’s just like opening, you know, a beer or something like

that, the pressure goes down and the bubbles come out as solution and the bubbles

grow. Now of course in a volcano these gases are dissolved under very large pressure

and when they come out they can do so rather violently and one of the products they

produce is pumice, which of course floats as just sort of foamy rock, which volcanoes

produce, which I guess many people know about. But very often the pressures are so

high that the bubbles just rip the liquid apart, it breaks it apart and forms the volcanic

ash. And so that happens during the explosion. And we – and so I wanted to

understand how this process worked and rather like the past, you know, the earlier

one, I – there was very, very little literature on this and nobody had really done very

much work on the physics of bubble growth and nucleation. In other words, you

know, how fast do the bubbles grow, how big do they get, what do they tell us about

the pressure conditions, how can we understand that. So there was almost nothing

around. And so while I was at Lancaster as a – I think I mentioned earlier, this was

the first time I’d – through Lionel, I was sort of introduced to the idea of doing

numerical models to solve equations, which are a bit more complicated than you can,

you know, you couldn’t get an analytical solution. So part of my post doc there, I

looked up the literature on bubble growth. There’s a lot of it in the engineering

literature particularly. I taught myself how people thought bubbles nucleated, how

bubbles grow, and they grow because the pressure goes down. If you get a bubble

under high pressure, when it comes to low pressure it’s got to expand so it grows by

that. And then it grows by what people call diffusion of – gas dissolved into liquid

has to – the gas molecules have to move into the – out of the liquid into the bubble

and by moving into the bubble the bubble grows. So it’s exactly what you see when

you open, you know, a fizzy drink or something, that’s when the bubbles grow. And

we also know that you can get catastrophic flows through bubble growth. And in fact

Stephen Sparks Page 74

C1379/89

Track 2

74

anyone who wants to do this can get a bottle of lemonade, fizzy lemonade, pour a

little bit – half of it out and drop a teaspoon of sugar in, and then it’ll have a jet which

will go up two or three metres, because the sugar triggers the catastrophic growth of

bubbles. So these are all the things I wanted to understand. So I read up a lot of

engineering literature. I mean, I remember reading papers on the bends, you know,

bubble growth – when people go diving, they get the bends because bubbles grow in

their blood. So I read up some of that literature and I sort of immersed myself in that

literature, got the sort of principles, the sort of physics, and then I wrote a computer

programme, FORTRAN programme, which estimated rates of bubble formation in

volcanic eruptions. So I put in the appropriate numbers, the pressures, the natures of

the gases, the solubility of the gases, all the things which govern how fast bubbles

grow. And I made a computer programme which essentially worked out what the – if

you like, the regimes of bubble growth that might occur in nature and eruptions. And

I published a paper on that on my own, which, as I say, is I think probably my second

highest cited paper, it might be. And because it was the first one to have a go at that, I

sort of found a lot of things that nobody had really thought of before as a

consequence. There were some obvious things – from doing those numerical

calculations, a lot of obvious things emerged, which turned out to be very useful for

understanding the basics of volcanic eruptions.

What sort of things emerged out of the calculations that wouldn’t have done by a non

mathematical –

I think it’s – again, I don’t think – I think it’s like the ones we’ve been describing,

because you can’t really just do a numerical model or a model, I don’t think, you

know, without being informed by data or observation. So you’re always seeking to

understand some observations that are made and sort of trying to make sense of them

using the mathematical model. I think that’s how almost all the things I’ve been

involved in have worked. And we knew that bubbles which formed in magmas which

were very viscous and tended to be associated with very explosive volcanoes like

Mount St Helens, tended to form very small bubbles, whereas the sorts of volcanoes

you get in Hawaii, which are – the magma’s much hotter and much more fluid, tend to

produce much bigger bubbles. Okay, well you might think that – it sort of – there

Stephen Sparks Page 75

C1379/89

Track 2

75

might be a sort of so whatness about that. I mean, okay, we explain why one type has

big – the model would explain why one had big bubbles and one had little bubbles,

and the nature. But then when the magma gets fragmented or smashed apart in the

explosion, the size of the particles that are produced are determined by – seemed to be

determined by the bubble size. That’s the natural way the things break, you know, the

big bubble – something with a lot of big bubbles will break into big fragments.

Something with a lot of little bubbles tends to break into a lot of small fragments. So

then you realise that for a more – again, this is an impact point. None of this work

was done in any way related to impact. But what’s important in forecasting volcanic

ash over Britain is what’s the size of the particles that are produced, and to understand

the size of the particles you have to know about the bubbles. So I think that’s the

principles of it. It also relates, but not in a very simple way that I can easily explain,

but the other fundamental thing in volcanoes is we get lava flows, which sort of flow

harmlessly down the volcano, and we get explosions and the one thing that – I don’t

think was really known so well then but we do understand very well now, is the

magma which forms the lavas originally had the same amount of gas in it as the

magma that formed explosions, you know. So a simple explanation is that if a

volcano explodes, the magma has a lot of gas in it. If it doesn’t explode and produces

a lava, it didn’t have much gas. That’s the obvious explanation and it was sort of the

explanation that people had in the sort of, I would say, ‘60s, even into the ‘70s. That

turns out to be completely wrong. The magmas which form the harmless lava also

originally had a lot of gas in, so the problem now becomes not of saying one’s gas

rich and one’s gas poor. The problem comes, why did the – how did the gas escape

from one magma so that it can come out harmlessly as a lava. So in other words, the

gas comes out slowly and it never produces pressures big enough for an explosion and

in other cases it does. So the question changes. And to understand that, why you get

lavas sometimes and why you get explosions other times, you really need to

understand actually in some detail how these bubbles interact with each other. And so

this led on – I mean, again, this is not the research I did then but it led onto a lot of

research, not done by me but done by many others subsequently, which really tried to

understand how these bubbles interact. And the work I did at Lancaster I think was a

sort of starting point for that sort of field of understanding, you know, what gases do

in volcanoes.

Stephen Sparks Page 76

C1379/89

Track 2

76

[37:33]

Thank you. You mentioned that your wife came with you to Etna. How would you –

how did you meet and when did you meet?

Oh right, well that’s – ah, yeah, that’s going back a long way because we’ve been

married a long time. We met when I went up to see my father in Birkenhead, when

he’d just married his second wife, and she was a teacher at a Catholic teacher training

college in London, quite close to Imperial College, called Maria Assumpta. And she

– we just were – she lived on the Wirral in a place called Heswall, quite close to

Birkenhead, and we just were travelling on the same train and then we met on Lime

Street Station, so our, you know, sort of famous pickup point in Liverpool. And so

we met on Lime Street Station and sort of, you know, our – I didn’t know the area

very well so I asked her to show me to Birkenhead and so that was – [laughs] that was

how we were introduced.

And how did that relationship develop towards getting married? You know, how and

when did you see each other?

Well, we were both students in London so it was all this sort of, as I say, about 1970,

and then we got married in 1971. So we’ve been married, you know, quite a long

time.

And she was working as a teacher while you were –

She was a teacher – yes, teacher training and then she started doing teaching in

London, so we – so yeah, that’s how – yeah, and of course obviously we were married

by the time I did my PhD.

[39:18]

Stephen Sparks Page 77

C1379/89

Track 2

77

Thank you. And at the end of the Lancaster appointment, what decisions did you

make then about what to do next? What were the options, as it were?

Well, it was serendipity because a well known geological oceanographer called

Norman Watkins, a larger than life character, was a professor at the Graduate School

of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. So Norman knew about George

and knew he produced PhD students and Norman did a – organised for – got funding

from NSF to take the URI research vessel, called the Trident, out to the Eastern

Mediterranean. And he contacted George and George said, Steve’s done a [PhD on

Santorini] – and the idea of his expedition, I should have said, was to trace out the ash

from the great Bronze Age eruption of Santorini. So Norman contacted George, I

think in the first instance, and then George said, well – I’m not sure whether – I’m not

actually sure quite how that link came up because we’d also published our paper, so it

could be that Norman – Norman worked with George and he’d perhaps also seen our

paper. Anyway, he contacted me and said, well, firstly would you like to come on our

cruise to the Eastern Mediterranean, and secondly, how about coming over to Rhode

Island for a post doc. And so I applied for a NATO fellowship, they did NATO

fellowships, and I got that to go to Rhode Island and then I went on the cruise with

Norman. And we went, taking sediment cores round the Mediterranean and picked up

the volcanic ash. And that led me to go into, you know, spend two years in Rhode

Island, the School of Oceanography.

The – could you describe the process of taking sediment cores on this?

Yeah, the process of sediment cores is – it comes back to sort of steel barrels again a

bit. You basically have a steel pipe, you have a great big weight on it, at the top of it

– so imagine a steel pipe and you imagine a sort of – big weights, almost like sort of

weight lifters weights, on the top. And you plunge this pipe with – it has an inner

liner of plastic that you push up it to take the sediment. So what you do is you plunge

this instrument onto the seafloor, the tube basically pushes into the sediment and takes

a core of – it takes a core of sediment. But that sort of brute force – you find when

you do that that the core won’t go in more than a metre or two if you’re lucky. So you

don’t get very far with that. So a piston corer is something with a piston at the bottom

Stephen Sparks Page 78

C1379/89

Track 2

78

of the tube so that the piston is – and then it’s on a bit of steel cable, which is attached

to a trigger. And what it’s designed to do is the moment the tube touches the seafloor,

the trigger is pressed and as the steel tube goes into the sediment, the piston goes up

and in principle it stays exactly – it’s designed to stay exactly at the seafloor. So it’s

like a vacuum and it sucks the sediment up into the tube. And so this way you can get

four or five or six metres of core and you can go back 100 or 200,000 years of ocean

history by doing that. And that’s what we did. So we went round – and it takes four

or five hours to take a single core and you’re – you do work – the boat works night

and day and we collected about thirty cores.

[43:25]

And what did you come to know about the sort of – I can see the aims of the work but

the reasons for doing it at that time? Why was this work happening here?

Well, I think the reason was that scientifically the whole idea of a giant eruption

extinguishing a whole civilisation in the Bronze Age, which was around at the time,

and then the sort of rather much more speculative and romantic notion that Santorini

might have been Atlantis and there were books written about this. So it was a very

popular science topic. And then the discovery of the Minoan – late Minoan

civilisation, the town of Akrotiri buried beneath the ash was a sort of Greek Pompeii.

So there was a sort of – I suppose sort of romance and popular science aspect of it.

And the – it was a sort of – linked a little bit with the very early ideas that a big

volcanic eruption could affect climate. These ideas were beginning to be talked

about, that it might have a huge environment impact. And so this was really

interesting. And so the idea was to find out how far the ash had gone, how big the

eruption was, by taking these sediment samples from the seafloor. So that’s really I

think the rationale for it.

[44:59]

And how did you find – you then went back to – you then moved to America for two

years.

Stephen Sparks Page 79

C1379/89

Track 2

79

We lived in Rhode Island for two years, yes.

How would you describe the sort of society and culture of American science in

relation to your experience of science in Britain at that time?

It was very different. I was younger than most of the PhD students who were around

me, because they spend much longer doing their PhDs. So even though I’d done two

years post doc, there were some old hands there. And, you know, the – but of course,

you know, in general, I think, like a lot of people who go to the United States, it’s an

extremely dynamic country in many ways, very different in all sorts of ways, but as a

young student it’s tremendous really. I mean, you’re exposed to a lot of new – and of

course going to an oceanography institute, which – I didn’t know very much about

oceanography before, so being involved in more oceanographic science was really

very interesting. And so I really enjoyed, you know, so I was being exposed to new

sorts of science and new sorts of questions, still around volcanology obviously. And

we – Rhode Island is a very nice place to live, so we …

Were there any differences in the way that scientists dressed or spoke to each other in

the US as opposed to Britain?

I mean, I – it’s difficult to answer that question without a lot of, you know, forward

knowledge about, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in the United States so I know

the scientific culture and I’m not sure I could answer that as a sort of young scientist

being there for the first time. I mean, I could answer the question in a much more

general way.

Mm, perhaps we’ll look at that tomorrow maybe.

Yeah. I mean, I think – I did find it an exciting place to be scientifically. I again

made a couple of very major collaborators, an Icelander called Haraldur Sigurðsson,

who was at Rhode Island, a famous volcanologist from Iceland, and Steven Carey,

who his PhD student, who is now a sort of eminent sort of geological oceanographer,

Stephen Sparks Page 80

C1379/89

Track 2

80

still there. And I made those two links. I mean, actually Norman – poor old Norman

died of cancer within a few months of me getting there, so I never really interacted

with him. It was – and there was a brief three month period where Norman was well,

three or four months, when I sort of did get to know him a bit and quite a few of his

students, and that was very interesting. I mean, I’d heard some of the sort of more

sort of puerile aspects of science in a sense, that, you know – well, one could make of

this what one likes. I mean, Norman loved the fact that he and his student group in

Rhode Island had more abstracts for the big American conference [American

Geophysical Union] that takes place once a year and so he would sort of come into the

lab and say, ‘Look at this, we’ve got ten abstracts and I’m co-author on seven of

them’ [laughs] ‘And nobody else in America’s got this.’ So I suppose that was sort of

slightly trivial but it sort of – that would be different for Britain. I mean, that would

be sort of the competitiveness that you get in the – it’s a sort of, you know, sort of

manifestation I suppose of sort of competitiveness. And Norman also loved the idea

that he and his students would publish in different journals, so they sort of collected

journals that they’d published in, like almost like a sort of collection that you’d, you

know, you wanted a paper in this journal or that journal. So you learnt a lot about the

sort of competitiveness in American science. And then, as I say, it was a – they’re,

you know, very dynamic. They, you know, they – in a British institution you all go

for coffee or tea, but they tend to sort of get their coffee and go into their [laughs] –

go into their desk and carry on working and things. It is different.

[49:40]

And what did you do with the – I mean, in practice and in detail, what did you do with

the cores now that you’d brought them back to Rhode Island? What I think people

would find it hard to understand is how on earth you identify ash from an ancient

volcano in a core of sediment on the –

It’s very, very easy because the sediment on the bottom of the Mediterranean is mud

and silt. The ash is different in colour and even under a little magnifying glass you

can see that the magma represents smashed up foam. And so the particles are shaped.

So if you imagine a collection of bubbles and you broke that up, you’d get some very

Stephen Sparks Page 81

C1379/89

Track 2

81

peculiar shapes because the liquid in between would have sort of carved and pointed

features and edges, which would be very distinctive. And so you basically saw that

this was smashed up bubbles and that – you can tell that instantly by looking at a –

with a magnifying glass, so it’s actually very easy. And then furthermore, you can tell

which volcano it is because each volcano produces magmas which have just slightly

different chemistry or minerals and you can measure – using an electron microscope

and analysis, you can measure the chemical composition of the volcanic ash particle

and you can say, well, that ash is from Santorini and this ash is from Vesuvius, or

wherever. So it’s fairly easy to do that.

And how in practice did you do that, where and how?

Well, in Rhode Island they have a core repository, so you – on the boat you’ve got the

core, you split it along its length. You do some basic measurements on the boat. You

take it back, you put it in essentially a freezer to keep – preserve the – stop it drying

out, wrap it in cellophane and then when you want to study it you open it up and you

see – in the long, you know, tube that you’ve got, half of a tube, you see the layers of

mud and you see the layers of sediment and you see the dark layers where the whole

Mediterranean went stagnant for a period and you see all the history of the

Mediterranean laid out in the core. And then of course you just take small samples

and do whatever analyses you want to do on them.

And what did it show about the size of the eruption?

Well, it sort of confirmed what we thought, which was that it was a jolly big eruption,

which wasn’t too surprising. But we were able to quantify that, which is a start. It led

to some work of a more subtle kind, which told us a lot about the mechanism of the

eruption. And it really relates back to this sort of earlier work I talked about, that we

could look at things like the grain size distribution of the deposit and we could make

inferences about the nature of the activity that went on in the volcano. Now I, during

my PhD, had already done work near the volcano and that gives you a lot of

information to reconstruct what had happened. But you – the ash that goes a long way

and you find on the seafloor gives you a different sort of information, so you can add

Stephen Sparks Page 82

C1379/89

Track 2

82

a bit more of the jigsaw puzzle to working out what happened in the eruption. I don’t

think that work in itself led to anything sort of – a dramatic science breakthrough or

anything, but it was part of a wider picture of understanding these big eruptions and

understanding the, you know, the processes that go on. And it did lead to something,

which was – it was a little bit of a nugget or bit of a picture of a jigsaw puzzle, which

ultimately led to a much bigger idea, which is that when you get these giant flows

they generate – the flows themselves generate giant amounts of very fine ash and

these ash layers can become suddenly buoyant in the atmosphere and lift off in

altitude, dramatic, almost lofting. If you imagine an area that’s been covered by hot

volcanic ash by a flow measuring, say, thirty by thirty or fifty by fifty kilometres,

thousands of square kilometres, and you imagine all of that area becoming suddenly

lighter than the atmosphere above it, then the whole thing can lift off, huge amounts

of fine ash, and inject into the stratosphere as a huge cloud, which covers, you know,

areas the size of the eastern Mediterranean. And that was a discovery which we really

made much later, but this was a little, you know, this was one of these little clues that

later on you would put together with other clues and you would then come up with a

sort of – something which is a really significant new idea.

Because this is how this ash that you were finding in the cores had got there?

That’s right, yeah. Now we didn’t realise that at the time, you know. This idea

wasn’t produced at the time, it was produced much later, but it always, you know, it’s

– these things – things you observe, which you don’t think necessarily are – you don’t

really know whether they’re important or not, turn out to be very significant when you

put it together with a bit of other evidence that might be five or ten or fifteen years

later and then you put them together and then you find something new out of that.

[End of Track 2]

Stephen Sparks Page 83

C1379/89

Track 3

83

Track 3

Just on things that you told me last time about your early life, I wondered whether

you’d have any comments on the effect on yourself of the death of your mother at the

time and then sort of in reflection, as you look back on your life now, the two things.

Yes, I – I mean, of course I often wondered about that. I mean, I think the – I mean,

one of the things that – and I think this was – as I mentioned, because I think she was

ill for several years, sort of mental illness, and in and out of hospital, and so I didn’t

really know her very well. I think that’s one thing obviously one sort of regrets. It’s

hard to know what the effect would have been … as I say, I was definitely a slow

starter and didn’t really sort of show an awful lot of promise in things until I got really

into secondary school when I was about thirteen or fourteen, so a little bit later. So

I’m sure it must have had a very strong effect. I think it’s hard to know – it’s hard for

me to sort of assess what that really was. I mean, I – as I say, I was effectively

brought up in a sort of bachelor household and I must say, I don’t really have a huge

amount – my brother remembers things about her much better than I do, ‘cause he’s

eight years older.

Do you remember the effect of her death on your father or on your brother?

Oh yes. I mean, he was obviously highly traumatised by it and, you know, a lot of the

sort of family came and helped and we – I remember going up to the sort of

internment of her ashes up in Scotland. So she’s buried in a place called Kilcreggan,

which looks over the Clyde. And that’s – I think that was because my father was

stationed there in the Ack-Ack defending Glasgow against the Luftwaffe and I think

that’s – I think from what I understand, that was the sort of – one of the sort of

happier times in their lives when they were up in Glasgow. And that’s when they

adopted my older brother, who’s a Scot – who’s actually, you know, sort of a Scot.

He came from – his – they adopted him from – what’s – is it Dunoon, on the Clyde?

So I think – and so they had – so I do remember going up, you know, for the funeral

and the internment of the ashes and things. And, you know, and her twin sister

Stephen Sparks Page 84

C1379/89

Track 3

84

coming along and my cousin and so forth. So yes, I mean, it undoubtedly must have

had a big effect.

[2:49]

You mentioned your father serving in the war there. Could you just say something

more generally about what he did?

Yes, he was a captain in the Ack-Ack. So in the first part of the war, when he was,

you know, sort of a commissioner, he became an officer, he became a captain, and I

think his first station – and learned to, you know, do the Ack-Ack guns in the artillery.

And he was stationed in Glasgow, I think from probably sometime in early ’42 to end

of – near the end of ’43. So I think he was up there for at least two years. And, as I

say, they were trying to defend Glasgow against the Luftwaffe. And then he went to –

he went to India for the rest of the war. I think he must have gone over early in ’44,

or late ’43, to when the Japanese were – they’d invaded Burma and there was a threat

that they’d invade India. And so he went out as part of the British Army to, you

know, sort of – to defend India. So that’s how he got out then, stationed in Bombay,

or Mumbai now. And so that was the war. Then he sort of left the army of course as

soon as the war finished.

[4:12]

Thank you. We’ll go back to the University of Rhode Island. We’d discussed some of

your work there but there was another significant piece of work that you did there

with someone called Sigurðsson, am I saying that –

Yes, Haraldur Sigurðsson, an Icelandic volcanologist. And, as I say, the chap

Norman Watkins died a few months after I arrived, so he was the person I was really

supposed to be working with. But then I started working with Haraldur and we did a

lot of really interesting things. We went on another cruise to the West Indies and took

a lot more cores of volcanic ash. And we went to Iceland together and did some

studies there. So we did quite a lot of interesting science. I think the one I would pick

Stephen Sparks Page 85

C1379/89

Track 3

85

out, because it sort of then led onto something that happened later, is that during that

we got interested in why it was that when you went out to the mid ocean ridges of the

earth and you looked at the basalts that had erupted, they all seemed to have a rather

similar composition. So as you probably now, where tectonic plates are constructed,

the plates pull apart and the hot mantle comes up and as it comes up the change in

pressure makes the mantle melt. And then we get volcanoes where the plates are

pulled apart on the seafloor and these erupt and form lava flows. And one of the

observations was that almost none of these lavas could have been directly taken from

the Earth’s mantle. In other words, we knew that that’s where they were being – these

magmas were being formed, by melting the Earth’s mantle, but something was

happening in them between being formed and then getting to the Earth’s surface. You

never saw the original melts, magmas getting to the earth’s surface. And this really

relates to big questions of how the earth chemically differentiates and how the

magmas beneath volcanoes behave. You know, all volcanoes have underneath them

storage regions of molten rock magma, which is sort of there before an eruption and

then this is the source of the eruption. And so this led us – this was an interesting

area. And I thought that – because my interests had been in – started to get into fluid

mechanics and I’d been thinking about plumes in the atmosphere, I started to think

about the idea that underneath the mid ocean ridges you would have this volcano and

then you’d have these storage regions. And so the mantle – the magma that was

created in the mantle and came up from much greater depth would have to pass

through these bodies of magma first. And I started to think, well, these magmas have

different densities, fluids with different densities, and if the magma coming in is

heavier than the magma in the chamber it might do one thing. So in other words if

you’ve got a heavy fluid it will tend to flow under – just like the volcanoes I was

describing before. When you have something which is dense in the atmosphere it’ll

flow along the ground in the same way a magma that comes into a magma chamber

will flow along the bottom of it and will never erupt. Whereas if it comes in and it’s

lighter it’ll mix – it’ll form a plume. And I started to look at the fluid mechanics,

applying in a way some of the same principles that I’d applied to volcanic eruptions in

the atmosphere, but because these are much – magmas are much stickier than, you

know, more viscous, stickier than the atmosphere, it’s different in detail. And I was

able to show that it was very likely a simple fluid mechanical screening which

Stephen Sparks Page 86

C1379/89

Track 3

86

prevented the deeper magmas directly from the mantle, from ever erupting, or very

rarely erupting. And so I used fluid mechanical principles and I worked with

Haraldur. We collated data from the ocean ridges and we published a paper, which

we were – yeah, was really quite pleased with. It’s an interesting example of how –

the progress of science, you often find that people think of the same idea almost at the

same time but don’t know each other. And we were sort of – we’d got our paper

[with Adrienne Bond] sort of accepted and a colleague of ours from Harvard, a

professor at Harvard, came in and sort of – to visit Haraldur and myself to talk about

things. And we had our diagrams on the table and he was sort of like this [laughs],

because he and another guy, another famous petrologist, a chap called Ed Stolper, had

published a very similar idea but not – but it was – in detail it was rather different to

ours. So they went and published their paper anyway. But it was almost the sort of

two groups of scientists independently coming to the same – broadly to the same idea,

but we just pipped them to the post of course, which was [laughs] – the sort of

competitive element of science is always sort of something one – that happens. So

yeah, so that was – now the reason for – I mean, I think it was a nice bit of work and it

was really quite influential at the time.

[10:08]

Also I published with Haraldur and Lionel Wilson another idea, which has proved –

which last - lasted with time, is that big explosive eruptions, like the ones in Santorini,

could be also triggered by a magma chamber sitting underneath a volcano and then

some very hot new magma coming in from much greater depth and stirring it all up

and destabilising it and making it erupt. And so we came up with this idea that many

volcanic – big explosive eruptions are triggered by what we call recharge. In other

words, the magma chamber’s just sitting there underneath the volcano, not doing very

much, and to get it to erupt you need a sort of boost of new magma from – hot magma

from depth. And we came up with that idea and published that in Nature and that’s

turned out to be – I think lasted the – again, that idea has been demonstrated in

countless volcanoes ever since, that that model often works [Note: I recently have

done research which indicates these ideas are not quite right.]

Stephen Sparks Page 87

C1379/89

Track 3

87

[11:12]

At this time, how did you – or what observations were necessary to determine that the

melt that was coming out of the mid ocean ridge wasn’t in character the same as

mantle material? How did you know that?

How do you know that, yes. Well, there’d been a lot of excellent work in the field

that was called experimental petrology. So you would take bits of the mantle and you

do experiments in different pressures and temperatures and you look at the

compositions of the melts that are formed. And one very prominent feature is that

when you melt the mantle, the ratio of magnesium to iron has certain values and

they’re constrained by the mantle composition. You can’t get values which are very

different from these values. And when a magma – you take a magma like that and

then it either cools or mixes – or degasses or something and it starts to crystallise, the

ratio of magnesium to iron changes. So you can tell magmas which have been

somewhere, stopped, cooled and crystallised, they’ve changed their magnesium – the

ratio of magnesium to iron. And then when they erupt of course they’ve got this

different value. So almost all the lavas that erupt in Iceland or in the mid ocean ridge

have this character, this magnesium iron ratio, which is essentially impossible to get

by melting the mantle. So you just could tell from the simple chemistry that they’d –

something had happened to them, they’d changed. And the really – what we call

primitive or the original material just hadn’t got through. So that’s how we did it.

And the other idea, the explosive – the triggering of the explosive eruption was again

simple – in this case it was simple field observations. We went and looked at the

deposits, volcanic deposits, from eruptions like the Bronze Age and when we looked

at the pumice we saw these little dark bits in them, mixed in. And we found that they

were pervasively mixed with very tiny amounts of a different sort of magma, a hotter

magma. And these were little dark blebs. And we just saw these all over the place.

And when we looked at them we found that they were essentially magma which had

come from much greater depth, much hotter, and that they’d been pervasively stirred.

You know, every lump of pumice you took, every other lump of pumice, would have

perhaps one of these little blebs in. So we made the deduction that the magma – the

observation suggested this hotter magma had come in and then it had been stirred

Stephen Sparks Page 88

C1379/89

Track 3

88

pervasively, you know, like sort of stirring sultanas into some porridge almost. It had

been thoroughly stirred. And then we could tell by looking at the – some of the

minerals and, without going into details, we could tell that that had happened very

soon before the eruption. It couldn’t have happened a long time before the eruption or

the minerals would have changed or we’d have seen different things in the minerals of

the rocks. So we could also say that this mixing event had happened just before the

eruption. So it was observation in the field of these little blobs and then looking at

some of the sort of simple mineralogy and chemistry when we got back in the lab.

[15:09]

Yes, what did you do – if we could sort of look at you, both of you, in the lab working

at that time on that problem, what would we actually see you doing? ‘Cause

sometimes it’s a little bit mysterious for people, knowing what the work of science is.

So what did you – having made these observations in the field, what are you then

doing back at the office or in a laboratory?

Yes, that’s right. You’re – well, in this case – in fact both the bits of science I’ve

described, we would use something called an electron microprobe. It’s a very

standard instrument these days. It was still – it had become standard by that time as a

way of analysing minerals. And essentially it’s a very high voltage beam of electrons,

which you could take – just like I described yesterday, you slice the rock until it’s

almost transparent, into what we call the thin section. You then polish one side of this

thin section so – and you cover it in a very thin coat of carbon so that the – if you like,

the electrons – the current is transferred. And you have this beam of electrons that

hits a very tiny area in the mineral, or in the volcanic glass, and when it hits it at very

high energy you get characteristic x-rays given off of the different elements that

compose the mineral. So if the mineral’s got a lot of magnesium or silica then you’ll

get – the bombardments by the electrons will give off the x-rays that are characteristic

of those two elements. And then of course you look at a spectral – essentially you

analyse the spectra and you find out what the proportions of silica and magnesium

must be. And then if it’s – there’s quite a lot of different minerals, which all contain

magnesium and silica, silicon, but their proportions are different. So you can then tell

Stephen Sparks Page 89

C1379/89

Track 3

89

from the proportions which of the minerals it might be. You actually – generally

actually already know from looking at the optical properties what the mineral is, so

this is not as much of an identification tool as a tool to do some sort of quantitative

analysis of the material. And so then once you’ve got, you know what the mineral

composition is, you can then look at people’s experiments where they’ve found out

that you only form this mineral at this temperature or this pressure, you can then say,

well, my rock’s got this particular mineral in with this particular composition and

therefore I know it must have been erupted about 1,200 degrees centigrade, or it must

have been crystallised at a pressure less than three or four – the equivalent of three or

four kilometres depth. So I can then make some sort of proper quantitative statements

about it. And then if I know that the minerals should have – it’s out of chemical

equilibrium with its environment, it’s a mineral which shouldn’t – it’s like sort of

having ice in hot water, it should really dissolve, and then I find that in a rock where it

should have dissolved, there was enough time, then I can make some deductions

about, you know, how long that mineral could have been there before it erupted. So,

you know, if you had a glass of hot water and you chucked an ice cube in, you’re

going to say, well, that’s not going to last more than ten or fifteen minutes and it’s all

going to be dissolved. So if you – if you see a glass of water with a lump of ice in

then you know you’ve – and you knew the temperature of the water then you’re going

to know that that ice cube was, you know, if you went into a room and you saw the ice

cube dissolving away you would know it could only have been put in there ten or

fifteen minutes before. And that’s really the logic we use to work out that these

eruptions were triggered, you know, were triggered by these bursts of new magma

from depth.

[19:21]

Thank you. What was your wife doing while you were – presumably she came with

you to –

To Rhode Island.

What did she do whilst you were there?

Stephen Sparks Page 90

C1379/89

Track 3

90

She was a teacher and she did – she did some sort of local volunteer work in schools.

She wasn’t allowed to work unfortunately. We started a family. Our first son was

born in the USA, towards the end, so that took up time. We were there for two years

and we very much liked the place. We made an awful lot of friends outside academia

and we went back there – because of the connection, we went back there a lot. In fact

probably the next ten years we went back almost every summer to Rhode Island and

sort of kept our friendships up there. And in fact about five years ago we bought a

house there, so we’ve currently got a house in Rhode Island, a small house we use for

summer vacations and rent it in the winter so that we can keep up contact. So we

really like the area.

What was the effect of having children on the way you worked or the amount of work

you would do or the timings of your days, that sort of thing?

Oh, I think that does change things a lot. I mean, our first child was born towards the

end of our trip in Rhode Island, so – I think with about three – he was born about

three months before we – two or three months before we left for Cambridge. And of

course that does change things quite a lot [laughs] in terms of the things you do and

the sort of lifestyle and things inevitably. I mean, it didn’t – as I say, he was really

born just before we left, so it didn’t really affect, you know, that when we were in the

United States, except that we were – a lot of – at least three of our very close friends

there who are not academics at all, families, were people who were also bringing up

young families at the time, so that’s how we sort of got to know them.

[21:31]

Ah, I see, yes. What specific memories do you have of things done sort of outside of

work at Rhode Island over these two years?

Oh, I think, because I’m – at the time I was a sort of big sports – I’ve always been a

big sports fan and played sport, and soccer in particular, so I joined a group of Irish

Americans, who called themselves the Jamestown Shamrocks, and they played in the

Stephen Sparks Page 91

C1379/89

Track 3

91

Rhode Island Soccer League. So I played a lot of, you know, at the weekends I’d play

for the Shamrocks. And that was great – very interesting because the, you know, it

gave you great insight into the history of America because we would play in places

like Providence, where a lot of Italians and Portuguese communities are, and so you’d

play teams of Portuguese Americans and Italian Americans and so very different sort

of cultures. And the odd fight would break out [laughs] in the matches sometimes.

So it was – that was great fun. And so I played soccer. You know, a lot of our –

Southern Rhode Island is on Narragansett Bay, which is the heart of, you know,

American sailing, so we – there was the Americas Cup there and some of our friends

had yachts so we’d – I didn’t sail myself but we’d go out with friends on sailboats. Of

course we sort of just about got there, 1976, for the bicentenary, you know, July 4th

celebrations, which was – I remember being great fun, with huge firework displays

and things. So it was a very nice part of – as I say, recreation, a very nice part of the

world. So those are the sorts of things I remember from the – yeah, from the time.

[23:26]

Thank you. Could you tell the story of the move back to the UK, including reasons

why you went back to Cambridge rather than anywhere else? What happened?

Well, obviously when you’re on these short post docs, like a lot of young scientists

find these days, you sort of – almost as soon as you’ve got the post doc you’re sort of

starting to think, what next. And I – there was a possibility – in fact, as I mentioned

earlier, I went back there almost every year for almost ten years and that was always

supported by NSF grants that my Rhode Island colleagues wrote and they wrote in

some money for me to, you know, for travel and a bit of accommodation. So I think

the initial plan might have been to have submitted an NSF grant with Haraldur to, you

know, to work on something in – so, you know, one wouldn’t know whether that

would work out or not. But Cambridge University advertised for what they called a

demonstrator. I’m not sure whether they still have these posts there but they’re sort of

junior – I suppose junior lectureships, but fixed term contracts. And I applied for one

of those, got interviewed in – in a rather interesting way because – I think they had

four people up for interview at Cambridge for this job, me being one of them, and we

Stephen Sparks Page 92

C1379/89

Track 3

92

– but Ron Oxburgh, who was just about to go from Oxford to Cambridge at the time,

to become head of department – I actually went to Oxford and then Ron took me and

another candidate across to Cambridge and I’m sure he was actually interviewing us

both [laughs] in practice, although he’s, you know, of course he would have done it

very subtly. But – and then we went to Cambridge and did the – did the usual thing of

doing a talk and getting interviewed and then I was offered the job, so that led to

going to Cambridge.

[25:38]

What were your impressions of Ron Oxburgh? Was this the first time that you’d met

him?

I’m sure I must have met him before but I didn’t know him very well so it was sort of

the first time I’d really sort of come across Ron in detail. And of course he was a sort

of – at the time he – and of course still is, a sort of giant of earth science. And he’d

just got the Cambridge job and his sort of mission was to, you know, bring it up to

speed, as it were. And he, you know, he’s an extremely impressive figure. And so,

you know, I’ve always enjoyed talking to Ron. He always talks, you know, has a, you

know, sort of very common sense – view of science and the world. And of course

seeing him operating, sort of transforming the Cambridge earth science department at

the time was sort of a fascinating lesson of how, you know, if you like, to – how

leadership should work; so a very impressive figure. And, as I say, I’ve always

enjoyed his company.

What was the – are you able to say something about the nature of your own sort of

ambition at the time? What – at this time, as a fairly young scientist, what were you

sort of hoping for for the future? What were you aiming at? What was the sort of

nature of your ambition, if you were ambitious?

I think – it’s interesting. I’m sure I was subliminally ambitious, I’m sure. I don’t

really remember – my recollection was that it sort of – that sort of thing never really

quite occurred to me, because in a way the various jobs and positions I got sort of fell

Stephen Sparks Page 93

C1379/89

Track 3

93

– just came about at the right time, so I didn’t really have to do an awful lot of

thinking or worrying about what the long term, you know, as I said, I was sort of

toying with the idea of writing an NSF grant or being on an NSF grant on soft money

in the United States and making my way that way, but then this job came up and I just

applied and got it, so that was all very straightforward. So I never really, you know,

and I think at that age – it was a five years appointment, seemed a very long time.

And so I’m not sure it ever occurred to me. Indeed, I was with a colleague, a very

famous colleague, when I took my sabbatical in CALTECH in ’87, 1987, where he

was sort of – we were chatting and he just asked me what my sort of career plan was,

you know, sort of – and he’d obviously sort of thought out a sort of carefully staged

plan. And I guess the question never really occurred to me at the time. I mean, I was

enjoying the science, things seemed to be falling into place, you know, fairly easily in

some respects. So I just went to Cambridge and, you know, obviously had to start

teaching, which I’d not done before, which was a bit alarming, but, you know, that

was also at the time enjoyable. And of course Cambridge is a very special place in all

sorts of ways, so I had to sort of learn a new environment.

[29:09]

Before we go on to look at what you did in Cambridge, could you just say what you

saw of how Ron Oxburgh led this change at Cambridge in the earth sciences?

Yes. I think when he – Ron came there – this is – I mean, this is very much a partial

perception. I mean, at the time they had three departments which were completely

separated, Mineralogy [and] Petrology, Geology, which were next door, and then the

Bullard [Geophysics] out in Madingley, where Dan and co lived, Dan McKenzie and

company lived. And these departments had – I think historically had not worked

together very closely. They did obviously have links but – there was even a time

when the doors between the Mineralogy [and] Petrology, and Geology department

were locked [laughs] back in the sort of – I think at an earlier stage. But the, you

know, it was clear that it didn’t make any sense to have these separate sort of

essentially departments created in the nineteenth century disciplinary views. And

Ron’s – obviously one of his big missions was to merge these three departments into

Stephen Sparks Page 94

C1379/89

Track 3

94

one. And of course he did that very effectively and I think he did it – my perception

is he did it by a mixture of consultation but determination when obstacles were put,

you know, put up, well, we’ve always done it this way, sort of thing. And he’s, you

know, he’s a very persuasive personality. He’s very good, I think, at talking to people

and finding out what they want and trying to meet as far as he can their aspirations or

requirements. But at the same time he’s not, you know, he was going to do this

irrespective of anybody who thought they could carry on in the same old way. I’m

sure there were one or two who were sort of very reluctant to go down this path. So I

think that sort of mixture of – that’s what his leadership was. I mean, of course

coming in as a head of department at that time, I think – I don’t know the details. I

suspect he had quite a bit of, you know, Cambridge would probably have said he

could have some resources to help sweeten the change. And so, you know, I

remember him, you know, sort of discussing with the mineralogists that they were

going to get some nice new machine [laughs]. And, you know, I’m sure he didn’t say

this but, you know, the – I’m sure the implication was, you know, if they, you know,

they supported they merger, you know, this would be – one of the benefits for

supporting the merger would be to get these nice new machines and things. And of

course he brought in some new, you know, sort of big name appointments like Keith

O’Nions, obviously he came in at about that time. And so made some strong

appointments, I think. So it was at a stage when people were, you know, a few people

were getting near retirement so he had a lot of opportunity too, I think, to shift the

balance of the department, bring younger people in like myself. And so of course

obviously he created an enormously strong earth science department. I mean, of

course Cambridge always was extremely strong in certain areas and particularly the

geophysics and Bullard had been at the heart of the plate tectonics revolution and

Dewey had been there for a while, John Dewey. So I – so I think – yes, I think he

showed a lot of the sort of key elements of, you know, sort of leadership where you

really need change.

Apart from new staff, what else changed? What else actually changed in terms –

‘cause I know that – I mean, the Bullard Labs still – it’s not as if the Bullard Labs

came into the centre of Cambridge. They remained out there, didn’t they?

Stephen Sparks Page 95

C1379/89

Track 3

95

They remained out there, yes.

The door wasn’t locked but – and hadn’t been for a while.

No, still ten minutes to cycle down, isn’t it, yes [laughs].

So how did it become the Department of Earth Sciences as opposed to these three

departments, apart from the fact that certain people left and certain people came?

Were there any other sort of organisational or even geographical changes that –

No, there were no real geographical changes. I mean, I think it was obviously much

easier to unite the Mineralogy [and] Petrology and Geology departments because they

sit next door to each other and effectively they just become one department and

everybody has tea and – I think interacting with the Bullard was always going to be a

little more of a challenge in the sense that of course they were already the preeminent

– really the strongest part. I mean, there were the sort of great palaeontologists of

course at Cambridge at the time and other people, but you could say with all the plate

tectonics, the Bullard was the preeminent bit of the earth sciences. But I think – I

mean, my recollection is that it was done – it wasn’t done in some sort of dramatic

way, it was sort of very incremental and the two departments just sort of gradually

fused – the three departments gradually fused together. And there was an effort,

certainly from Bullard people, to come down to have tea in the Downing site. I

remember Dan would – made a particular – Dan McKenzie made a particular point of

coming down to the Downing site and, you know, was having tea with people and

talking to people. So I think there was quite a big effort there. And now of course it

is – very few – I think James Jackson is now the head of department at Cambridge,

from the, you know, he’s sort of a Bullard person. So I think it happened in a sort of

gradual way, but there’s always going to be an issue when you’ve got two sites. I

mean, that’s inescapable that there’s going to be – communication issues are always

going to be there and have to be addressed. It’s not going to be something you solve

and then you don’t have to worry about. He [Ron Oxburgh] also had a wonderful –

he made a wonderful appointment of an administrator called Margaret Johnson, who

ran the department on the administrative side. And Margaret was a sort of –

Stephen Sparks Page 96

C1379/89

Track 3

96

tremendously well organised and she really played a huge role in bringing that

department together and – she’s since retired but she was a – she played a big role as

an administrator.

In what way? What was significant about what she did?

I think she just ran, you know, she ran all the sort of administrative organisational

aspects of the departments, the things that might – some things which might have

perhaps in other places been the responsibility of the head of department. Ron felt

very confident at being able to delegate to her and he could sort of spend more of his

time looking at sort of bigger strategic issues. I would say that that was, you know,

she ran the administrative office and the technical staff and the, you know, who gets

what room and how the, you know, and so forth. So it’s all the admin aspects which

underpin how a department works.

[36:51]

Could you then tell me about colleagues at Cambridge and how your research

developed there in relation to a sort of new group of people?

Yes. I mean, it was again like going to all the previous places, you start interacting

with people you didn’t know before. But I think I – my interaction was very much

with one particular person, Herbert Huppert. And because of my starting to get

interested in the fluid mechanics of magma chambers, I realised that some of this

convection theory and fluid mechanics was really pretty difficult – it involved quite

complex mathematics, which was well beyond my, you know, sort of capability or

knowledge. But I knew I had to get to grips with this maths in some way to really

understand the problems I wanted to – was interested in. So I then – I went down to

see Herbert Huppert, who was in the DAMTP [Department of Applied Mathematics

and Theoretical Physics], in the applied maths department, and started talking to

Herbert. And Herbert had previously worked on – largely in oceanography on

convection in the ocean and problems like melting ice and so forth and was also a

very good experimentalist, analogue experimentalist, as well as a very fine

Stephen Sparks Page 97

C1379/89

Track 3

97

mathematician. And so we started talking and he got interested in the problems I was

interested in and we started to collaborate very strongly together. And so for sort of

almost ten – well, really until I went to Bristol, between ’78 and ’89 we did a

tremendous amount of research together, published a lot of work together. And that

was a highly sort of – I think sort of creative and stimulating time because we sort of

forged ahead in this field and came up with all sorts of interesting stuff. It’s when I

really learnt a lot more about the power of simple laboratory experiments. Herbert

obviously had the high level maths skills to sort out the mathematical aspects of the

things we were interested in and I could provide the geological insights as before. So

we worked together in a very collaborative way and, you know, have written, you

know, literally sort of dozens of papers together over the years.

[39:36]

Could you describe some of the experiments that you did together?

Yes.

To get a sense of what you did together when you were working together.

Yeah. Well, I’ll just go back to the issue I mentioned before, which is when you have

a volcano, we know that many volcanoes have these things called magma chambers

underneath them. These are the sources of the material that erupts. And it goes back

to this idea that I’d already developed in Rhode Island, that the recharge of the magma

chamber – in other words the magma chamber’s sort of sitting there cooling and

crystallising and not doing very much and then we have a deeper surge of deeper

hotter magma come in. And the question is, how do we – if it comes into the

chamber, what happens. So we were able to do a whole series of experiments to

examine the physics of that. We were fortunate at the time very early on to have this

chap called Stuart Turner, a very famous fluid dynamisist from Australia, who – over

in Cambridge, so we – he was a great experimentalist too. And we did a series of

experiments. So in order to test this idea out we had a tank of – a simple tank, a sort

of Perspex tank, sort of measuring perhaps thirty centimetres across and ten

Stephen Sparks Page 98

C1379/89

Track 3

98

centimetres deep, maybe thirty centimetres high, so just a box really, a Perspex box.

We would – on the bottom of it we would have a nozzle or a feeder and we’d put in

the tank some sodium nitrate. And when you dissolve sodium nitrate in water it’s

endothermic so it cools down naturally. You just put room temperature water in and

you get cold sodium nitrate. So we then took some potassium nitrate, some hot

potassium nitrate we had in a separate reservoir, and we heated it up and dissolved the

potassium nitrate, but kept it saturated so that even though it was hot it was just about

to start crystallising – making crystals of potassium nitrate. And so what we’d do

would be to inject this very hot – we put some blue dye in it, which made it look quite

spectacular. So we put some blue dye in the potassium nitrate solution and then we’d

feed it through the nozzle into the box containing the sodium nitrate. Now remember

the sodium nitrate is cold and the potassium nitrate is hot, so we’ve got hot

underneath cold but the hot is denser because it’s got – potassium nitrate is denser

than sodium nitrate when you dissolve it. So the potassium nitrate that comes in can’t

actually – flows along the bottom of the tank and forms a separate layer at the bottom.

It stagnates at the bottom. So you can now imagine this sodium nitrate there with no

dye in it and underneath there’s potassium nitrate with blue dye in it. It comes in, it

ponds at the bottom, so it’s like salty water will go the bottom of the ocean, and then

because there’s a heat exchange, there’s convection, the hot potassium nitrate cools

the – heats the sodium nitrate, so that starts to get less dense because it’s been heated

up. And then the potassium nitrate does a very interesting thing, it starts to crystallise

because as it cools the potassium nitrate crystals want to grow. As those crystals

grow it’s taking – it’s changing the chemical composition of the potassium nitrate, the

blue layer, and so it’s getting lighter and lighter because it keeps forming crystals that

you can see growing. And then there’s a point at which the density of the lower layer

becomes equal to and then less dense than the overlying layer and then we get a

catastrophic overturn and the two fluid mixes together. So it’ll be stable for twenty

minutes or half an hour and then this point is reached where you get this catastrophic

overturn and we studied that. That’s an example of the sort of experiment. And we

thought that that was very relevant to what was happening in the ocean ridges,

because what we wanted to do was we want the basalt to come out but it’s got to have

– it can’t be the stuff from the mantle so it has to have crystallised and it has to have

crystallised yet there has to be some mix – we also knew that there would have to

Stephen Sparks Page 99

C1379/89

Track 3

99

have been some mixing. So in this very simple experiment we were able to test out

the idea that we had about the mid ocean ridge magma chambers. We were able to

compare Herbert’s theory with the experiments and show that the theory worked. So

we could verify the theory, so it’s a classic piece of science in a sense. And then

because the theory was rather general we could have some confidence in saying, well,

it applies in this little tank but we think it also applies in the large scale of the earth.

And so we were able to then get a lot of insights into how the rocks underneath the

ridges, the mid ocean ridges, formed.

How did that experiment with the tank – I wonder whether you could describe the sort

of – almost the sort of fiddling about that was required to get it to work? Because the

way you described it, it’s almost as if it worked first time like that and perhaps it did.

No. Well, experiments never work first time [laughs], so we always had issues of

finding ways of avoiding experimental issues. And so often doing these sorts of

experiments, you have to play around and it may be weeks or even months before you

can quite get the right conditions or you’ve sorted of worked out how to do it

basically. We had a big advantage because, as I mentioned, Stuart Turner was in

Cambridge on sabbatical around that time, this is sort of right at the beginning of the –

sort of ’79, ’80. And Stuart was actually a great practitioner of these sorts of

experiments and was able to sort of help – he knew, you know, he knew some of the

tricks that would shortcut or, you know, he knew the sort of mistakes you could make,

and so he was helping some of the design of the experiments. So perhaps we didn’t

have as much trouble. But that was always the case, the experiments never sort of

quite worked first time.

And over what sort of timescale is what you’ve described happening, the formation of

the crystals and then the density changing so that it equalises and then the mixing –

The mixing, yeah.

Does all of that happen in an afternoon in this tank or – what is the time –

Stephen Sparks Page 100

C1379/89

Track 3

100

It’s usually – I mean, that’s part of the thing, because you want to fix the conditions so

it doesn’t take several days, because the tank is in a cold room and so one

experimental difficulty is that it’s going to lose heat. So if you make it so it’s too

slow you’re going to have a problem because it’ll lose heat by another mechanism and

you don’t want the heat loss to the lab to be an important factor. We in fact had to put

polystyrene round the tank and then only take them off just occasionally so we could

watch what was happening, but we’d sort of try and avoid the heat loss. So that

would be an example of a modification you’d have to do to an experiment. So we

basically designed them so things happened in the order of, you know, a few – several

minutes to perhaps half an hour, an hour. That would be the typical – that’s what

you’d want this to happen in. So you’d design the size of the tank and the

temperatures and things so that you were in the right regime to get a result in a

sensible amount of time.

And how did you record what was happening in a way that you could then present to

other people?

Oh yes. Well, we had little thermistors, temperature measurements, embedded in the

two layers and we would take – with a pipette you could take out samples and

measure the composition of the fluids, so the potassium content to find out how much

potassium nitrate had crystallised. And you could monitor the, you know, with a sort

of chart recorder you could monitor the temperatures of the two layers. So you could

do all that. So fairly simple but, you know, by the time we put thermistors and

samplers and insulation in and worked out how the nozzle should – turn the tap off

and the nozzle on and off to make it work, there’s a nice flow of fluid from another

tank, those are all the sorts of little things which make it a little bit more complicated.

[49:00]

Thank you. Would you be able to describe significant fieldwork during your time at

Cambridge? I don’t know whether you went every summer or every year.

Stephen Sparks Page 101

C1379/89

Track 3

101

Yes, I tried to keep in the field as far as I could. I think I did less fieldwork than

perhaps I would have in Rhode Island. But I did, you know, I did still continue to do

field based science. I went to the St Vincent eruption in 1979 on St Vincent and

looked at some of the explosions there and filmed them, you know, for example. I

continued to do work on deep sea cores. I think I did less at that time because I was

very much involved with Herbert in this fluid mechanics area and also I was at the

time doing a fair amount of work on ash core deposits in cores, size. And that – I

think I was still doing fieldwork but then I was teaching and then I was having to go

on field trips with students, so I think I did rather less of my own fieldwork. I started

to take on PhD students of course and that – you start – you then kind of do a different

thing where you’re sort of in a sense advising and managing other people’s research.

And we started a project on Santorini with five successive PhD students, working on

the volcano and working out its entire history. For example, I had people working on

the island of Rum in Scotland, where we saw the remains of one of these magma

chambers that I mentioned before and I had a student working on those up in

Scotland, so sort of relatively easy to go. And of course, you know, go with a PhD

student for a few days or a week, look at the rocks and give them some advice and

then of course they would be doing most of the fieldwork. So I – in a sense Santorini

and Scotland were pretty big in – were pretty big. And then towards the end of – I

had a sabbatical in ANU, Australia National University, where Herbert and I went for

six months, which was great fun. That was in sort of ’82. And I also had a big

expedition – I was involved in a very major expedition to Argentina in 1981, where

we went to a huge volcano right in the remote part of the Andes and I was part of an

expedition led by somebody called Peter Francis from the Open University. And he

was a great sort of expedition guy and he invited me along on that and that was a sort

of very remarkable experience in all sorts of ways. But it was in a very remote part of

the Andes and dealing with one of the biggest volcanoes in the Andes and we mapped

– we did geological mapping and sampling for sort of something like six weeks. And

we – it was a joint – it was a joint Argentine and British Army expedition. There

were the scientists and then there was the Argentine Army, about ten of them, and

another sort of ten or so from the British Army, a corps of engineers, with us. So it

was a major – because it was such a remote area, the army people did all the sort of –

the camps and, you know, sort of the logistical part, and we just went around doing

Stephen Sparks Page 102

C1379/89

Track 3

102

the science. So that was – and we finished the expedition and two months later the

Falklands War started, so I think I have a photograph of the last time the British Army

and Argentine Army collaborate. We’ve got our camp with the Argentine flag and the

British flag, the Union Jack, next to each other. So it was just – so we just got out in

time in a sense. So that was great ‘cause we brought back a lot of great material to

work on. So yes, so I carried on doing fieldwork in the Cambridge period but I think

it was significantly less than I probably had done before.

[53:18]

Would you be able to tell the story of that expedition? It seems fascinating, the British

Argentine one.

Yes.

A sort of detailed account of, you know, what happened?

Yes. Well, the – I first met Peter Francis when he was a PhD student at Imperial

College. And when we did this undergraduate expedition – Peter was a great

expedition organiser, he loved organising big expeditions to remote places, and he

was a PhD student at Imperial and he organised an expedition when I was there as an

undergraduate to the Andes. And of course they were the sort of – we met them – I

met him as part of the Imperial College Expedition Society, but of course they were

much grander and sort of, you know, more – they were PhD students and we were

first year undergraduates so, you know, the interaction was quite modest. But then

Peter went on to become the sort of leading volcanologist at the Open University and

still liked doing big expeditions. And he was at the vanguard of the early satellite

data, particularly LANsat, and he was the first person to see this huge structure in the

Andes from satellites. And so this is an absolutely giant volcano with a crater fifty

kilometres long and twenty kilometres wide just sitting in the middle of the high

Andes. And as far as we knew nobody had been there so there was nothing known

about it.

Stephen Sparks Page 103

C1379/89

Track 3

103

And this was a sort of form of a volcano, a sort of –

It’s what we call a super volcano. It’s a sort of giant – one of these volcanoes which

has unimaginably large volcanic eruptions. And so Peter invited me to go on the trip.

He did – because he liked organising expeditions, he did most of it [laughs], but he

linked up with the army – he realised the logistics were going to be very considerable

and he raised money from the Royal Geographical Society and other sources, got the

army interested, sort of like adventure training for their guys, and they linked up with

the Argentines, which – to have them along. And we went out there for about six

weeks. And we camped at – we had a main camp at about 4,100 metres altitude and

then we had a – we then went out – ‘cause it’s a huge area, we’d go out, usually on

mules with – we’d split up into groups and we’d usually go out – you couldn’t take a

four wheel drive, you had to go to places by mule. So you – we took out tents and

supplies and went out on the mules, usually with – there were some Argentine – we

had people from the Argentine Geological Survey with us too. And we went out and

went over the place and would camp in one area for two or three days and then come

back to the main camp and sort of went out and covered the whole area that way, in a

reconnaissance way. So we did actually climb the main peak, which eventually –

which was 6,000 – just short of 6,200 metres. We did a traverse over it. And yeah, I

mean, it was a sort of fantastic experience really.

[57:07]

Could you describe the land – I can’t imagine the sort of – not having ever been

anywhere like that, what was the landscape that you were moving through? What did

you see around you while you were –

Yes. Well, the High Andes is a very particular kind of landscape. It’s not like the

Himalayas or the Alps where you’ve got these big rugged mountains, that part of the

world. It’s called the Altiplano. So it’s more like a sort of Tibetan plateau in a way.

It is mountainous of course but the plateau itself is very high, you know, like 3,500,

4,000 metres. And then you’ve got this volcanic, partly older rocks, which are

sticking – mountains which are sticking up, but these mountains are, you know, sort

Stephen Sparks Page 104

C1379/89

Track 3

104

of like 1,000 metres or so. And then you’ve got the volcanoes, the volcanic cones,

which can go up to 6,000 metres in places. But then you have the volcano like the

one where we were going, which wasn’t like a sharp peak, it was just a giant

depression actually but at higher altitude with a big sort of mound in the middle of it –

a mountain range in the middle of it. And this mountain range had been pushed up by

magma. And the landscape is very – it’s a very dry part of the world. It’s a sort of

desert really but there are springs and streams running and sort of snow in – there is

some snow in the winter. And so you get springs coming out. And so you get these

what’s called Quebradas - valleys where the water’s coming out and the locals will

have, you know, the more populated areas – this was unpopulated, I should add, but,

you know, in other parts you would see irrigation. In this area you’d just see green,

bright verdant green, in these valleys where the springs and the rivers came out, sort

of fresh water flowing along. But it’s basically a sort of dry landscape. I mean, you

know, if you watch cowboy movies then, you know, the American – I think you’d

think American West, you know, sort of Arizona, that sort of character to the

landscape.

[59:26]

And could you tell me about relations between these different sorts of people? You’ve

got British scientists, including yourself. You’ve got the Argentine Army, you’ve got

the British Army. How did these different kinds of people relate to each other on this

expedition?

I think that it went reasonably well. I can’t really remember anything – major

tensions. I think there was a feeling, whether this is justified or not, amongst the

British soldiers that they were doing all the work and the Argentines were sort of

hanging around more [laughs]. There was definitely that sort of idea that – and I

don’t know how fair that was or not, but I think that – there was an element of that.

There were some, you know, some difficulties. I remember one of the British Army

guys, a sergeant I think it was, who’d come – it was a sort of mixture of squaddies and

a couple of sergeants and about three officers, including a medical officer. And the –

I remember one of the – I’m not sure if it was a sergeant or one of the squaddies, but

Stephen Sparks Page 105

C1379/89

Track 3

105

they – it turned out they had agoraphobia, so they got up and this guy wouldn’t come

out of his tent, you know. The open spaces were – he just got completely freaked out.

And so this chap had to be dealt with and he eventually had to leave and go down. I

mean, remarkably he – I met him many years later and he sort of greeted me like a

long lost friend and sort of reminisced about this fantastic time [laughs], but my

recollection of it was that this chap was, you know really had terrible trouble with

that. And then, you know, it was British Army supplies and the odd goat came up

from the villagers, it was transported up occasionally, which was eaten and things. So

I don’t remember huge tensions. As I say, I do remember that. The Argentine

scientists we had in were perfectly fine and we worked together pretty well with them.

Yes, what did you do in this place in terms of scientific work?

It was very much like the sort of work I was describing before, making measurements

of thickness, working out what we call the stratigraphy. There was a number of huge

eruptions from this volcano and so each of them has produced a layer and we wanted

to map out where these layers were, find out how big the eruptions were. We wanted

to collect samples to date them, so we wanted to find out how old this volcano was,

when it last erupted, how long did it last. We eventually found that it was about five

million years and it last erupted two million years ago, so that’s the sort of thing we

discovered. We wanted to look at the mechanisms of the eruptions, so similar to the

sort of previous work I’d done. So we were trying to, yeah, sort of work out what –

how these gigantic eruptions worked.

And what was the nature and extent of the army’s interest in the scientific work?

I think some of them were pretty interested. I remember the doctor, it was a woman

doctor – I think her name, if I recall, was Charlie, and then there was another officer.

They were modestly interested, I mean, not hugely. And of course they had a lot of

things to do because the logistics of the expedition were quite significant. And they

just sort of let us get on with the science and, you know, helped us – were very

helpful, so the expedition was no doubt, you know, was a success because of their

help.

Stephen Sparks Page 106

C1379/89

Track 3

106

Did they help directly with the scientific work, collection of –

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, if we’d got lots of samples they’d volunteer to take them.

I mean, we had the mules of course so sometimes they’d just go directly onto the

mules. And they’d help us with, you know, sort of locations and, you know, sort of –

at times, if we needed that. They had sort of – they had communications systems so

… Obviously one of the problems in a remote area is making sure – safety and

making sure people were safe, so they had sort of communications systems that they

brought along. So yeah, they were reasonably interested in what we were doing.

[1:04:08]

Thank you. I think we might be up to the point where you might want to describe the

sabbatical at CALTECH.

Oh, the one at CALTECH, yeah, that came in ’87.

Ah okay.

So that was a little bit later than this.

Yes. So if we then go back to Cambridge, if you could then talk about other work

done at Cambridge at this time?

Yes. I mean, I think – as I mentioned, I went back virtually every summer from

Cambridge to Rhode Island with my family and we’d sort of spend nice summers

working at the School of Oceanography. And there I was working on cores but I was

starting to do some of our own experiments with another colleague called Steve

Carey, who was a close colleague at Rhode Island as well as Haraldur. And so I’d

work with Steve and Haraldur and we started doing experiments. And we did some

nice work there on – looking at how you can tell how intense previous prehistoric

eruptions are by looking at the distribution of the size of the fragments. And I worked

Stephen Sparks Page 107

C1379/89

Track 3

107

with Steve on that problem and we – I sort of – by that time – this was about mid

‘80s, I knew enough fluid mechanics that I could sort of do some of this stuff myself

without, you know, at a sort of basic level without necessarily involving Herbert. And

also I’d learnt to design some experiments. So we did actually some nice experiments

in Rhode Island of – about plumes and this problem of rock fragment size. And we

developed a method that’s now very widely used, which is to look at maps of big

fragment size away from volcanoes and then use that information with a physical

model of the eruption column to reconstruct the intensity of past eruptions.

What is a physical model of the eruption column?

It’s very much a fluid mechanical model of a plume rising in the atmosphere and then

spreading out. And so it’s again combining momentum energy, mass conservation

laws, laws of heat exchange, equations of state which describe the material and how

the density – obviously when you’ve got an eruption column which is buoyant, the

key property is the density because that’s the buoyancy. That’s what causes the

plume to rise. So you need an equation of state which tells you what the density is.

And I sort of knew enough about this to create a model which we then used to find out

– if you’ve got a very energetic eruption column, as it rises it starts to widen and

spread in the atmosphere as it rises and starts to – can start to slow down and the

density gets less. So the further up you are in the atmosphere the lower the density of

the air. And so you need – you’ve got a trade off. You’ve got the velocity of the

plume going upwards and you’ve got a big lump of rock. If the full velocity of the

rock is less than the upward velocity of the plume then the rock will go upwards, but

if it gets to a place in the plume where those are exactly balanced then it’ll sort of in

principle roughly stay there. But if it goes to the region of a plume or such a height

that the full velocity of the rock is greater than the upward velocity of the plume then

it’ll start to fall out. And so we mapped out – we did a model which said where rocks

of different size would fall out of the plume and then we predicted what the pattern

would look like on the ground. And then we – having got the pattern, the bigger the

eruption the more – for a rock of a given size, the bigger the eruption the further it

goes, so the pattern depends on the size of the – the intensity of the eruption. And so

then we said, let’s go and look at some eruptions where we know what happened and

Stephen Sparks Page 108

C1379/89

Track 3

108

we know what the pattern looks like, like Mount St Helens, for example. And then

we found that the model fitted – we were able to fit the model to – it agreed quite well

with what had actually happened. We used recent historical eruptions to calibrate the

model. We’d also say what the wind speed was at the time, so we could calibrate it

against wind speed. So if the volcano’s in one particular place and the wind’s

blowing to the east then you expect the bigger rocks to go further to the east than they

will to the west, and so you can look at that aspect of the pattern and you observe how

far the rocks go one direction rather than another. And therefore you can work the

wind direction and the wind velocity out from the model. So we did that and that’s

now very widely used in reconstructing past eruptions round the world. I mean, that’s

the standard method that we developed then. Very recently one of my current PhD

students has done a much – updated it and sort of done a much better model and

looked at some of the issues of uncertainty and errors in the model and so she’s now

just – is publishing a paper which is a sort of much improved version of this 1986

thing that we did. But that was a – I think that was sort of an important bit of work.

And it sort of links – as I say, I continue to collaborate with people in Rhode Island.

When you say model, is this –

It’s a computer model.

Okay.

Yeah, it’s a computer model.

And so what would it look like? Did it display on a screen?

No, we didn’t have any fancy graphics at that time. I mean, nowadays people do

models and people look at them, you know, at that time we just sort of got the output

as numbers on a spreadsheet, you know, on a printout from a computer and then we

plotted them up in graphs and then used Letraset and Graph It to do our graphs.

So –

Stephen Sparks Page 109

C1379/89

Track 3

109

So they were, you know, it wasn’t a – it was certainly not – at that time there wasn’t

the, you know, it was before the sort of fantastic visualisation technology that …

What sort of computer were you using then in 1986 to produce this model?

Just a – I think we were using just a sort of desktop. It was one of the early desktop

computers. You know, it wasn’t a particularly sophisticated model so we didn’t really

have to do anything, you know, big numerics or anything. It was fairly

straightforward.

And for the non programmer, how do you – what do you do sitting at the computer to

get it to run a model which sort of simulates the plume of a volcano?

Yes, well it’s always the logic of the code. I mean, the key of modelling is to get –

firstly you’ve got to hope that you’ve got the mathematics that you’re describing the

physical phenomena correct and then you’ve got to find ways – usually because there

isn’t – the mathematics is sufficiently complicated that there’s not a sort of simple one

answer, so in other words, what mathematicians call a sort of analytical solution. This

was a bit more complicated than that but not terribly more complicated. And so we

have a set of equations, we hope they’re the right equations, or we think they’re the

right equations, and then you have to code them up. You have to write the equations

in computer code and then you have to find ways of solving them numerically, which

usually means – I mean, it’s not the only – there’s a lot of different ways of doing this

but, you know, the simple thing is you – what people call convergence. You don’t

know the answer so you guess what the answer should be and put a number in. At the

beginning you have a little bit of an equation which tells you a number and you’ve

guessed the – you’ve guessed what the output should be but the number you first

calculate isn’t like that, so you then change it. It’s called iteration. So you keep

changing the number until the two match. That would be a simple example. And

that’s really just writing the mathematics in the form of a computer code really and

making the architecture of it such that it does what you want.

Stephen Sparks Page 110

C1379/89

Track 3

110

And to give us a sense of the work, how long did it take you to satisfactorily code up

this?

This particular one, not very long because it really wasn’t very, you know, as I say, it

wasn’t very elaborate mathematics. I think I did it in Basic actually, if I remember

right, rather than FORTRAN. So it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t a sophisticated

computer. I mean, these days this would be, you know, I’m sure with Mathematica or

something people would be able to solve it in sort of – very, very quickly.

But for one of the sort of perhaps simpler parts of the model in my imagination

anyway, you know, the size of the fragment going up, what would that look like in

terms of computer code?

Yes. Well, all we needed to do is – we wanted to find a particular height and a

particular distance from the axis of the plume, in other words laterally. At a particular

position we wanted to calculate the velocity of the plume, the upward velocity of the

plume, and then we want to calculate the downward velocity of the fragment of rock

and we want to find those places where those two are exactly equal. And then when

we’ve found that place we can then contour that. And we know that inside that

envelope the plume is rising faster than the rocks can fall so the rocks must go

upwards and outside that region it’s the other way around and the rocks will fall down

to the ground. So it’s an exercise in finding out where those two velocities match.

And at this time was this model being used in any sort of applied way in terms of

current volcanic activity?

Well, it was very extensively used subsequently. I mean, it still is used. I mean,

people who work on virtually – volcanoes round the world will use this method.

They’ll go and map the rock fragment sizes from past eruptions to find out how big

the eruption, or how intense the eruptions were in the past and they’ll apply this

method.

[1:15:18]

Stephen Sparks Page 111

C1379/89

Track 3

111

Thank you. Are we then up to the point of the sabbatical in terms –

Yes, I think that’s probably – we’ve got there. I mean, we’ve skipped quite a lot of

the stuff with Herbert, but I think – I think that would – I mean, essentially we did a

lot of – over that ten years I did an awful lot of work, and Herbert, on really trying to

understand convection in multi component and multiphase fluids and, as I say, there

was an awful lot of interesting results that came from that.

[1:15:55]

So, as I say, going to – well, going to CALTECH, I went on – it was quite a short

sabbatical, about four months actually, but we went over to Pasadena, Los Angeles,

and spent it there and that was a really interesting little trip.

And what was the research that took place?

I’d got something called a Sherman Fairchild Scholarship from CALTECH and

basically I could do anything I liked. I mean, they just wanted me to be there to, you

know, talk to graduate students, attend seminars, do the research I was interested in.

The main research – I ended up doing sort of – the tangible result. I mean, it was a

great trip there but the most tangible result was interacting with an aeronautical

engineer in the – I was hosted in Earth and Planetary Sciences but actually ended up

doing I think the most – the research I did was mostly with this chap, Brad Sturtevant,

who was a Professor of Aeronautical Engineering. And he had apparatus for looking

at jet engines and things and he’d got interested in volcanoes and so he was saying,

well, you know, maybe some of my stuff would be interesting for, you know, we

know these volcanoes have hot gases roaring out of craters, can we use some of the

understanding of how high speed jets and jet engines work and can we apply that to

understanding how volcanoes work. So he had some wonderful experimental

apparatus which we were able to use and so we started doing – well, I shouldn’t say

he but it was – he had a graduate student who was working with him and I guess

Stephen Sparks Page 112

C1379/89

Track 3

112

through my interaction with Brad the graduate student did a whole series of really

interesting experiments on very high speed flows.

Could you describe that apparatus that was –

Yeah. I mean, it was basically a giant tube. It was in a big laboratory. The tube must

have been six or seven metres high, if I remember right, probably diameter about

twenty centimetres, so really quite a big thing so you need quite a tall, you know, lab

to do that. And Brad was an expert in shock tube experiments. So if you had some

material that was under very high pressure and then you broke a – if you imagine in

this tube that you put some material at the bottom of the tube and you have a barrier, a

diaphragm, a barrier which keeps that at high pressure and above that it’s at low

pressure, and then you break the diaphragm, you want to see how this very high

pressure material expands into the low pressure region. So it’s like a – which is

broadly analogous to what happens in a volcanic explosion. So he did experiments of

two kinds, which we looked at. One was having sand, a layer of sand, with very high

pressure gas in it, and then when you break the barrier the gas in the sand sees that

there’s a low pressure up there and wants to expand and it expands violently because

the pressure’s very high. And so it then shoots up the tube and then we used high

speed film to capture these processes which were going on in microseconds. And so

we were able to look at the way the sand bed expanded and the sort of complicated

things that happened during that expansion. And then the other one was – he had

liquid Freon – and there the situation is if you have hot Freon behind a diaphragm and

then you have a low pressure region, which is below, you know, basically where it

should – the Freon should be a gas. Then if you break the diaphragm the Freon wants

to transform from a liquid into a gas very, very quickly and it does it catastrophically

and so we get another extremely high speed flow due to a phase change. And we

studied – we looked at that problem as – that as well.

So these are sort of analogues for what might be happening in volcanic eruptions.

Yes.

Stephen Sparks Page 113

C1379/89

Track 3

113

But what was this equipment used for before this in terms of aeronautical

engineering?

I think that Brad was, you know, I think he was a curiosity driven scientist. He

wanted to understand multiphase flows. I’m not sure quite – I mean, this was a form

of fast fluidisation actually, you know. It’s a gas going through some sand and so

there are various engineering applications that he could, you know, fast transport of

solids and things like that that he could think of. So I think he just wanted to know

some of the basic fluid, you know, how these – the physics of how these things

worked. And so that was the sort of outcome of that trip. And then when I got to

Bristol – I got Brad to come over – we got a grant from NERC and we got Brad to

come over for a year to build some apparatus here in Bristol.

[1:21:21]

Thank you. Before we get to Bristol, I wonder whether you could say something

about your sort of personal relations with Herbert Huppert, as someone who you

worked with.

Yes.

Obviously you’ve got a sort of working relationship with him but sort of how, you

know, how you got on as –

Oh, we got on extremely well personally. I mean, he’s always been a great friend of

mine. In fact he’s currently in this department at the moment for a few months and

we’re still sort of working together a bit. So we got on very well. We’re very

different personalities. He’s an Australian and, you know, sort of quite – can be quite

sort of flamboyant at times. And he’s a very good mathematician and he also – my

experience of working with mathematicians has been somewhat mixed. There are

some which have huge intuition about the natural world and there are others who are

fantastic mathematicians but basically don’t have [laughs], as far as I could judge, so

much intuition. But Herbert was a mathematician with this great intuition about the

Stephen Sparks Page 114

C1379/89

Track 3

114

natural world. He believes strongly in the power of experiments and testing of the

mathematical theories. And so the – our skills complemented each other very well

really. I – my mathematics has never been very sophisticated but I had enough of it

that I could sort of follow in a rough and ready way what he was doing

mathematically. I couldn’t do it myself but I could follow, you know, the steps he

was taking, the logic he was using, to do the mathematics. I was learning about

experiments, which Herbert was a sort of past master, and we – and I could provide

the geological – the things I could provide, which were sort of the geological context

and the motivation, identify the interesting problems, know what, you know, sort of

numbers you should put into the equations and in the models to look at what happens

in nature. And then when we got the results, you know, things which we were

satisfied from the verification of the experiments could be applied to large scale then

obviously putting numbers in and working out – calculating what would happen in

nature and then using that to interpret the rocks. So it was a very complimentary

interdisciplinary enterprise actually and we – so we just got – it was just a very good

chemistry between us in terms of complimentary skills and perspectives.

This might be difficult to answer but I was very interested in what you said about

Herbert being intuitive about the natural world as a mathematician. You may not

want to name the mathematicians that didn’t have this quality but what does it look

like, that difference? What is the difference between a mathematician who has an

intuition about the way the natural world works compared to a mathematician who

doesn’t?

Well, I think this is – I mean, this is quite subtle. I mean, again, as I say, I wouldn’t

want to name names at all. But I did work with a mathematician in the very early

days of doing numerical models and in this particular case I was interested in solving

the problem of the rates of bubble growth. And this guy was very, very good and was

in the early days of generating finite element models and so he had a lot of skills to

solve a problem which I just couldn’t solve myself, just – either my mathematics or

coding skills were just not up to doing it. So we talked a lot and we got on and he

wrote a giant code and we kept getting results from the model which were to me

preposterous as a geologist, but he was actually completely adamant that these results

Stephen Sparks Page 115

C1379/89

Track 3

115

were right and he’d done the mathematics right. And we just couldn’t find a way

through. I mean, he was insistent and he really wouldn’t – my recollection is he just

wouldn’t take the argument, well, this simply is not possible, we know that this

doesn’t happen because we make these observations, this is not the right answer. I

mean, what would be analogous, that, you know, if you came up with a calculation

that the Amazon River flowed at a velocity of a kilometre per second you would know

that was not the right answer, and it was that nature. And we – so our communication

– anyway, the end of it – it was to do with pressures. At the end of the day it turned

out that his mathematics was correct and his code was correct but he had put the

pressure in CGS whereas they should have been in SI, it might have been the other

way round. But the results were coming out at a million times different from the real

result. And it wasn’t a coding error, it wasn’t his mathematics, nor was it my thing, it

was simply that the wrong – that, you know, the wrong units had been – he’d used

CGS rather than SI for pressure and therefore the numbers were a million times

different. And, you know, I suppose – and, you know, I suppose our impasse was that

in hindsight it was just so obvious that something like that must have been happening

but of course we were – he was sort of thinking, well, you know, you must have got

the geology wrong and I was thinking, well, you must have got your maths wrong or

your coding wrong, but of course neither of those was right. And that was sort of

instructive. As I say, I think that would never have happened with Herbert because

Herbert would immediately have accepted my argument that, you know, that, you

know, I knew the geology and he would also have understood that the physics, you

know, the Amazon doesn’t go at a kilometre per second or whatever and he’d have

understood that and sort of said – and gone back, well, what’s – is it the theory, is it

the model, is it the maths, is it the coding or is it some simple mistake like that.

Is there a reason in Herbert’s sort of background or interest why he is more likely to

–

Yes, I think because he started out life as an applied mathematician working in –

doing his PhD in physical oceanography at Scripps, so he was very much at, you

know, the sharp end of natural – applying maths to natural sciences. His whole career

has been – he started out doing his PhD in physical oceanography, so he was always, I

Stephen Sparks Page 116

C1379/89

Track 3

116

suppose, trained – I suppose it’s, you know, so I, you know, Herbert would have to

answer a question like that. I would imagine that it’s a combination of his, you know,

this sort of intuition. I mean, it’s a, you know, I was mentioning my supervisor

George Walker, it’s the same sort of – in a way it’s the same sort of intuition that

George had, you know, that there’s a feeling for how the natural world works which

you can’t sort of express in a simple way. But, you know, why some people have that

intuition and others don’t, I’m sure that’s – there’s no simple answer to that.

[1:29:08]

Thank you. And while at Cambridge, could you talk about what was going on in the

department in terms of what colleagues that you didn’t work with necessarily were

doing? You know, what were other people doing in the Department of Geology at

Cambridge at this time, or Department of Earth Sciences?

Oh well, I mean, there was some great stuff going. I mean, it was a fantastic place to

be around. You know, people like Dan McKenzie and Keith O’Nions and they’re sort

of giants in their field. And of course Ron was there, although he was much more

now into admin and, you know, sort of strategic leadership, but Ron was there. We

had, you know, young colleagues like Mike Bickle and Euan Nisbet there and the

palaeontologists like Simon Conway-Morris and Derek Briggs – oh sorry, no, Derek

had left by that time. There was Simon Conway-Morris. And there were some very

good colleagues. I mean, actually – I actually wrote very little- very few papers with

other colleagues in the department when I look back on it. Most of the papers from

that time were either with PhD students or with Herbert.

And did Herbert come to your department to work or did you –

No, we – DAMTP’s [Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics]

just down the street, you know, in Silver Street, so it’s about three or four minutes

walk, so we sort of – and the labs were in the DAMTP where we did the experiments

so I would go down there quite a lot. So we just – it was fairly easy – it was close

enough, we could communicate very easily.

Stephen Sparks Page 117

C1379/89

Track 3

117

What was the nature and extent of your relationship with Dan McKenzie? Dan being

someone who was working on the mantle.

Yeah. I mean, Dan obviously is a fantastic person to have around. I mean, he very

much does his own stuff and on his own terms. I think we have one paper which

involves Dan and myself and Herbert, which we did towards the end. So Dan took an

interest in what we were doing but didn’t get involved in – obviously one took an

interest in what Dan was doing but I never really – as I say, we never really

collaborated in any sense. But, you know, we talked science quite a lot, you know,

over coffee and at seminars and things like that.

[1:31:34]

Where did you live at this time in Cambridge? Where were the family living?

Oh, we lived in a place called Comberton, which is just outside – we started out in a

flat in Fen Causeway, just near Trumpington, a little bit closer to the centre of the city,

but then we quickly bought a house out in Comberton, one of the commuting villages

outside Cambridge, and that’s where we lived all the time.

And did any more children come along?

Yeah, we had another son, so we had two sons. So they were, you know, sort of

primary school aged kids when we were in Cambridge.

What was the extent of your wife’s interest in your work, or perhaps even help with

your work? I don’t know …

Yes. I mean, she’s always been interested and supportive of it. Obviously the fact

that I had to go away on field trips – the nature of the work involved field trips that

obviously took me away for periods. I think she did a – when we – I’m not sure

exactly when this was, possibly – and she did an O level geology, just so she sort of

Stephen Sparks Page 118

C1379/89

Track 3

118

understood a little bit more about what I did. She was a teacher, a primary school

teacher, which she did for a while and then she started – she got sort of fed up with

that a little bit but also with the family, she did some sort of part time work for a

company which did reading materials for young children. And then she got a job

actually – towards the end she got a job with – in the earth science department

actually, working with some of the sort of Arctic research groups, I think sort of

compiling geological data. So she did that for a bit. But I think her interests were sort

of, you know, primary school and education and teaching and things were the things

she was sort of interested in.

So she did an O level geology course?

Geology, that’s right.

As a way of trying to sort of access –

Yeah, at least to have access to something about what I was doing. And later on of

course she came out to Montserrat a couple of times when I was working there and so

sort of saw some of the sort of practical implications of some of the work I was doing.

[1:33:59]

This may not be possible, but is it possible to describe a sort of typical day at

Cambridge at this point, taking in the fact that, you know, you’ve got a family at home

and you’ve got work. So what was the sort of typical day?

Oh yeah, a very – typical is very hard to say. Obviously I was teaching. I was

eventually made a fellow of Trinity Hall and so had tutorial work to do. Early on –

Cambridge believe in – at the time, probably still do, believe in throwing you in the

deep end in terms of teaching, so my first task on teaching was actually to teach very

bright physics students about – space groups in mineral physics and x-ray diffraction

and things like that. So I had to learn a lot of things I’d not learnt before about

symmetry and different sorts of geometrical group and crystallography. And I had to

Stephen Sparks Page 119

C1379/89

Track 3

119

teach in the material science programme. So that – yeah, so we – so, I mean, I was

doing my lecturing and teaching. I was doing research. But I guess it was a fairly

sort of – except when I was away on field trips, it would be a fairly – actually a fairly

regular, almost nine to five job in a way. I lift shared with a colleague from the maths

department who lived in the same village and so we’d sort of, you know, do a regular

sort of commute and get there sort of half eight, nine and leave about half five. You

know, if there was a seminar on you might stay on for a bit and go to the pub or

something like that to – on occasion. But, you know, fairly – I think fairly sort of

regular in that sense. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary. The nature of my science I

think – I mean, I know that there are other areas of science where people had to work

phenomenal hours, particularly in sort of geochemistry and some of the biology

departments where we – one of my neighbours in – our next door neighbour was a

Dane who – a Danish guy and he was a post doc working in the – who’s – one of the

famous Nobel Prize biochemistry labs in Cambridge and he was working there and he

was separating proteins from cows’ blood. And I remember, you know, he would

regularly have to go in every evening to look at his extractions or come back at one or

two in the morning. So, you know, I know that there were other sorts of science

going on there which did demand these sort of tremendously long hours and

dedication. I guess I was lucky that I didn’t really have that – the nature of the

science I did didn’t mean I had to do these sort of fantastically long hours.

Why are those two kinds of science different? Why would that kind of science require

it and volcanology not?

I don’t know. I guess volcanology is – I mean, those sorts of sciences – the fact that

you can have experiments running for very long times. When you’re doing synthesis

or an extraction, you know, you have to be there to make sure things don’t go wrong.

You don’t want your experiment to go wrong. So I think it’s just the nature of the

science perhaps, you know. And also I suppose it’s just personality, you know. I was

sort of quite happy coming home in a sort of regular basis.

[1:37:48]

Stephen Sparks Page 120

C1379/89

Track 3

120

And what – in the same way that I asked you what memories you had of time spent

with your father, what memories do you have of time spent with your young children

during these Cambridge years, things done with them?

Yes. I mean, we’d – as you’d probably anticipate, we – because I was a sports fan I –

and both my boys have been very good at sports, then I sort of supported their, you

know, doing mostly football but also the older one was a very good tennis player so

he got into the – at one time he got into the sort of Avon County team and so I’d go

and support him doing that. And we, you know, did the usual things of walks or

trying to interest them in various things. I mean, we did sort of a number of bird

watches, the usual sort of kids – when they were much, you know, very – quite young,

the sort of usual children’s parties and things. And it was a nice village so they made

lots of friends on the street without any cars on it, which was nice, and so they could

play out. So it was a sort of reasonably nice environment. And it’s a village, you

know, with villagers who – nothing to do with academia, who we got to know and

became friends. So I would say it was a sort of, you know, reasonably normal family

life. As I say, I did have to go away on field trips so that obviously meant, you know,

my wife had to sort of cope with the children while I was away. We had reasonably

supportive grandparents. At least my – certainly my father and stepmother would be

down from time to time. And they lived up in Chester at the time so we could go up

and see them and they would come down and stay with us and help out. My mother

in law also came around sometimes, but she was a slightly more awkward personality

so [laughs] it was – that was a help sometimes. I mean, she liked the young children

of course.

[1:39:59]

And what was your wife’s view of times that you spent away? How did she manage

when you were away?

Yeah, I think sometimes she found it difficult, particularly when I was away for long

periods, I think. And so I guess over the years I’ve tried to sort of keep those trips,

you know, I no longer go for enormous long, you know, sort of five or six weeks

Stephen Sparks Page 121

C1379/89

Track 3

121

away. I try and sort of cut it down to sort of, you know, relatively short trips when I

do have to go to a conference or do a bit of fieldwork.

[1:40:31]

And when you met non scientists in the village where you lived and they found out that

you were a volcanologist, what did they tend to ask you about it?

Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of people in the public really find them fascinating, so I

think they – it’s also a sort of topic of conversation of course that you work on

volcanoes. And so sometimes it comes up. I mean, I would say – it’s interesting that

on the whole – and I live in a village now in the Mendips and when you’re dealing

with local people – they’re interested but they don’t want to talk about that all the

time of course, you know. It’s an interesting thing that you do and so particularly

when meeting new people they’ll ask you about it, but on the whole when you make

sort of friends outside academia you tend to be talking about all sorts of other things,

not about your, you know, sort of, your work.

Thank you. What was the effect on your career of becoming an FRS, if anything? I

don’t know how it works.

I think it was quite – I mean, I think it had a huge effect. Herbert got his FRS in ’87,

then I got mine in ’88 and I think the work – certainly the work that we did together

was a sort of significant factor. And the fact that the work was so sort of

collaborative, that, you know, you would – and so it had a big effect. Of course

obviously my father could come to the ceremony and he was sort of enormously

proud and all that. And so I remember the ceremony being a very nice occasion. And

of course it did mean – undoubtedly it must have played a big factor in getting the

Bristol job, ‘cause I was still a lecturer and relatively, you know, when I applied for

the Bristol job I was still relatively junior and a lecturer, hadn’t been promoted to

senior lecturer or reader or anything, so getting it was sort of quite a big deal. And of

course, we talked about it yesterday, I was only thirty-eight [thirty-nine] so it was

Stephen Sparks Page 122

C1379/89

Track 3

122

fairly early, particularly for sort of natural scientists, to get that accolade. So it did

have a – yeah, so I mean, it obviously was a big event.

I haven’t actually, across any of these interviews, got a description of the ceremony

for the FRS. In fact I’m not sure that I realised there was one. What did yours

consist of?

Well, it’s a – my recollection of it – it’s changed now, they do it a different way, but

at the time you go to the big lecture hall in the Royal Society. The president has a –

there’s somebody with a mace and the president walks up and they make a welcoming

speech. And there’ll be sort of thirty or so new – at the time thirty-five new fellows.

And then there’s a little bit said about them and then Newton’s signature is displayed,

I think, you know, it’s on there. And then you go and sign the book, you know, put

your signature in the book. I don’t – and then you have – I can’t remember – I’ve no

idea what – I’m sure there must have been champagne involved, but there was some

sort of reception thing after it. I can’t remember it lasting, you know, and the families

come along, so my father and my stepbrother and stepsister and my wife and children

were there. So there was a sort of group from my family and they came along and we

went to a reception. I can’t remember it being very long, I think just in an afternoon.

Are you presented with something? Are you given something?

Yeah, you’re given a scroll, you know, you’re given a scroll in a tube, I think is what

you get.

[1:44:25]

By this time were your children showing interest in what you were doing or were they

old enough to –

Not particularly. They all – they both showed some interest in it. They were quite –

both of them were quite – the older one was probably slightly more academic than the

younger one at the time in school, when they were kids, although they sort of reversed

Stephen Sparks Page 123

C1379/89

Track 3

123

later in life in some ways. And they took an interest in it. The older one became

interested in sort of bird watching at one time and I took them off for that, so – and we

took them for walks. By then they were mostly, to be honest, interested in kicking

footballs around and throwing cricket balls and things. So as I say, the older one was

– well, they were both reasonably good tennis players for their, you know, that age,

and the older one got into the sort of county training set and we could go and support

him. But I think, you know, they were very sporty boys and – and yeah, they had an

interest in it and they still do.

So why – I realise the Cambridge appointment was fixed term, but how is it that you

came to Bristol? What is the story of that?

Well – should we take a – I mean, I was just thinking –

[End of Track 3]

Stephen Sparks Page 124

C1379/89

Track 4

124

Track 4

Yes, so if you could tell the story of applying for and getting the post at Bristol, why it

was that you went for that as opposed to anything else and perhaps other options that

you considered at the same time.

Yeah. Well, I think it came up – of course the Bristol job came up because of the

Oxburgh Review. And it’s just probably sort of briefly worth just saying a little bit

about what happened with the Oxburgh Review, that the – I think the government at

the time wanted to see if they could get efficiency gains in the universities, not just

financial but educational improvements by looking at particular subjects and then

seeing how perhaps they could, you know, a more rational – they could rationalise the

distribution of resources and activities, educational activities in particular subjects

around the universities. And I think earth science came up because it was a science

but it wasn’t such a big science as physics and chemistry, so it would be a good place

to start. So I think the Oxburgh Review was, you know, asked – it was asked the

question that you’d –

Excuse me, sorry.

[End of Track 4]

Stephen Sparks Page 125

C1379/89

Track 5

125

Track 5

Yes, the story of the appointment.

Yes, that’s right. What happened was that there’d been something called the Oxburgh

Review of Earth Science, which was a sort of attempt by the government to rationalise

educational activities in universities within particular subjects. And earth science was

thought to be a good place to start. It wasn’t as big as chemistry and physics. So Ron

Oxburgh was given – tasked to do the Oxburgh Review. And they looked at all the

geology departments round the country and they obviously made the observation that

there were a lot of them, and of course some of them were quite small and this didn’t

seem to be perhaps such a, you know, an efficient use of resources. And how would

you – I think the idea was, well, how would you reconstruct geology in British

universities to make it more competitive internationally. And so that was the task of

the review and they came up with the conclusion that some departments really were –

hadn’t got critical mass and so perhaps should close completely. Others which should

be perhaps merged, Aston and Birmingham, you know, for example, both have –

same city, two departments, why not amalgamate them into one, Newcastle and

Durham and so forth. And then you had – obviously you wanted – so I think the

general idea was to reduce the total number of geology departments, or that was the

sort of recommendations that were made, and you’d focus your resources on larger

more competitive – internationally more competitive institutions. So I think that was

the idea of the Oxburgh Review. So in that context Bristol was a relatively small

department in a very strong – I think Bristol science, particularly physics, was sort of

already established as extremely strong, so the science faculty were very strong. The

geology department here was really relatively small compared to many geology

departments. It was pretty good in parts. There was really excellent palaeontology,

for example, here. It was somewhat traditional in the style of geology that it taught

and researched in. And there really wasn’t very, you know, I think the feeling was

that something should be done about Bristol. And at the time there were some

options, one of which would have been to close, but I don’t think people felt that it

was a particularly weak place, it was just sort of small and perhaps just hadn’t got

critical mass. But maybe it should combine with Cardiff or Exeter, those were ideas

Stephen Sparks Page 126

C1379/89

Track 5

126

that were floating around at the time. I wasn’t a party to any of this so, you know, the

– but eventually the vice chancellor, Sir John Kingman, I think, presumably with

other senior managers, said, ‘Well look, we’ve got a really strong science faculty. We

should have a really strong sort of state of the art earth science department at Bristol.

And so why don’t we – why don’t we actually invest money into it?’ And we asked

the HFC at the time, why don’t you put some money into it as well, and that’s what

they decided to do. And the end result was that they said, well, we’ll find – they did

three things. One was obviously very difficult. They needed to look at some of the

staff and find alternative employment within the university to create space to, you

know, build up a new – build up a strong department. So there were some people here

who were – thought that it would be better if they were reemployed in some other

way. And they actually did a lot of work with people to help them get into other jobs.

One or two people who were really quite good but felt the writing, you know, this is

uncertain times, and they actually left, so there were some staff who left. I think the

faculty would have been about fifteen or sixteen [coughs]. And so these exercises

meant – and then they decided, well, what we’ll do is we’ll make two professorial

appointments. The then head of department, David Dineley, had been head of

department for twenty years and he was retiring, so it seemed an opportune time. So

they said, we’ll appoint two new professors and we will make – with the people who

have been redeployed or who’d left, and we would then – and building on some of the

strengths, like the palaeontology, we’ll reconstitute this department by bringing in two

new professors. So they went and advertised them and I was sort of encouraged to

apply. I was – I think I was sort of approached and told, this job’s coming up, would

you be interested. And I thought, yep, I was interested.

Who by?

I’m not sure I remember actually, whether it was somebody from Bristol or – I think it

was somebody from Bristol actually sort of alerted me to the job. And I applied and

Bernie Wood applied and there were other candidates, but we were interviewed

individually and Bernie and I were appointed to these chairs. And after some

discussions with Bernie, we agreed that I would be the first head of department for the

first five years. So that’s how it came about.

Stephen Sparks Page 127

C1379/89

Track 5

127

[6:17]

Before we go onto what you then do, the people who were reemployed, in what way

were they reemployed? In academic posts in other departments?

Yeah, in academic or administrative posts, yeah. There was – I think that one became

sort of an administrator. Another one was sort of turned into a sort of admissions

tutor. They were sort of – they were involved in other things where their skills were

looked at. Nobody actually lost their job per se, they were given other opportunities.

And what – when you say that the geology in part was traditional, what does that

mean?

It’s – the usual things that you expect in a geology department. There’s

palaeontology, mineralogy, petrology, structural geology, tectonics, those are –

sedimentology. These are all the things that Bristol did and was well known for and

did well. I think, with probably the exception of palaeontology, they really weren’t

quite at the sort of cutting edge of the science of the time. And so a lot of the sort of

new areas which were opening up in the sort of late’ 80s hadn’t, you know, weren’t

being addressed in Bristol from a research point of view.

What are those sorts of things that weren’t being addressed?

Well, I think it was the sort of – the whole issue of – they had no – they had very

limited geochemistry and, you know, at the time the big departments really had people

like Keith O’Nions running big mass spectrometers and things. So they had no – they

had no sort of cutting edge – the facilities were quite modest at Bristol, so in terms of

experimental and analytical work, so it was quite field oriented. As I say, they had

some super palaeontologists, but of course their work was around – looking at fossils

and, you know, doesn’t – didn’t require big kit or anything. So, you know, as I say, I

don’t – it was perfectly respectable high quality geology of the sort of traditional –

Stephen Sparks Page 128

C1379/89

Track 5

128

broadly of the traditional kind, I think. And I would say that probably palaeontology

was the area where they still excelled.

[9:01]

As the new head of department, what was your – what were your sort of aims for these

five years, or perhaps even what were you tasked by the university with doing?

Well, we were – it was very simple really. We – the expectation is that we’d turn

Bristol into a world class earth science department. That was the mission. And we

had a, you know, certainly a lot of help. John Kingman came up with money and

HEFCE came up with money, so we had about – a couple of million pounds to spend,

which, you know, back in 1989, that’s a significant amount of money to spend on new

kit. We had about six new appointments to make, lecturers and so forth. And so we

were able to bring in some really very talented sort of mid early career scientists. And

so we had an opportunity to really – firstly make – transform the department into a

department where there were – a lot of experiments were done. Bernie of course –

Bernie Wood is a high pressure experimentalist, mineralogist, geochemist. I brought

in the sort of fluid mechanics and volcanology side. We were then able to make

appointments to strengthen isotope geochemistry and get state of the art geochemistry

and experimental facilities. So the place – I mean, the mission was to use this money

to transform the place into somewhere which was doing an awful lot of cutting edge

research with a strong analytical and experimental side and in several areas, not, you

know, as I say, not just palaeontology.

Let’s start with the kit then, or the equipment, what did you buy? What did you

install?

Well, I built a fluid mechanics lab, which is still there. That’s what I wanted. I

wanted – I sort of said, where we could do these sort of analogue experiments. Bernie

wanted high pressure cubic – sorry, high pressure equipment to take rocks to

tremendously high temperature and pressure and look at what happens in the deep

earth. So he wanted that. Both of us wanted a really good workshop, so we wanted to

Stephen Sparks Page 129

C1379/89

Track 5

129

really strengthen the workshop so we could make our own equipment in house. So at

the time I think we had a – there was a workshop, there was a small workshop with,

you know, one technician and so we expanded that to three machinists, technicians,

who could build kit up for ourselves. We bought an electron microprobe, which is the

instrument I mentioned earlier, which analyses minerals in minute detail. That’s

absolutely an essential piece of kit for any modern, you know, analytical studies of

volcanic rocks or any rock for that matter or minerals. So we bought that electron

probe. We got – hired a technician – a technical staff to run that. So we expanded the

technical skills of the department to cope with this sort of new era of analysis and

experiment. And then we went out and looked for really talented scientists to hire.

And so we then went about hiring a sort of spectrum of mid career to early career

academic staff. And so we had these sort of six posts to fill and we sort of filled them

in the first two years.

[12:39]

Who did you employ and why did you employ those particular people?

Well, we – I think Bernie and I had a very similar vision. Within some constraints,

we wanted to get really – and I learnt this from Cambridge too, that the route to

success is not to be too prescriptive in appointing people but to get really talented

people wherever they come from. And so we were not – we didn’t start with, you

know, we must have somebody who does exactly this. We wanted to look at a wide

spectrum of earth scientists and we wanted to hire the best people we could possibly

get. Now we had some constraints because if we’re going to run an isotope

[laboratory], you know, we’re going to go into isotope geochemistry we have to have

some people who do that. So we wanted to – so there were some constraints, which

were partly moderated by the sorts of science and kit that we could get. So we, for

example, hired a chap called Martin Palmer, who’s now the sort of dean of science in

Southampton University, as a very bright and promising young isotope geochemist.

And Martin came and did his stuff and he brought a lot of – doing a lot of stuff in the

oceans, chemical oceanography and oceanography stuff, a very different sort of

science to anything anybody had done at Bristol before, and got mass spectrometers

Stephen Sparks Page 130

C1379/89

Track 5

130

and things like that for him. We hired a chap called Mike Carroll, who is an

American. Hired two Americans, Mike Carroll, who is a very able experimentalist,

and we hired Mike Benton, who’s – at that time was a sort of very precocious young

vertebrate palaeontologist, working in sort of the area of dinosaur evolution. And

Mike’s now one of the sort of – he’s still a professor in the department and is sort of

one of the – sort of the most eminent sort of vertebrate palaeontologists. But at the

time we hired him he was a sort of, you know, sort of relatively young guy. And

George Helffrich, who is a seismologist, a woman called Vala Ragnarsdottir, who is a

geochemist, and so on. So we, you know, we think – we aimed to get people who

were going to be really top notch scientists, so that was our sort of policy. And we

didn’t much mind what they did in detail. That would sort of take care of itself, we

thought. So the department always had a – I mean, some people – the culture of the

department that has developed is I would say very collegial but somewhat anarchic

[laughs], you know. We hire good people and we let them get on with it.

[15:54]

And what were you able to do in terms of your own research in this period?

I decided when I got here I wanted to do two things. One, I wanted to set up a fluid

mechanics lab, and because of the CALTECH thing I wanted to get into high speed

flows in volcanic nozzles and vents. And so we – I got a NERC grant to bring Brad

Sturtevant from CALTECH, the aeronautical engineer, over to Bristol fairly early on

and got some post doc money for having somebody to work on that. And so we built

shock tube experimental gear in our own lab.

Shock tube?

Yeah, like these tubes with high speed flows that, you know, mimic what happens

inside a volcano. And so we built that apparatus and we hired – we built up a fluid

mechanics lab so we could do experiments. So that was one aspect of me coming

here. The other one was I wanted to do something – go to a very different part of the

world to do fieldwork and carry on my work on young volcanoes. And so I got a

Stephen Sparks Page 131

C1379/89

Track 5

131

chance in ’89, just after I’d got here, [in] 1990, to go out to Chile, and I started

working with people at the Geological Survey of Chile on the Andean volcanoes.

And that project has really lasted about fifteen years. I don’t go out there so much –

that work has – that sort of thing, but certainly for a good twelve or so years I had

PhD students working in Chile and I went to Chile to look at work on geological maps

and had the odd post doc. So I made the Andes a sort of – my sort of area of interest.

Can you explain why – from a volcanology point of view, why that was an area that

you chose, why that was an interesting area?

I think again it’s probably serendipitous to some extent. I think because I’d been to

the Andes with Peter Francis, the Cerro Galan, the Argentine expedition, I’d seen just

how spectacular – what a spectacular place it is to work. So I sort of – I had this sort

of background idea, I really should go back there some time. Then I got contacted by

– I had a PhD student, a Canadian, and he was working on lava flows and I contacted

– there was an eruption of Lonquimay Volcano in the Southern Andes in ’89, ’90, and

it linked quite well to the project that my PhD student was doing. And I got in contact

with somebody I didn’t know terribly well – well, I asked Peter Francis actually, who

would I get in contact with? And he suggested a name, a chap called Jose Naranjco

and I contacted Jose and he was working on this eruption for the Geological Survey of

Chile. So we asked if we could come out and have a look at it. And so I went out

with a PhD student and we did some work on it. And then sort of one thing led to

another and I started getting to know other Chileans in the Geological Survey and I

started work with particularly Jose and another woman called Moyra Gardeweg, who

was on the survey, and she and I worked on some – started to work on a volcano in

the north of the country. And I think actually ultimately it was through – that both of

these people knew Peter Francis quite well and so I was sort of introduced to them

and started working with them.

And could you say what in particular is – are these erupting volcanoes? They’re

active volcanoes?

Stephen Sparks Page 132

C1379/89

Track 5

132

They’re a bit of both. I mean, we’ve been working on active and sort of dormant

ones, so it’s a combination of geological mapping and studies and sampling and

working on volcanoes which have been erupting. So – and, you know, they are

fantastically well exposed, the Andean volcanoes. So it was a mixture of the two

really. And so I suppose I was working on the history of the volcanoes, the physics of

the eruptions and so it was continuing a strand of work but, you know, based on –

using the Andes as sort of the field area.

What does it mean, that they were well exposed?

Well, that means plenty of rocks around basically. I mean, if you go to, you know,

Indonesia or the Amazon, it’s covered in tropical rainforest, you don’t see many

rocks. The places where you can actually sample and look at rocks are few and far

between. But in the High Andes you’ve got, you know, rivers cutting mountains and

environments so there’s plenty of exposures of the rocks from which you can make

geological observations.

So it allows you to study this area.

It allows you – yes, that’s right. You wouldn’t – you’re in a much better area in –

studying a volcano in the Andes is much better in a way than studying it in Indonesia

from an academic point of view because the Indonesian volcano would just be

covered in impenetrable rainforest and it would be really tough to get information,

extract information, whereas in the Andes it’s dry and there are big huge canyons and

Cabradas cut by melt waters and you just get great exposures of rock.

[21:55]

What’s the difference in approach to studying an erupting volcano, an active volcano,

as opposed to a sort of historical event? What do you do that is different, you know,

in each case?

Stephen Sparks Page 133

C1379/89

Track 5

133

Yes, I think that’s a good question. I mean, it’s – in the former, the study of the

ancient – the volcano that’s not erupting but you’re looking at its history, then you’re

very much in the business of using geological observations to infer what has happened

in the past and to reconstruct that history, you know, how big the eruptions are, how

frequently they’ve erupted, what sort of eruptions were they. When you’re working

on an active volcanic system then you’re really trying to understand the processes as

they happen. And of course you’ve got the huge advantage that you can – you don’t

have to infer some of the things that happened, you can see them happen. So the two

sorts of study are actually very complementary because you can use the – you can use

them together to understand the whole process. So I’ve never sort of seen them as

completely different sorts of study. They’re sort of complimentary. And so many of

the things we do in an active volcano would be quite similar. We’d map – after the

eruption we would map out where the blocks of rocks were thrown and where the

flows went and so forth.

What do you do in terms of actually recording what’s happening in a volcano that is

erupting? Because I know that in the laboratory you’re interested in the jet that is

coming out of the crater.

Yeah.

And with a volcano that’s erupting, you’ve got that sort of happening in a sense in

front of you. Is there a way of recording that in some way, of getting measurements of

its temperature or velocity or –

That’s right. Well, taking film is the obvious first thing you do and that’s – I took

films of some of these early – of some of the eruptions and then we’d have still

photographs that you can use. What I didn’t do very much of until I got involved in

Montserrat later on is that – you’re quite right that there are a whole series of methods

of monitoring volcanoes and characterising what happens, seismology – networks of

seismology near the volcanoes to look at the vibrations that occur during the eruption,

defamation of the landscape and gases coming out and you measure the composition

of the gases and so forth. I wasn’t involved in much of that sort of work at all. I

Stephen Sparks Page 134

C1379/89

Track 5

134

mean, I took an interest in it but it wasn’t my field. I’m not a, you know, I’m not

somebody who goes out and puts out geophysical instruments or tries to understand

seismic signals. That somewhat changed when Montserrat happened, but of course in

the Andes you were working on relatively remote – really rather remote volcanoes

which weren’t monitored very much at all anyway. I mean, none of the volcanoes

really had seismometers on them or these sort of instruments you might get on

Hawaiian volcanoes, for example. So we were not working with volcanoes where you

could very easily apply those sorts of methods. And in fact I didn’t have the expertise

really to do that sort of work.

And what is involved in particular in videoing an erupting volcano? ‘Cause perhaps

there’s more to it than simply putting a video camera in front of it. What do you have

to do in order to make this sort of worthwhile, make this video footage data –

Well actually, it is – it was actually at the time not much different from that. I mean, I

had a sixteen millimetre Bolex camera and you’d just stick it on the ground and film

the volcano. And, you know, you obviously would like to – you wanted to know

where the volcano was and where the camera was so that you could then scale the

images that you got back, but it wasn’t much, you know, it wasn’t anything very

sophisticated. Of course the technology since then has moved on absolutely

fantastically, so things you can do now with radar and other techniques, acoustic

energy, there’s lots of techniques, but those are all things that didn’t really – hadn’t

really been developed yet.

[26:39]

Thank you. And so I wonder whether you could describe some of the experiments that

you did in the new fluid mechanical –

Yeah. We did a lot of different sorts of experiments. I don’t want to go through the

whole list. I mean, the shock tube experiments were pretty interesting. We did some

experiments where we created violent flows by mixing acids and bases. So, you

know, we had carbonate and then put in some acid and then that created bubbles of

Stephen Sparks Page 135

C1379/89

Track 5

135

carbon dioxide violently. And so we had to build some quite sophisticated and

corrosion resistant apparatus to do that, with Brad’s help, Brad Sturtevant’s help. And

we used the workshop to help build this equipment. And we had to put things like

little pressure pads in to measure pressures and where appropriate temperatures. So

you built some quite complicated – more complicated than the previous apparatus to

sort of try and look at these very violent flows. And we had a high speed camera in

the lab that – we took films of the activity and made measurements of them. And I

had a couple of very good post docs, who are now members of staff here and their

own independent researchers, but at the time they were doing – they were doing –

they were helping out in these sort of shock tube experiments. So that was good. I

mean, we learnt a lot about, you know, what happens in – what might happen inside a

volcano and the sorts of flows that – very violent flows that you could never actually

observe in a real volcano.

And was it – was the point of it to sort of – to understand how movement happens at

that speed, you know? What is the – what was seen as the sort of – a value of looking

at these high speed flows?

Well, so that we understood the processes that go on underground, because they’re

ultimately controlling what happens in the air. So, you know, we’re erupting stuff

through cracks and fissures and tubes in the earth, natural tubes in the earth, conduits,

and we know those flows are very complicated and violent and we wanted to

understand those flows much better and understand what might be happening. So

that’s really the rationale for those sorts of experiments.

So by understanding the flows you could say what was happening below to produce

that particular kind of flow.

That’s right, yep, that’s right yeah.

[29:20]

Stephen Sparks Page 136

C1379/89

Track 5

136

So yeah, so the, you know, I mean, perhaps – I’m not sure whether you – to deviate a

little bit. I mean, it’s worth just going back to the sort of department. When I got

here, it must have had perhaps eight or nine PhD students or so, I don’t know the

exact numbers, and it had no post docs, so I brought the first post doc to the

department [laughs]. One of my former PhD students from Cambridge came. So we

of course had to build up a lot of the sort of expertise and funding from sort of scratch

really, you know, to do this sort of work.

[30:01]

Thank you. I wonder whether you could tell me about work, which I think started

around 1992, on advising on the geological disposal of nuclear waste.

Yes, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that – that has never been a major research strand for me.

It’s always been more using my sort of expertise and knowledge to advise in various

contexts. So around 1993, I think it would have been, I was asked to go on a science

panel for UK Nirex, which at the time was the organisation which was responsible for

disposing of nuclear waste in the UK. Keith O’Nions was the chair of that panel and

he asked – invited me to be part of that panel. And so the reason that – it seems a

little bit odd at first sight that somebody interested in volcanology and the sort of

research I do would be relevant, but the fact is that the rocks of the Lake District are

all old volcanic rocks and at the time Nirex were very interested in disposing of

nuclear – radioactive waste near Sellafield and this was the sort of – this seemed to be

the preferred site. And if you were going to bury the nuclear waste in the volcanic

rocks, you actually had to understand the geology and part of that understanding was,

you know, an understanding of the volcanic geology. And so that’s, I suppose, where

my – the reason for my expertise – bringing me in. And that was a really fascinating

period. We were in a panel which was advising UK Nirex on their programme of

research, R&D, and we were exposed to all the debates of the time about the

desirability or not of burying radioactive waste. And so it was a very interesting

experience of seeing the interface of science and policy and public understanding –

the public perception of nuclear waste was clearly an absolutely critical issue, so it

was not just – the whole issue was not just science and the technical feasibility, it was

Stephen Sparks Page 137

C1379/89

Track 5

137

all about how people responded, the degree of opposition to a radioactive research

programme, the way in which Nirex handled their public face, the issues – at the time,

you know, they were still – I suppose there was still an aftermath of the Cold War and

people’s fear of anything nuclear and suspicion of the nuclear industry, for very good

reasons. So it was a very interesting education actually as well as providing some

technical scientific advice but actually seeing how this issue was tackled and what the

difficulties were.

Could you go into those debates? What in detail was being discussed in terms of – for

example, if we could take the sort of – the public view of nuclear waste?

Well, I think you – there’s two sides of this. There’s – the technical aspect is that you

completely leave out any issue about the, you know, the public and policy and things

like that, then obviously you can identify ways of disposing of nuclear waste and you

can optimise – so you would think – just technically you would find the best place to

bury it and the radioactivity didn’t escape easily and that’s where you’d choose. Of

course that’s not anything like what happens in reality because if you - [it]turned out

that the best place to bury nuclear – was right beneath of centre of Birmingham,

geologically that was the best place, you wouldn’t be able to do that because that

would clearly be just a nonstarter, to find a major city and decide to bury nuclear

waste under it. It just wouldn’t be politically or socially acceptable. So that’s really

the nature of the – in a way that encapsulates the nature of the debate and is – it’s the

– and also if you’re dealing with nuclear waste you don’t – it’s not just that the

geology is very good, it – where’s the nuclear waste, where are the power stations.

We have to transport the nuclear waste from one place to another, so Birmingham

wouldn’t be a great place to, you know, to come down the M5 with a truck full of

nuclear waste might not be a good – that entails risks in itself. So you come into a

whole series of complicated socioeconomic issues, which you – which have to be

matched with the technical requirements to find a solution to the problem. And at the

time – and this may be a sort of, you know, I’m not sure whether this is a balanced

view or not. I suspect it’s just my impressions, which is that at the time the UK Nirex

were very – an organisation dominated by engineers, dominated by the idea, you

know, that they could engineer this problem and that they might have been right that

Stephen Sparks Page 138

C1379/89

Track 5

138

they could engineer this problem. They could create safe barriers underground. And

they didn’t probably put enough – anything like enough effort in the engagement with

the public and public debate and the concerns of the public, you know, rational or not,

about this issue. And so they really came a cropper because they wanted to – they did

two things, which – I’m sure anyone involved in this will probably have different

stories, but … They did a sifting exercise of looking round Britain to find out the

places where you – geologically might be good for burying nuclear waste. And the

shortlist that came out was Sellafield and Dounreay. And some people thought this

was a bit of a coincidence, that the geologically best places would happen to be next

to the major nuclear installations in Britain. That’s what the sifting process seemed to

end up with. So that I think wasn’t a particularly good start and they were never

terribly convincing at the time in sort of saying what the reasons were for saying these

were the best places. And Sellafield became the place that was earmarked. And that

then led to an awful lot of opposition from the environmental antinuclear group about

Sellafield and about the whole concept of geological disposal even. They eventually

came a cropper because they – Nirex had planning permission to put a – they did an

awful lot of work round Sellafield, drilled holes and geology and geophysics, and then

they wanted to put an underground laboratory to test out the suitability of the site.

And that would mean basically mining underground a series of caverns in which you

did a lot of tests. And that was thought by some of the opposition to be a sort of – a

political ploy to get, you know, once they’d got underground and done this test then

they were suspicious, again rightly or wrongly I don’t [know] – is another matter, but

they were – there was a suspicion amongst some quarters that this was just a ploy to

get the waste site there. So there was a public inquiry. It was the end of 1996,

Cumbria County Council involved, the thing collapsed. They couldn’t get planning

permission for this. And the Conservatives were in the – it was in the dog days of the

– Major’s administration, they didn’t appear to have a great interest in dealing with an

issue which had great controversy and long term implications but hugely

controversial, so it was sort of sidelined. And Nirex sort of basically sort of almost

collapsed. I mean, it carried on but it reduced in size. And the Labour government

came in and they really, you know, they didn’t want to do very much about this issue.

They were sort of into alternative energy as the sort of way forward, not enthusiastic

about things nuclear. And so very little was done until probably around 2006, ’07

Stephen Sparks Page 139

C1379/89

Track 5

139

actually. So I was part of that. You know, of course the science panel was disbanded

once this, you know, this public inquiry finished, but it was, you know, a very

interesting period to sort of see these sort of complicated interactions and the, you

know, political dimension of science policy.

Who else was on the science panel with you?

There was John Lloyd. There was a guy from – was it – what’s his name, erm …

There was myself, John Lloyd, Keith O’Nions. There was one other, er … Yeah, I’ll

have to check with that. John Lloyd was the hydrologist, I was the geologist. Keith

was the – I think – we had some guy – was it Tony Batchelor? We certainly involved

Tony Batchelor from the sort of south – from a company in the south west of England.

He certainly came to quite a lot of the meetings. We had – the meetings we had were

often with contractors who were doing work for Nirex and the Nirex scientists. It was

quite a small panel.

And do you remember what you were able to advise, what you thought scientifically

about the issue?

Yes, I think we provided a lot of guidance about the science. We were sort of

supposed to be there as friendly critics, you know. We weren’t there to be sort of –

just rubberstamp things, we were there to look at the science that was going on and

say, you know, what we thought about it, whether we thought the quality was high.

There was a lot – like a lot of rad waste programmes, the Nirex themselves weren’t

doing a huge amount of it. It was all subcontracted to other organisations, like the

British Geological Survey and big drilling companies and geothermal companies and

Schlumberger and other companies doing the work for them and they would be

managing. That was a typical model, they would be managing it. There would be

scientists but they wouldn’t – they would have knowledgeable scientists who were

giving – knowledgeable clients really giving these – for the industry. So we would

sort of hear presentations by the contractors. We would hear about sort of some of the

science, strategic science, issues they were trying to pursue, the things they were

Stephen Sparks Page 140

C1379/89

Track 5

140

trying to do. And we would sort of advise or we, you know, as best we could, you

know, what sort of directions they should be going in.

Did you have a view yourself on the Sellafield site from a geological point of view as

a suitable –

I never formed a strong view myself. I felt that the grounds for – that it was a

plausible site, was actually quite strong. It was a plausible place to [do] it. There

were clearly some geological issues which needed to be addressed. And almost any

site will have geological issues. I learnt one very important thing, which I’ve – which

I’ve benefited from enormously ever since, is the idea at the time in all sorts of

contexts was for environmental societal issue or a hazards issues – or a very common

claim in research proposals at that time was if you do more science you’ll reduce the

uncertainty. And I learned that it’s usually the opposite. The more science you do,

the more complicated the system seems to be and the more uncertainty, or the better

you – it’s not that there’s more uncertainty but you discover there’s more uncertainty

than you really thought. And that’s very commonly true. So it’s certainly the case in

almost all the nuclear waste repository sites I know round the world that when you

start to look in detail you find the system was more complicated than you thought it

was and therefore the questions start to mount up and the uncertainty increases. And

you have to deal with that to, you know, assess the site properly. And so that old

argument that scientists will often – you’d much less – you rarely hear these days is

I’m going to do this research ‘cause I’m going to reduce the uncertainty. That – you’d

hear that much less often these days.

You said that Nirex then went into kind of abeyance and then became significant

again in the mid 2000s, is that –

Yeah.

We may as well take the story on.

Stephen Sparks Page 141

C1379/89

Track 5

141

Yeah. Nirex – I sort of – I didn’t really have anything to do with the British

programme after leaving the Nirex Science Council [Council Panel] and I really

watched it at afar without being involved. In fact very little happened. I think Nirex

must have been reduced to about a third of its size. So it had a programme but it was

a sort of an on hold programme and since the governments of the day were not really

making any decisions and sort of preferring this, you know, to leave this alone, this

whole issue, really very little happened. Now I don’t know when CoRWM was

created, which is the Committee of Radioactive Waste Management, probably 2007

but I’m not great on dates, I must admit. But there was a point at which the – this

needed to be – the politicians realised this really did need to be addressed and they

changed the strategy. Nirex was disbanded, the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency

was created and some of the former employees from Nirex are now working for the

radioactive waste management division of the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency.

And they’ve built – and they’ve certainly changed their ethos and ways of doing

things and have expanded. So NDA are now responsible for nuclear waste in the UK.

They [the UK Government] created something called the Committee of Radioactive

Waste Management and they specifically put social scientists and political scientists

and lawyers as well as natural scientists on that committee and they had somebody

from Greenpeace on it. So this was a very intentional idea of making sure that the

tent was big and that all the stakeholders who had views on this were included. And

CoRWM was created, I think by the last Labour government, and it’s still in

operation. And it’s an independent committee which comments on, you know, the

nuclear waste issue. Out of that was born the idea of volunteerism. So now the

official policy is, we find communities who are interested in or willing to – for a

radioactive waste depository to be put in their area. We then – so we put that first,

these people who want to – are happy about this. That’s the way that Sweden and

Japan and Finland have all gone, to volunteerism. And then when we’ve got a

community which says, yes, we’re interested, and maybe there are some benefits for

that community if they say of one kind or another, then the area’s explored for its

geological prospectivity, if you like, for having a depository. And that’s the current

situation.

And are you still advising on this?

Stephen Sparks Page 142

C1379/89

Track 5

142

I worked on a small panel for the chief scientist of DEFRA, Howard Dalton, who

sadly died a couple of years ago. We were looking at the work of CoRWM from a

technical point of view. So I did that. And now I’m on the technical advisory

committee for the NDA on this issue. So I’ve been – I’m now into a sort of advisory

group, which again – a bit different from Nirex. This is much more advising NDA on

their – mostly on their technical strategy for R&D.

Meaning what?

Well, what do we know about – what are the technical issues which are still up for

questions, what are the things we don’t know or where are the gaps, where’s the –

where are the – what’s affecting the risk. But we do advise on other aspects. We

advise on how NDA interact with higher education. We advise on how they – more

from a science perspective, how they might engage – and outreach and engagement

with the public and with policymakers. So we advise on those sorts of things from a

technical science perspective. And so I’m involved in that. And still – yeah, I mean,

we – in a couple of weeks I’ve got a meeting in London of that committee. But in

between of course, just to complete the story, I did quite a lot of work based here with

a nuclear agency in the United States on aspects of Yucca Mountain, the Nevada test

site, where the US were thinking of putting their repository. And then I’ve worked for

quite a long time in Japan with the Japanese nuclear programme.

And for example, in terms of the American site, what do you advise in terms of sort of

geological understanding about whether or whether not this ought to be used as a

repository?

Well, our advice is – that really starts into this whole area now of probalistic risk

assessment. And I think our job is not actually to – I think the job of the scientists in

this context is not to provide advice on policy, it’s to provide the information which –

the evidence and information which allows the decision maker, i.e. the political

structure, to make the decisions. And that’s the job. And so if you’re in a nuclear –

somewhere like Yucca Mountain, you want to know what are the things that could

Stephen Sparks Page 143

C1379/89

Track 5

143

cause you problems, make radioactivity leak to the surface, poison ground waters

farmers use for extraction to irrigate their groups. What are the circumstances where

unacceptable amounts of radioactivity leak out and cause environmental harm. And

that’s really a matter of risk assessment. So you’re really now into the area of

probabilities, ‘cause you can never – almost never say that anything’s absolutely

certain or absolutely safe. So you’re looking for sort of regulatory thresholds which

say what’s the acceptable level of radioactivity that the public should be exposed to in

the future. Given that this is the acceptable level of radioactivity they’re exposed to,

what are the circumstances which could exceed that and how likely are those

circumstances. And if the regulations then go on to say that we’re really not worried

about that risk if the risk falls beneath some threshold, like one death in a million

years or – whatever the number is, then one’s satisfied the regulation and it’s deemed

to be safe because the likelihood of something bad happening is so small that we’re

not – we’re going to say that we’re happy with that situation. That’s the game

actually of all nuclear waste programmes actually is to inform policymaking but it’s

actually to demonstrate – and actually demonstrate isn’t really the right word to use at

all. It’s to estimate as far as you possibly can what the chances are of exceeding

regulatory thresholds.

I see, thank you.

So you’re not trying to demonstrate – it’s the point I’m making. You’re not trying to

demonstrate it’s safe because that would be a politicisation, wouldn’t it, because one’s

trying to demonstrate that whether or not you exceed thresholds that are prescribed by

law.

[53:38]

Thank you. And to what extent at Bristol, perhaps even before, were you involved in

advising mining companies, that sort of work?

Not much actually. I did a – played around. I had a couple of PhD students in Bristol

who did mining sort of – mining projects. They were both people from the mining

Stephen Sparks Page 144

C1379/89

Track 5

144

industry and they did projects on volcanoes and ore deposits in Fiji – one in Fiji and

one in Sierra Leone. And – ooh, somebody at the – oh, it’s … And yes, I – so I really

didn’t get involved in the mining industry in a big way until I got to Bristol actually. I

mean, I did a little bit but not very much. Oh, we did – oh, I’ve forgotten to – I’ve

forgotten that. Herbert and I did a little bit of work that turned out to be very

important for the nickel mining industry. So we did have – Herbert and I had some

interactions with some of the big mines in Western Australia, looking at their nickel

deposits, and the models we produced were able to explain what those ore bodies

looked like.

How? Could you go into that a bit?

Yeah, it’s quite a fun thing actually. I’d forgotten about that but it’s another nice

example of what Herbert and I did. So if you go to – well, firstly let’s start with the

observations. You go to Western Australia and you go to the big nickel mines, like

Kambalda, and what you observe is that the nickel ore body forms a long thin zone,

almost like a flat tube of material, which wobbles about a bit, but it’s like a sort of

tube like thing. And these nickel ore bodies occur at the bottom of lava flows and so

they are something to do with the dynamics of lavas. So the nickel ores are also

formed in lava flows which only formed at the early history of the earth. They don’t

form now. Very much hotter. These lava flows – the hottest lava we get on the earth

at the moment is about thirteen hundred degrees centigrade. These lavas were

probably around sixteen hundred degrees centigrade, so they were a sort of volcanism

which you only got in the early history of the planet. Because they were so hot they

were very fluid flows and we wanted to understand how those lavas would work. So

what we did was we – Herbert and I did some experiments where we took some wax,

a slab of wax, of a particular kind, immiscible with water. We created a slab of wax

on a low slope in the laboratory and then we poured hot water down the wax. And as

the hot water flows it starts to melt the wax and forms its own channel. We then knew

that the rills on the moon from the lavas have these same features, so we were able to

compare our little wax experiments with what happened on the moon where we saw

very similar things, so we could help explain features on the moon. And then we

worked out some – Herbert worked out some theory, which worked out how fast –

Stephen Sparks Page 145

C1379/89

Track 5

145

given the temperature of the hot water, how hot it was, how fast would this channel

form. And these channels have very particular properties because if you imagine a

slope of wax, you’ve got this hot water going down it, it’s very hot at the beginning,

and because it’s hot it melts fast. So near the source the channel melts quicker. As

the flow goes away of course melting cools it down. So as it goes further its ability to

melt goes down, so the channel gets shallower downstream rather than deeper, so it’s

the opposite of river channels. So you expect it to be deeper near the source and

shallower further down. And that’s exactly what you see on the moon, these big

channels. So okay, how does this relate to nickel? We then started to talk with

geologists and we went to Kambalda and looked underground and talked to the

mining people and we realised that these very hot early lavas were flowing over

muddy rocks with a lot of sulphur in them. And so these very hot lavas would have a

lot of nickel in them but very little sulphur whereas the rocks they were flowing on

were mud, sulphurous muds. And so we thought, well, what must happen is that the

lava melts the floor, the sulphur comes into the lava. It then forms globules of nickel

sulphide, which then are very dense and they sink to the bottom of the lava channel

and they get trapped there and they form a layer at the bottom of the channel. And

then these layers will have the characteristics that we see in the mine. And we were

able to explain why it was that where the lava flows were thin on the side we saw

underneath the lava flows, the sediment. Where they were very thick in these

channels, they were much thicker and there was no sediment ‘cause the sediment had

disappeared by melting. And so it explained quite well why the exploration

geologists found, when they did a drill hole, if they came across a lot of sediment they

were not going to find any ore. If they came through a thicker lava with – and were

not finding sediment, there was a much better chance they were going to find some

ore bodies. So it explained these sort of exploration thing, if you like, that the

geologists – so that’s what we did. And I think that idea is still pretty well the sort of

accepted view of how these sort of ore bodies form.

So in that way it can guide them in their prospecting?

It can guide their – that’s – I mean, hopefully that helps them guide their prospecting,

where they would be expecting to find the ore and where they wouldn’t. And it would

Stephen Sparks Page 146

C1379/89

Track 5

146

give them their sort of – the geological understanding – improved geological

understanding to sort of plan the mines and work out what was happening. So that

was – I guess that was a sort of major thing while I was at Cambridge that we did. Do

you fancy some lunch?

[End of Track 5]

Stephen Sparks Page 147

C1379/89

Track 6

147

Track 6

Could you say something about the role of graduate students while at Bristol?

Or at Cambridge or …?

Oh yeah, sure.

That’s right. Yeah. When I got to Cambridge of course the first thing you – that

happens when you’re a sort of newly appointed academic is that you’re encouraged to

start supervising graduate students for PhDs, and of course I did that. And I think

over the course of my career I must have supervised over – I think it’s over sixty PhD

students. And they’ve really played an enormous role in the success of the science

I’m associated with. I mean, some of the students have been sort of absolutely

outstanding and of course have made their own independent science careers. So while

I was at Cambridge I was lucky enough to have several really sort of brilliant young

students and they really played a big role in getting some of the science done and also

developing some of the sort of new ideas that we had. So – and that kept going when

I got to Bristol and I’ve sort of again enjoyed a lot of very capable graduate students

and some of them have, as I say, gone on to make their own name. It’s – I think it’s

an interesting business about how you best supervise graduate students. I’ve sort of –

I’m not sure this is anything like design, but the tendency has been that when I’ve had

a graduate student, quite often I’ll include in the thinking about their project things

which I don’t necessarily know that much about. So obviously I will supervise them

in things that I do know about and the projects are designed so I can provide a lot of

advice but it’s quite – I think it’s quite nice sometimes to have aspects of their project

which neither I nor the graduate student know so much about and then of course they

can – if they’re bright they’ll go away and read up and find out about this area and I’ll

learn something from them and I have to get up to speed in it. And I think that’s

actually sometimes produced some of the more sort of creative research results.

Stephen Sparks Page 148

C1379/89

Track 6

148

Are you able to perhaps pick one research student that would illustrate how that

relationship works in practice, almost how the division of labour works or how the

end result is a function of the two of you working together? Is there one –

Yes. I mean, I would say one – I mean, the graduate students who’ve been the best

ones are usually – by the time they’ve got towards the end of their thesis you’re sort

of starting to regard them as colleagues rather than students. They’re people who you

interact with and collaborate with. And, as I say, I’ve been very lucky to have some

very good ones that way. I mean, one of my – I suppose the – one of the most

successful graduate students has been a chap called Jon Blundy, who is now FRS and

professor in this department at Bristol, and he was an absolutely superb mapper. I

mean, he did tremendous geological maps when he was a student. And he also had a

flair for – he was not only a very sort of creative mind but he also started to get a real

interest in doing experimental petrology, something which I’ve never really done

much of, and during his PhD he did – he did a few – he did a geological map in the

Alps but he also did some experiments during his PhD, just to look at origins of

textures and something that I hadn’t up to that point been involved in. And so that led

to some very insightful results from his PhD. So a number of times I think during the

course I’ve had students who’ve gone away and done something sort of slightly

unexpected or – and something I’ve learnt from. So I think that’s really quite a

common experience I’ve had and of course it’s good when you’ve got students who

have got – who are, you know, independently minded. And I mean, one of my

students, David Pyle, who’s now professor at Oxford, when he was a PhD student

with me he did a bit of work which was really unrelated really to the main thrust of

his PhD and he did it independently and published a single author paper, which has

been absolutely a huge scientific hit. And it was just a very clever piece of work.

I’ve benefited from it. I wasn’t actually – I wasn’t involved in co-authoring, David

published this paper on his own when he was a – and that was – that then fed into a lot

of research which I’ve been doing to actually – doing subsequently, which related to

trying to explain the things he was – that he discovered and that was very stimulating

in that way. So there’ve been a number of occasions where that sort of thing has

happened.

Stephen Sparks Page 149

C1379/89

Track 6

149

What was the area that he was focusing on and then what was this extra work that he

did?

Well, David was doing – David Pyle was working principally on looking at – in fact

this is a good example because David was one of a series of students I had working on

the island of Santorini, the Greek volcano. And he did some geological work, which

was pretty good, and his main project was actually to use radioactive isotopes, what’s

called the so-called uranium series of radioactive isotopes, which have relatively short

half lives. And he worked with – I co-supervised him with a man [Ivanovich] from

Harwell who was a real expert in these short lived isotopes. And we used the short

lived isotopes to try and find timings of events prior to eruption, what was the history

of these magmas prior to eruption. And just to give you an example, that if you take

an isotope like radium 226, which has got a half life of sixteen hundred years, in the

decay series from uranium, 235 I think it is, you find that in that decay series, if

there’s some event which means that – chemical event which means that radium and

uranium are separated by a chemical process, then for a while they’re out of

radioactive equilibrium. And because the half life of radium 226 is sixteen hundred

years it takes a few thousand years to get back to the point where there’s a balance

between the amount of uranium decaying to produce radium and the amount of

radium decaying to produce daughter products from that. And so this is work that

was – at the time was beginning to – people were getting very excited about this and

applying this methodology in all sorts of contexts. So I thought that David’s project –

I’d co-supervise it with the guy from Harwell, Ivanovich, and that he’d be able to

make these analyses and get the supervision on the isotopes from the person who’d be

much more expert than – was the expert. And so that really was his, you know, that

was the main strand of his PhD. And that was a very good piece of work but during it

he – he made some – he tested out an idea about the way in which volcanic ash layers

thin with distance from the volcano. They tend to be thicker near, at hand. And quite

a long time ago it was recognised that often this thinning seemed to be exponential.

Now what David did was he thought of a very clever way of turning rather

complicated maps of thickness, so not just thickness in a particular direction but the

whole pattern of the ash, and converting that into a form which could – was much

more general than anyone else had ever thought. So he thought of this sort of very

Stephen Sparks Page 150

C1379/89

Track 6

150

clever way of doing it and then he plotted up all the data that he could find in the

literature and he found that this really worked extremely well. No matter how

complicated the pattern looked, if you reduced the data in the form that he’d

suggested then you really could make sense and you got this really very simple

relationship. And that was a really very clever thing to do. He published a paper on

his own. He – that has got highly cited and used ever since sort of – and, as I say,

he’s now a professor at Oxford in volcanology and has made himself into a very sort

of, you know, very, you know, one of these sort of outstanding earth scientists in the

UK, I think. And that was just a very clever thing to do. Interestingly, I don’t know –

you’d have to ask David what he had in mind, but it’s interesting that he was thinking

– he’d been working for his PhD on radioactive decay with half lives and some of the

stuff he did was thinking about this problem of ash layers in terms of decay constants

and half – not half lives but half distances and half sizes and things like that. So he –

you could almost say he took the theory of radioactivity and applied it. Now I’m not

sure whether you – actually that was what he was thinking about, but it’s sort of quite

interesting that that’s what he did. And then of course once he’d discovered that, the

question became, well, why does it – why do you get this very simple relationship,

what’s the cause of that, and then that leads onto new science and new questions. So

that would be a good example.

[11:27]

Have you ever had research students who sort of challenge your own developed ways

of thinking about volcanoes or approaches to studying them? In other words, they

move away from you almost during the process of …

Yes. I mean, I think the – I’m not sure I’ve ever really had – I’ve had students

who’ve challenged or got their own ideas, absolutely. That’s true. But it’s never

really led to any sort of conflict because if they’ve got the arguments and they’ve got

the evidence and they’ve got some new way of looking at it then, if it’s more

compelling arguments than perhaps I had made at some previous occasion and come

to some different conclusion, then that’s – I’m quite happy with that. I mean, in fact

one of my current PhD students at Bristol has done just that. We made some

Stephen Sparks Page 151

C1379/89

Track 6

151

suggestions sort of twenty years ago about certain aspects of volcanic ash layers,

about how they originated, and we were putting forward ideas which were really at

the time different to previous – what people had thought previously. And we thought

our explanation was definitely – the arguments were much – the evidence was much

stronger for our explanation. And then that gradually became the sort of paradigm.

And one of my most recent PhD students, who’s still here in Bristol, she has actually

shown that it’s somewhere in between these two actually [laughs]. So the end

members – what we said is not quite right and what the people twenty years ago had

been saying isn’t really quite right and actually it’s a sort of – the truth is somewhere

in between. And that’s absolutely fine. So those sorts of things do happen. I’ve –

yes, I mean, I’ve really never had a sort of big sort of – I mean, all PhD students have

very different personalities and, you know, you obviously get the odd one who

struggles for one reason or another, or finds it difficult. I don’t think I’ve ever had

sort of a scientific clash with a student, partly because, as I say, I’m sort of quite

happy to accept if they’ve got sort of new evidence or new ways of thinking about

things and that might be better than what was done before.

[14:19]

Thank you. In relation to David Pyle, you mentioned Santorini. It reminded me to

ask you about a conference, which I think you attended, which was organised by

Colin Renfrew on –

Oh yeah, right, yes, yes.

I wonder whether you could – part of the reason for asking is that, as you know, I’ve

interviewed Mike Bailey and he tells the story of this conference. So I wonder

whether you could tell the story of that conference from your point of view.

Yes. I wonder which one it was, ‘cause there were two Santorini conferences. I think

it was the one – do you know which one he was thinking of?

Ah no. I didn’t realise there were two.

Stephen Sparks Page 152

C1379/89

Track 6

152

Yeah, there were two. I think it was probably the same one that I was – that – yes.

No, I think that was very – I remember that being a really interesting conference. And

of course it was very interdisciplinary, so they had people who were art historians,

archaeologists, anthropologists, volcano people like me and geochemists. There was

a huge diversity of types of people there so it made it very interesting. And of course

the time that Mike was involved was – that was the time when the big dating

controversy about the eruption was still very much around. I mean, I’m not sure it’s

actually ever gone away actually but at the time it was a big – regarded as a huge

controversy about what the date was and the dating methods.

Do you have memories of Mike at that conference?

A little bit because I remember his talk on the oak trees, the Irish oaks and the tree

rings and the carbon dating that he did, and that was obviously a very important set of

observations and input into the, you know, into the arguments that were going on at

the time.

[16:15]

Thank you. Now I think we’ve got to the point where we’ll be going to Montserrat

and I think the question is how did that begin, what is the origin of that work?

Yeah. I mean, yes, well, it was the eruption of course that was the origin. At the time

I was – 1995, I was – largely my main field area was the Andes and Chile and I had a

couple of PhD students working there and a couple of – and another couple of PhD

students working on – just started on other topics. And the eruption started in July

1995 and I sort of read about it on the news. And so I wasn’t really involved in the

eruption much in the first few months. I didn’t go out there. And then I was asked,

with a colleague called Willy Aspinall, who’s now one of my major sort of

collaborators, to go out to form a sort of small audit commission on the state of the

observatory and the monitoring of the volcano and to advise government on, you

know, where they, you know, what they would do, not so much about the volcano

Stephen Sparks Page 153

C1379/89

Track 6

153

because we were going there really to say, you know, how do you – how should we –

the island had no scientific infrastructure and when the eruption started various

science groups came in and there was really a lot of conflict around between the

different science groups, which was concerning the governor of the time and the chief

minister of the island. And they thought that they would have Willy and I come out

and talk – and do a sort of quick trip. So we did – so this was January ’96, we both –

Willy and I went out. We stayed there for a few days. We talked to the chief scientist

of the time, a chap called William Ambeh from the Seismic Research Centre in

Trinidad. We got a sort of flavour of the tensions that were there and we realised that

there were real problems because the island had no scientific infrastructure to speak of

before the eruption. It was pretty clear it was a very serious evident with – and

potentially very dangerous, that there really needed to be a full, you know, a well

established well equipped capable competent observatory there to monitor the volcano

and give advice to the government. Now Willy had already been out. Willy had gone

out in ’95 so he was sort of more familiar with the situation than I and I think I was

brought in just to give a wider view about volcanoes and volcanology and things. So

out of that it really became very apparent that help was needed and then in a rather ad

hoc way people from Bristol, particularly my PhD students, started – and myself

started to go out there and started to work with the observatory team.

[20:01]

Before you go on, could you just say what you – say in detail what you found when

you went out on this initial visit? When you say there were science groups here and

there were tensions, what do you mean? What was actually happening? What did

you see happening there?

I think – the difficulty is that I now know so much more about what happened at that

stage than I did then, I’m not sure it’s very easy for me to put myself back into what I

would have said. If it had been coming back to Heathrow or Gatwick on, you know,

January 20th

, or whenever I came back, and you’d asked me that question, I’m sure

my answer would not be the same as I’m going to give now, because there’s an awful

lot of hindsight and new information that’s emerged subsequently. But I think we

Stephen Sparks Page 154

C1379/89

Track 6

154

certainly saw – fairly quickly got the following idea, that – the only scientific

organisation in the region was based in Trinidad, at the University of the West Indies,

the Seismic Research Unit, and they had come in to monitor the volcano. And

somehow or other, and the somehow or other is still not entirely clear, the US

Geological Survey team were invited in at the same time. And these two scientific

enterprises clashed in a pretty serious way for a whole variety of reasons including

personal chemistry, including the fact that the scientists from the United States were

well paid, well supported. The resources for the people from Trinidad were much

more limited. It was also different in perspective. There was – the US GS people had

just been involved in – they have something called the Volcano Disaster Assistance

Programme, where if there’s a volcanic eruption around the world the US GS will

bring a sort of like a SWAT team who will come in, usually for a relatively short time,

help the locals, put seismometers out, give them advice and experience and help them

get started or help to monitor the crisis, but they can never stay for a long period of

time. And this group had come in and they’d just come back from Mount Pinatubo in

1991, where there was an absolutely catastrophic eruption and they knew about

Mount St Helens. So they on the whole were extremely nervous. There were even

some who wanted to leave the island immediately, they thought it was so unsafe.

Some among the US GS?

Some amongst the US GS thought the situation just so dangerous they wanted to

personally leave the island. The people from Trinidad on the other hand were led by a

man called William Ambeh, who was from Cameroon, an African geophysicist with

seismological expertise, and he had a very much more – well, firstly he’d never been

involved in a volcanic crisis so in a sense he was much less experienced, but he felt

that there wasn’t nearly as much of a difficulty. And so there was a clash on science,

there was a clash on perspectives about what the eruption was doing and of course the

government, the British governor and the chief minister were getting essentially rather

potentially conflicting advice. So that was definitely in the air about just how

dangerous the situation was. And then you – into that mixture you have to put in

colonial politics. Montserrat wanted to be independent prior to the eruption. There

was quite an independence movement, you know, we’ll become an independent

Stephen Sparks Page 155

C1379/89

Track 6

155

nation, we’ll cut our ties with Britain. And of course the eruption really put a

complete stop to that as a possibility, but of course at the time they weren’t

necessarily realising that. They were getting sort of – the message they would prefer

to have heard was that it wasn’t as dangerous as people had said, you know. And

they’d got the scientist William Ambeh, who was a black man, at that time unusual to

have a black guy as a head of a sort of major research institution. He was highly

regarded and looked up to by many of the locals. So they preferred – in a way there

were some who preferred to believe that story, whereas the governor of the island was

being told by these American scientists who’d been experienced in other volcanic

disasters that this is really a very bad situation, you know, and even wanting to leave

the island. So this sort of, you know, all this sort of rather toxic mixture was

converging [laughs] all at the same time, so it made it a very awkward situation. I

mean, this is not what we were there to advise on. We were there more just to advise

what sort of observatory you would like to have, you know, what was fit for purpose.

And we of course talked to William and one or two of the US GS – there was one US

GS person there when we got there but they’d basically left by that time. So it was a

very – it was very awkward – it was a very difficult beginning to the crisis actually,

very dangerous in some ways because really actually nobody did know what was

going on at the volcano.

[26:21]

Yes. What were the two groups doing? What were William Ambeh’s group actually

doing and what were the US GS actually doing in terms of –

Well, they were doing things very similar. I mean, scientifically there wasn’t really

much distance. I mean, they were looking – they’d got seismographs out. They were

sort of starting to make some measurements of defamation, sort of the defamation of

the land, by using lasers and things like that. They’d got seismology – the little

earthquakes that occur was the main thing. So scientifically they were not, you know,

not really far apart. I mean, it was just – it was more a difference of perspective, I

suppose.

Stephen Sparks Page 156

C1379/89

Track 6

156

[27:02]

And so we can imagine it, could you describe what the volcano looked like and then

where these scientists are in relation to it? ‘Cause we might imagine that they’re

standing right on the edge of it dipping things in. So what did the erupting volcano

actually look like and then where were the scientists in relation to it? Where were

they putting their pieces of equipment?

Well, they put them on the flanks of the volcano. It’s a totally different sort of

volcano from like Hawaii. I mean, it’s very viscous magma, which is enormously

stiff and also capable of building up huge pressures. And of course this was the big

concern, that there would be a really very large explosive eruption. And it was – it

was – so it was potentially really quite dangerous and so people wouldn’t really go

that often near the volcano at all. I mean, it was – and people did climb up and look at

what was going on. And – but you basically put the seismometers on the ground and

you find some way – there was no fixed observatory so they had an observatory in

Plymouth, the main town, which was only three kilometres from the crater, and that

was I think – certainly when I went there I think that was acknowledged to be far too

close for comfort. And they’d moved by the observatory – I think by the time we got

there they’d actually moved the observatory to – further away from the volcano, away

from the main town. So essentially it was – the main measurements that were being

made at the time were the seismic measurements and the laser – electrodistance

measuring, where you have a reflecting prism on the volcano and you have a laser

light which you shine to it and get it back. And then if there are movements you tell

from the phase change what the movements are. So you can see these very small but

very significant, you know, millimetres per, you know, per week or less, very tiny

movements, but you can see these tiny movements happening and you know that

there’s – the ground is swelling. So that was the sort of information they were getting

at that time. They would also have been getting a bit of gas data, sulphur dioxide

coming off the volcano. They were starting to measure the gases too.

[29:30]

Stephen Sparks Page 157

C1379/89

Track 6

157

What were your personal feelings about the – about your safety or the safety of the

people near the volcano when you were just there for the first time?

Er, I think that I didn’t have a sense at that time that we were moving – by the time I

got there, I think the – well, I won’t go into the details of the eruption but basically the

eruption started in June 1995 and really that very uncertain and dangerous period was

probably in July, August, September 1995. By the time we’d got to January ’96,

when I first went out there, nothing untoward had – a big cataclysmic event had not

happened. And by that time there was the very start of something we call dome

growth, which is when this very viscous lava with no gas in it squeezes out and forms

a dome on the floor of the crater, and that had started to happen. And that was

somewhat reassuring because that sort of activity is certainly, you know, if the lava’s

getting to the surface it’s losing its gas and it’s being able to squeeze out without any

gas in it, then it’s lost the ability to explode. And so I think – at that time it was

coming out very slowly so I think the people by that time had started to get a little bit

more comfortable that this wasn’t going to sort of immediately go into some sort of

Krakatoan like cataclysm, that it was sort of moving towards one of these lava dome

eruptions. So I think the sort of anxiety that they likely – I mean, I wasn’t present in

those first few weeks, but the sort of anxieties and uncertainties they had were

probably dissipated a bit by then. And these sort of early tensions – the US GS people

had largely gone and one or two of them came back to help and were sort of – were

able to, you know, sort of mend bridges. And there were a couple of people,

Americans, who sort of, you know, made it their business to mend bridges with the

people from Trinidad and work with them, and that was sort of beginning to work sort

of quite well.

And finally on this initial visit, what did you sense of the sort of reaction of local

people to what was happening? What did you see of that in just going around where

you were?

Well, I think that was – there was still a huge amount of turmoil and uncertainty and

very different reactions from different people, people who were sort of terrified over

to people who were, you know, sort of didn’t think, you know, they thought – they

Stephen Sparks Page 158

C1379/89

Track 6

158

weren’t convinced that anything terrible was going to happen and they couldn’t

understand necessarily why they were being evacuated. I mean, a lot of the issues

locally were not so much to do with the volcano. I mean, the British government had

set up evacuation camps in the north of the island and old hurricane shelters and

they’d evacuated a lot of people to these. I mean, these shelters were very primitive.

And because the volcano was still threatening, it was still going on, these people

couldn’t move back and so they were living in really very dire conditions actually. I

mean, really, really quite shocking in some ways. You know, sort of churches

absolutely full of just bed after bed next to each other and people there living with

their families for, you know, literally weeks and months. And so the local politics

was, you know, you could see quite rightly, they were complaining about the British

government not providing adequate support and help, complaining about these

conditions. And so that – a lot of the discussion locally was more about that in a way.

People had been taken out of, you know, the very dangerous regions had been –

Plymouth was still open actually at that point so – on the east coast of the volcano

some people had been evacuated. And so it was still – it was a bit of a calm before

the storm because during the rest of 1996 the volcano gradually ramped up in activity,

became more and more active, albeit very slowly, and so it was like a ratchet, you

know, the population were continually being stressed and the situation was getting

more and more difficult slowly with time and that made it really difficult for them.

[34:34]

So then what happened next? You came back from this initial visit.

Yeah, I – I saw this as a fantastic opportunity to get involved the sort of applied side

and some of my PhD students were going very relevant work and I basically talked

with them about it and they agreed to come and able doing some of the monitoring

and work. And I came along and supported some of the monitoring activities and

started doing measurements and observations and beginning to help support the

observatory work and trying to keep up, you know, if you like, keep up with the

volcano in terms of what it was doing. And the PhD students sort of shifted – at least

Stephen Sparks Page 159

C1379/89

Track 6

159

two of them shifted their – what they were doing for their PhD [laughs] quite

markedly at that point and they started working on Montserrat.

And who were you speaking to in the government – who was inviting you to go out

initially?

I think it was the old ODA and – the ODA, Overseas Development Agency, before it

became DIFID, were providing a lot of the money. And the Foreign Office were in

charge of the island in terms of security but the money, because it was emergency

disaster relief, came from the ODA. So that was where the money was coming from

to support the observatory activities.

And how did your work with this island develop then from this point onwards?

Well, the first three years until ’96 – well, I suppose first two years really, till early

’98, that was a period of dramatic developments of the volcano one way and another,

scientifically fascinating terms of emergency, quite troubling, you know, there was

continued escalation of the activity. We established a sort of – the Montserrat volcano

observatory, in which the duties of doing the work were shared effectively by the

Seismic Research Unit from Trinidad, people from the British Geological Survey and

ourselves from Bristol principally, and one or two other British universities came in

and helped from time to time. And so by the combination of those personnel being,

you know, sort of all – ‘cause the main point is all of those organisations have other

jobs. I mean, they’re, you know, we weren’t – [laughs] it was going to be quite a

while before one would create sort of permanent posts of a director, for example. So

over those first two and a bit years we rotated the directorship of the observatory

between five people, me being one of them, two colleagues from Trinidad being other

ones, Willy Aspinall being another one and somebody from the British Geological

Survey being the fifth. So because we all had day jobs, you know, working in the

university, working at the BGS or working in Trinidad, we’d typically come on the

island for somewhere like five or six weeks at a time in a rota system and then during

the time on the island I would be director of the observatory and work with the

technicians and the scientists to keep the volcano monitored. So that was an

Stephen Sparks Page 160

C1379/89

Track 6

160

extraordinarily – for me an extraordinary experience because we were in the middle of

a really major volcanic disaster and emergency, we were trying to run a volcano

observatory in very trying circumstances in all sorts of ways. You know, obviously

from different institutions, different countries, working together, local technicians,

Montserratian technicians and admin staff in the observatory. It was actually in a sort

of bungalow, it wasn’t really a proper observatory at all, so a lot of these

seismometers and the ground defamation and things that we had to measure were

being set up. We had helicopter support, so we would be able to fly and look at the

volcano, get near the volcano quickly and get out quickly if we needed to, set the

instruments up, make the instruments work. At the same time the observatory’s task

was not just to monitor the volcano but was to give almost on a daily – a day to day

basis, advice to the local authorities and the civil protection section. And we were

giving advice both to the British governor and the chief minister of the island and

talking to the civil protection and engaging with the public on a small island to

explain to them what was happening and – what we were thought was happening, you

know, and also when decisions like evacuation came, what the sort of science basis

would be to inform an evacuation decision. So this was all going on simultaneously,

so it was a – it was a very unique and remarkable sort of political science, you know,

not an – I mean, there was a science opportunity but there was a sort of real, real

serious emergency going on where we were sort of contributing and interacting.

[40:28]

Where was the bungalow? Can you sort of locate –

Yeah, the bungalow was above the old golf course in a river valley, so when we

looked at the volcano we were about eight kilometres away from the volcano,

roughly, looking up at it. We were sort of on the wrong side of the volcano because

of various topographic constraints, so we got a view of the volcano but in the – when

there wasn’t any cloud about we were not getting the greatest view. We relied

therefore a lot on helicopter going up and – going down to the other side of the

volcano in the evacuated zone and seeing what was happening. There was a lot of

cloud about, which didn’t help, so that was a difficulty, ‘cause sometimes the volcano

Stephen Sparks Page 161

C1379/89

Track 6

161

was just shrouded in cloud all the – for long periods. So we relied a lot on the

instruments, the seismometers and the defamation data, to try and make sense. And

so we were – we’d be in this sort of bungalow, which had a nice swimming pool and,

you know, basically it was a sort of 24/7 service. I mean, we had a night duty and the

chief scientist would get rung up if something was happening at the volcano. And

there was a lot happening from time to time. And it was very sort of makeshift really.

Where did you live when you were on duty for five or six weeks?

We would live in local villas quite close at hand. We’d rent them and then, you

know, sort of had cars and drove into the observatory.

And you said that you were running this observatory under trying circumstances.

What were the sort of key difficulties in this particular context?

Well, the key difficulties, which is no – it’s really no different to any other emergency

from a natural hazard or volcano, was that fundamentally you’ve got an island of

finite size, the dangerous area of the volcano means that two thirds of the island

population have to evacuate, who are ultimately – well that – as I say, that happened

progressively. You have a situation where the north of the island isn’t big enough for

the people to be so that has to – a lot of people have to be relocated outside the island,

go back to Britain or go to Britain or North America. You’ve obviously got

tremendous tensions, which are between some of the islanders, who had a really

strong belief in wanting to keep the island going and wanting to survive this adversity,

and they would be, you know, every square inch that the scientists thought –

identified as being dangerous meant more of their island was no longer accessible and

more people had to move out. So clearly where we – where our – I mean, we didn’t –

what we would do would be we would say where we thought the dangerous areas

were and then it was up to the government to decide on what they did about that, did

they evacuate people completely, did they evacuate them during the day, was it a sort

of in and out, or did they completely evacuate. So obviously the bit – the wider the

footprint of the area that you think is dangerous, the worse it is for the island. And so

quite naturally some of the locals would question whether we’d put the island – we

Stephen Sparks Page 162

C1379/89

Track 6

162

were being too safe or calling an evacuation, you know, the government was calling –

based on our advice, calling an evacuation prematurely or unnecessarily. And then

there was the other side, people being very frightened and wanting to be out of the

volcano. And so there was a lot of, you know, sort of different views and different

perceptions about these issues. And as a generalisation, the British government was

more risk averse than the local government, ‘cause they didn’t want to have people

killed while they were responsible. It’s a British dependent territory. The local

people, particularly the administration, was interested in keeping the economy of the

island going, keeping it going as a nation, you know, sort of island nation, protecting,

you know, sort of the – so they – every – as I say, every square foot they could keep

to do things in, whether it’s businesses or people’s homes or not having to evacuate

people, for them would be better, so they were much less, you know, on the whole

they would be less risk averse. So that inevitably led to political issues and of claims

that Britain wasn’t doing enough and anti-colonial nationalist sentiments that would

be around in some people. I mean, most – I would say, you know, many

Montserratians are very proud people and they’re, you know, wonderfully pleasant

people to be around, but there were those sort of tensions in the air.

[46:40]

How did local people protest when they thought that the government were

overreacting on the advice of scientists? How – I mean, how did you know that they

were protesting? What did you see?

Well, you – I mean, it’s like a – the – by the time, you know, during this period, ’96

and ’97, there was a sort of – it’s a small island, it’s like a large village almost, so

everybody sort of knows everybody else. And in the Caribbean, you know, there’s –

there are all sorts of ways. I mean, you’d go to the rum bar shop or – we were almost

daily interviewed by the local radio station and people loved – in that part of the

world they love call in programmes, you know, with people, so a sort of ask the

scientists sort of thing or ask the politicians. So they’d have us in the ZJB studio,

that’s the local radio station, and they’d interview us and talk about what we thought

was going on in the volcano and cross question us and then people would ring in, the

Stephen Sparks Page 163

C1379/89

Track 6

163

locals would ring in and make their views known or discuss some points. And so it –

we’d have open meetings between the scientists and the public to, you know, for – to

exchange information and help them understand what was going on or what we

thought was going on. So there were lots and lots of mechanisms for doing that. We

had a local newspaper called the Montserrat Reporter, which came out every week, I

think, and that had an interesting column called ‘Jus Wondering’, which was a – and

it’d be all about politics and rumours and who’d done what to whom on the island, so

some things – nothing to do with the volcano but it was a sort of slightly gossipy

satirical thing and you could sort of – very entertaining to read. Everybody used to

read their Just Wondering and [laughs] you know, you would read that and you would

get a sort of flavour of the sort of – the talk around town, as it were. So that was very

– I mean, I must say that the Montserratian people were never sort of really

antagonistic. I mean, some of – there would be a few hot heads and people who

would make their views known very strongly, but they were never – as I say, never

really antagonistic at all. And so I think all the expat scientists like myself working

there always felt pretty comfortable with, you know, being in the community naturally

and working with them. But it was a very, you know, it was a very stressful situation

for everybody and so inevitably sort of emotions would run high occasionally,

particularly if people were being told to evacuate their homes and they really want to

be sure that it’s really necessary to do that.

[49:41]

In these radio call in programmes, or in the open meetings with the public, how did

you translate the sort of – the detailed science that presumably you were working on

in the observatory into sort of communication with the public about the – how did you

talk to local people about the volcano?

Yeah. Well, we – we developed methods by trial – to some extent trial and error,

because on the whole scientists are not trained in communication to the public. We

were sort of basically amateurs in some respects. We had to learn on the job about

having not, you know, avoiding jargon wherever you possibly could. At the same

time we thought that it was really important that they knew some of the

Stephen Sparks Page 164

C1379/89

Track 6

164

volcanological jargon and that, you know, they knew what a pyroclastic flow was and

what it could do to people if they were around. So we did need to explain some of the

very basics. And it’s a very well educated community so people caught on pretty

quickly and in fact a lot of the locals became sort of amateur volcanologists

themselves and were sort of arguing about pyroclastic flows and volcanic bombs and

things, you know, amongst themselves. So – but we tried where we could to use – we

found using a number of mechanisms – I mean, getting help from the locals to

communicate. I mean, the message would often be perhaps more effective if there

were local people like the village – maybe one of the priests, for example, or perhaps

a school teacher or one of the local staff might be able to say things in ways that, you

know, somebody from the UK couldn’t. He had some colleagues from Trinidad, who

were very good, and they’d sometimes talk. And we’d talk and we’d – so there, you

know, using those different means of communication. We’d use analogies, which we

found useful. For example, when the – one of the features of the eruption is the rate at

which the lava dome builds up and rather than using facts and figures we’d say, well

actually, every second there’s something like the volume of car is added to a lava

dome, and by the end of the day you’ve got 10,000 extra cars. That’s how fast it’s

growing. And so we tried to use straightforward analogies that would be familiar to

people to explain what we – what was happening.

Were there things that you could show local people, I don’t know, plots or graphs or

images? Was there anything that you could show them?

Yeah, we tried – we had leaflets in the supermarkets. We had a video produced by the

International Association of Volcanology, which was a sort of about – made for the

public and made for volcanic hazards and risks, and we showed those at schools and

community halls and to individual groups and showed them the film and showed what

a pyroclastic flow could do to people. So we tried a lot of different tactics of

outreach. And quite a lot of emphasis on schools because often they take – they’re

more – in some respects they can be more – schoolchildren can be more receptive and

then they tell their parents and things. So we tried all sorts of different methods to

explain what the volcano was – what was happening at the volcano.

Stephen Sparks Page 165

C1379/89

Track 6

165

[53:48]

Early on we had an awful lot of media around. I mean, huge amounts of foreign

media to deal with as well, who often are very intrusive.

In what way?

Well, they just want as much possible time as they can with you and they think, you

know, they’ve got to get their story out so they want it now, not tomorrow. And then

they don’t necessarily understand what’s happening except there’s a big volcano

going off and we had to deal with the problem that the media would often exaggerate

or sensationalise what was actually happening on the island. I mean, I was talking to

– I was on Montserrat about six weeks ago and I was talking to a local guy and he was

saying people – when he tells people in other Caribbean islands that he lives on

Montserrat, he said – he was saying that somebody was saying, ‘Well, does anybody

live there anymore?’ Or, you know, ‘You must be crazy,’ sort of thing. So that still

happens. And so this sort of outside perception was sort of distorted by the media at

the time, that this was a sort of time bomb waiting to go. And so we had to deal with

that.

How did you deal with that? How did you counter it?

Well, it’s very difficult to – I mean, I think the media is really very difficult to deal

with at times. I mean, they will interview you for long periods and then they will use

a very tiny little bit of what you say on their news clip. And it’s the bit that they

select which is telling their story, not the story you want to tell. So you’re always

under the – if you like, the tyranny of the editor of the – whether it’s a news

programme or a documentary, and of course loads of people wanted to do

documentaries on it. I mean, there’s umpteen Montserrat documentaries. Some are

very good and some are just sensationalised and really telling a story which isn’t

correct or true. So they do tend to be very intrusive, very persistent. You can

understand why that is with a journalist, but people are trying to get on with the job of

monitoring the volcano, they don’t want to be talking to journalists and be filmed by

Stephen Sparks Page 166

C1379/89

Track 6

166

TV crews all the time so you have to sort of try and get a balance. On the other hand,

I mean, if it’s good journalism, and there were good journalists, they can be really

helpful and they can really get a message out. I mean, the radio station was absolutely

fantastic. I mean, they were really supportive, very balanced. They were a major

source of information for the local people. So talking on the radio in these call ins or

interviews was a really key part for the scientists’ role.

[57:01]

What did people used to call in with? What did they tend to ask when, you know,

local people calling in through this radio station, what did they tend to want to ask

the expert?

Ooh, it’s so diverse. I mean, it’s, you know, it might be asking about a particular

place, maybe that’s where they lived, what’s happening there. They might be asking

about some phenomena, why was there lightning last night, did you hear it roar. It

could be more sort of political, you know, if they felt that the place that was under

threat or had been evacuated wasn’t, you know, was actually safer. You know, they

might say, well, nothing’s happened there yet so why should we worry. Isn’t

everything happening on the east of the volcano so why should we be worried about

the north and the south west, you know, that sort of thing. And it came to – and of

course the thing at the volcano was – the way it erupted was that it would do not an

awful lot for quite long periods of time, like weeks where nothing very much from a

public point of view was happening. We knew there were things going on. And then

it would roar into action in a few hours or a day or two and there would be a sort of

major event. And so it was sort of punctuated. And of course in the quieter times

people were saying, well, this looks like it’s quietening down, doesn’t it, and it was

sort of to some extent in hope that it was. And so you had to deal with those sorts of

natural tendencies to be at the same time concerned but really wanting the thing to go

away and to get on with their lives or move back into their houses or start their

business again. So there were all these sort of conflicting emotions that were going

around and that would be in the local, you know, with the local people.

Stephen Sparks Page 167

C1379/89

Track 6

167

[59:09]

And then finally on this earlier period, could you tell me about communication with

the two sort of political leaders, the British governor and the –

Yes, that’s right.

Yeah, well start with the British governor, yes.

Yeah. That was – we would often – in the height of the crisis we would likely see the

British governor almost – I wouldn’t say daily but maybe, you know, three or four

times a week, and particularly when something was brewing up at the volcano then

we’d be sort of seeing him on the phone or talking to him a lot. And he would – I

mean, he was a chap called Frank Savage and he was sort of really a wonderful

governor and I think handled the crisis very well, but it was a really difficult situation

for him, especially when there was – there were twenty people killed in ’97 in an area

they shouldn’t have been and he felt, I think, tremendous sort of responsibility for

those deaths, even though it was – actually people felt no – no, I don’t think anybody

would say that it was in any way related to his decisions. I mean, these were people

in an evacuated area, they shouldn’t have been there, but they were still killed. So we

did that. Now if I sort of fast track it a little bit forward, I’ve talked almost entirely

about these sort of first two years and as the two years from ’96 to early ’98 came, it

became clearer and clearer we needed an established volcano observatory, people

staffed with salaries who were there fulltime. This sort of rotation was clearly not a

long term way of doing things and rather ad hoc, having students from universities

and people from Trinidad and the odd American and French person coming in in a

very ad hoc way, wasn’t going to be a long term solution. So over that two years we

moved towards trying to establish a much more – well, essentially establish a sort of

permanent observatory. At the same time we realised the scientific advice needed to

be formalised in a much better way that we had. And of course if you’ve got five

chiefs at different times they can have different personalities and views and ways of

doing things, so it was really difficult for the governor, I think, and the chief minister

to cope with five different senior scientists coming in and then giving them advice in

Stephen Sparks Page 168

C1379/89

Track 6

168

different ways. You know, that was clearly not the optimum way of doing things. So

we realised we had to establish a permanent – a much more permanent observatory

where the director would be there for perhaps a year or two, there’d be more

permanent staff. We realised there needed to be – scientific advice needed to be much

more formalised and structured, so we created a scientific advisory committee and

that was I think a big success because we – in ’96 we had a meeting in – end of –

sorry, I’ve got this wrong, end of ’97 we convened a scientific advisory – what we

now call the scientific advisory committee and we designed it by happenchance. We

– Bob May, who was the chief UK scientist at the time, had just come out with

guidelines about how scientific committees should work, advisory committees, and

we followed these guidelines and we created a new committee for giving advice to the

UK government and the Montserrat government in a formal way. I chaired that

committee for the first six years and we had senior scientists from the major

institutions, you know, Trinidad, the UK, British Geological Survey and so forth, and

we convened this scientific advisory committee, which could also work a bit offline.

[1:03:29]

And we then developed for the first time something really very pioneering, which is

largely attributable to Willy Aspinall. We started to do very structured formal risk

assessment based on probabilistic approach and we used expert elicitation judgement

methods to formalise our compiling of evidence and structuring it in a way which

took account of uncertainties. And that is the first volcanic eruption that’s ever –

where those methods have ever been applied and they’re now being copied in other

parts of the world, but we did it first on Montserrat and we’ve then had regular

meetings of the scientific committee doing the proper risk assessment, working with

the observatory and then providing this structured considered advice to the

government. And we’ve been doing that ever since.

And how is – could you go into detail about how that formal probabilistic sort of

document, if it is a document, how it looks, how it’s structured, the thing that they

get?

Stephen Sparks Page 169

C1379/89

Track 6

169

Yes, it’s a – the thing they get, the deliverable, is always a report, assessing the

hazards of the volcano, the status of the volcano and assessing the risk. And it’s

based on a methodology which Willy has sort of used, from a Dutch mathematician

called Roger Cooke. And what we do is we have our scientific experts. We’re trying

to answer some usually pretty simple question. There’s a village eight kilometres

from the volcano, it’s got 500 people in it, the volcano is doing this, should we

evacuate that village or not. That’s the sort of question we were being asked. Now to

answer that question you then have to integrate all the scientific evidence that you

have at your disposal in order to assess the probability that something unpleasant will

happen to that village over a fixed time period, which we usually chose as six months.

And the way that you do that is you combine your empirical evidence, what’s going

on in the volcano, with – with modelling work, which is sometimes empirical,

sometimes more physics based, but basically you want to know if there’s something

happening in the volcano which is going to produce a deadly hot flow which goes into

the village. And you then look at all the factors which go into determining that

probability and you use all the evidence, and you use expert judgement, to work out

the probability density functions of – now that’s a bit of jargon, that. Basically we

want to know how certain – the things that are going to decide whether the flow gets

to the village or not have some uncertainty and we want to assess that uncertainty.

Once we’ve got that uncertainty there’s a range of possible values that we believe –

within which the true answer is located. And then for all the processes we have to –

all the things which are going to affect the parameters, affect that probability, we have

to work out that range of – how uncertain – what our most likely value is and what the

range is. We then combine all those through a method of computer modelling, which

is sometimes called Monte Carlo Ensemble. In other words, we sample all the

possibilities, the combinations of possibilities, we end up with a statistical likelihood

that this event will happen and if the event happens it will get to the village. And then

we present that as risk curves, which are either an individual risk, somebody in the

village, what’s their chance of – if they stay in this village for six months, what’s the

chance of them being killed. If it’s the whole village, the societal risk, what’s the

chance of the governor finding he’s got 300 dead people on his hands. And so we

calculate the risk and then we present the results of that risk assessment to the

governor and the chief minister and the decision makers and they look at it and say,

Stephen Sparks Page 170

C1379/89

Track 6

170

wow, that’s pretty dangerous, we’re going to evacuate, or maybe it’s okay. I mean,

maybe the risk turns out to be low and therefore they don’t have to do anything. So

that’s the principle of it. We wait – our experts, all the experts on the panel, are

weighted according to a calibration. Every expert is regarded as a statistical

hypothesis. So you’re claiming to be an expert in geography, let’s say, okay, in some

branch of geography, and I want to know how expert you are, so I’m going to give

you a series of questions which test your expertise. But I don’t just want to test your

expertise, I want to test your ability to assess uncertainty in the natural world, so I’m

going to ask you some questions which test how well you know your subject but also

how good you are at assessing uncertainty, how, you know, how confident are you

that you’ve got the right answer. And that series of seed questions then creates your

calibration score and then when you do your real assessment you’re weighted

according to how well you’ve done in the calibration.

So each individual has a different – almost the status of their view gets a different

level according to –

How well they’ve done, yes, yeah.

So that changes report by report, does it, or is it established at the beginning and then

–

It’s usually – in this case it’s established at the beginning. There’s a case – there’s a –

well, I don’t want to go into details about this, but there is a case of whether you

should continually retest people ‘cause maybe they’ll improve.

That’s fascinating. So what, for example, was your rating as a –

I don’t know because Willy – this method gets everybody anonymous. I don’t know

how well I did. Willy Aspinall is the facilitator so he’s the only person who has

access to the information on how well people did, so it’s an anonymous process.

What do you remember of the questions though that you were asked?

Stephen Sparks Page 171

C1379/89

Track 6

171

Oh yes. Well, we do this now with the students all the time, so, you know, and I’ll

give you a sort of trivial example to illustrate this thing. So I could ask you, how

many bottles of red wine were consumed in France in 2010, okay. That’s your

question. Now it could be that you’re a wine merchant and you know a lot about the

French wine industry and you’ve, you know, you know a lot about it and you actually

know that figure quite well, you think you know it pretty well. So you’d give a pretty

good answer and you’d probably have a narrow band. You could be a wine merchant

who thinks they know a lot about the subject but actually don’t and they give

completely the wrong – they’re very opinionated and they give completely the wrong

answer and even their bands don’t hit the right answer. Or you could be somebody,

more likely in this case, who doesn’t know very much about it but knows there’s sort

of maybe seventy million French people and maybe they drink a bottle of wine every

month or week or whatever it is and then they say, well, I’ll do a very rough

calculation, you know, seventy million Frenchmen drinking red wine, I’ll allow them

to drink, you know, some of them are children, some of them are old people, but I’ll

say that on average they drink a bottle of wine every month, or some figure. And I’ll

come up with a number. But then of course I don’t really think I’m very confident in

that because – and I try and think, what’s the least it could be. You know, is it

feasible that the average Frenchman only drinks one bottle of red wine per year or do

they drink 10,000 – does each Frenchman drink 10,000. Well obviously they don’t

drink 10,000. So you can sort of come down and down and down each way until you

come to some numbers you feel, well, really that’s possible. So that’s your

uncertainty and then your central value. So that’s what it’s doing, it’s your ability to

make that assessment, use your own internal knowledge and do it. And that then

answers those sorts of – obviously the real questions are sort of more technical

scientific.

So were you asked questions about volcanology?

Yes, that’s right. You’d be asked questions about your field of expertise.

And how were your answers then assessed, you know?

Stephen Sparks Page 172

C1379/89

Track 6

172

Well, Roger Cooke, who – this – from Delft University who has developed this

method, has a sort of – essentially an algorithm. It’s a statistical question. I mean,

you’re compared against a statistical hypothesis. And so Willy uses this method and

we’ve used it ever since.

It’s fascinating ‘cause I think intuitively the public would imagine that you have

experts in volcanology and you just have those experts and whatever they said, based

on their observations, would be accepted, that there wouldn’t be this sort of external

sort of rating.

Yeah, that’s right. And that’s the interesting question because what happens in this is

fascinating. I mean, I’m sure this is much more to do with psychology than anything

else, but the fact is you do get very eminent people who are highly opinionated and

they don’t – sometimes they don’t do very well in this, because they’re so

opinionated, they’re so confident that they’ve got the right answer, that they’re going

to say it’s this and I’m very confident and it’s a very narrow band –

Which means their score would go down, which means that their opinion then gets a

lower weighting in the overall document.

Correct, that’s right, yeah. On the other hand, you don’t want – to get a decision, an

insight, you don’t want somebody who knows nothing at all and gives their – such a

large range, it could be anything from one to a billion and that’s of no – absolutely no

value for decision making. So they don’t score very well either in the sense that, you

know, the information they’re giving is really not very valuable, it’s not very

informed, it’s not very expert. So your optimum expert needs to be somebody who

has a really good knowledge of the subject so they’re quite likely to get somewhere

near the right answer and also has a really good feeling for the true uncertainties and

therefore they can give a range, which is good enough for decision making or

informing decision making but not so narrow that, you know, they’re not starting to

get into this opinionated category.

Stephen Sparks Page 173

C1379/89

Track 6

173

What sort of a question might you have been asked about volcanology in order to be

rated in this way? What would have been a sort of typical question that –

Yes, you might have something like the number of earthquakes per hour in a volcano

prior to an explosion, built up from thirty per hour to, say, 200 per hour, two hours

before the eruption. And this is – and then you could quote it in the eruption. What

was the earthquake rated in the two hours, you know the earthquake rating, it was

increasing, that’s the earthquake rate in those two hours before the eruption. Okay?

That’s the question you might be asked. If you’re not a seismologist or don’t know

much about volcano earthquakes, that might be a pretty difficult question to answer.

And you might say, well, I think I’ll just sort of extrapolate – if you sort of thought

you were a bit of an expert and it seemed reasonable to extrapolate, you might say,

well, it’s 250 and 300. If you were very confident in that you’d give it a narrow band,

if you weren’t you would give it a wide band. There might be the real expert who

might be even the person who’d done that study and he knows exactly what the right

answer is, which is fine, or there could be somebody who didn’t do that study but

remembers the paper and said, you know, I sort of remember they actually went down

a bit so I’m going to give, you know, they don’t know the exact answer but they know

enough about the field. So you could get a whole spectrum of answers depending on

the person’s knowledge and expertise and intuition about those sorts of things.

[1:17:57]

Thank you. And I suppose we haven’t explored what you were learning about the

behaviour of a volcano by being in this position of –

Ah yeah, yeah.

Running an observatory, constantly looking at it.

That’s right. We’ve talked a lot about the management of the crisis and all those

aspects. The science was absolutely fantastic. I mean, of course it’s always difficult

to say that when you’re around a human tragedy, but the fact is that we were on one of

Stephen Sparks Page 174

C1379/89

Track 6

174

the biggest eruptions of the last 100 years on the earth, it went on for fifteen years.

We had opportunities of observing completely new phenomena, making

measurements nobody else had ever made before and discovering a whole raft of

fantastic things about how volcanoes behave, to the extent that Montserrat is

probably, along with Mount St Helens, the most important scientific eruption that’s

happened in the last fifty years. And so that opportunity, you know, particularly for

PhD students and young post docs as well as myself, to actually witness the eruption,

be able to make the scientific studies which characterised what went on and they tried

to understand that, was an absolutely fantastic experience and we learnt just a

phenomenal amount of new science, new ideas, new concepts, new ways of

understanding volcanoes. And so – and that’s still going on. So it was a wonderful

natural laboratory, I mean, just spectacular in many ways.

[1:19:43]

Could you give us a sense of the observations that were being made and the

knowledge that came from those?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, without – yeah, I mean, one of the things that we started to see in

the volcano was patterns, you might call them cycles or oscillations, of activity. And

these were sometimes remarkably regular. And we started to see – three sorts of

patterns started to emerge. One was – we put an instrument quite close to the

volcano, which showed that the ground every few hours was going up and down, up

and down. It was breathing. And we could start to link that breathing with the

eruptions. Now when there were explosions the ground would go up for a few hours,

it would explode and the ground would go down. Then we started to see patterns of

activity which were longer, sort of forty or fifty days, so there would be forty or fifty

days where nothing all that much was happening, there was a bit of lava growing but

nothing much happening, and then it quietened down and quietened down. And then

there was a burst, a really serious onset of new activity, and there would be activity

and then it would quieten down for another forty or fifty days and it would start again.

And we started to see this longer pattern of activity. And then over the fifteen years

we saw five episodes of longer periods of quiet, a year or two, followed by longer

Stephen Sparks Page 175

C1379/89

Track 6

175

periods of activity of two or three years. So we started to understand – observe these

patterns, we can see that they’re linked to the behaviour of the volcano, and of course

they immediately ask why. I mean, that’s the big question, why are they showing

these patterns. And so then a lot of intellectual research effort goes into finding

mechanisms, physical mechanisms, which explain the patterns. And I’m not sure

we’ve completely explained them but we’ve got a long way. And out of that came

another bit of work with a colleague who I haven’t mentioned before but sort of came

into my existence about – oh, it would have been about 1995, ’96 – ’96 probably. I

got a message from a young Russian mathematician from Moscow State University in

their theoretical mechanics division, saying they were coming in through Bristol, they

were going to go and see Rolls Royce, they were doing something else with Rolls

Royce, and could we come and see them ‘cause they were interested in volcanoes.

And this chap, Oleg Melnik, turned up and Oleg was a sort of mathematician which –

who had – already interested in cyclic behaviour in nature, and we started working

together. We got a Royal Society grant for Oleg to come over and Oleg’s now come

over virtually every year. We’ve got money in grants to support his coming over for a

few weeks. And we started a very strong collaboration together, again sort of maths –

oh, it’s a … yep. So we started collaboration with Oleg and we developed what I

think is a really nice model that – mathematical model of how volcanoes behave,

which explains the patterns we – gives a first order. It’s not – an explanation of some

of these patterns that we’re seeing. And it explains – it’s got explanatory power for a

lot of the things we saw on Montserrat, the measurements we made. And it

essentially turned out that we could explain things by a competition between magma

coming up the volcanic conduit and losing its gas and crystallisation. So as the gas is

lost – in a lot of materials, if you lose gas you can freeze – you don’t have to cool

something, you simply change the phase from a liquid to a solid, so by loss of gas.

And in this – what happens here is that this is accomplished – the solidification occurs

by crystals growing and the rate at which these crystals grow depends – there’s a – it’s

a time dependent thing. So in other words you don’t grow crystals instantaneously,

you have to have some time. So if the lava comes up the tube rather fast and it loses

its gas then these crystals can’t form and therefore it still remains a liquid and it can

erupt – squirt out of the volcano very – relatively easily. If on the other hand it comes

up a bit more slowly, loses the gas and the crystals start to grow, the crystals are

Stephen Sparks Page 176

C1379/89

Track 6

176

converting a liquid to a solid so the liquid and crystals become viscous, they get more

difficult to flow out, so it slows down. As it slows down more crystals form. And it’s

a feedback, it’s a positive feedback, so you keep slowing things down and at some

critical value of the speed of the flow, which determines whether it comes out fast or

slow. And because it’s what people call a tipping point, there’s a sort of – this system

flips from one state to another state. It’s a bit like population crashes in biology, the

same – it’s actually almost the same mathematics. And you – and we could then

understand what – we could understand something about where the earthquakes were.

We could understand why we got this flip, you know, we got this sort of cyclic

behaviour.

What does that mean in terms of the predictability of these things?

I think long term, if we sort of understand these better we’ll get – we will improve the

predictability. We’re probably not there yet. We were certainly using the patterns.

You know, even if you didn’t understand the patterns, you sort of saw that the patterns

existed, and therefore we could use the patterns to make – actually manage the crisis.

Yes, you don’t have to know the reasons.

You don’t have to know the reason to recognise that the patterns exist.

[1:27:02]

So we used, for example, these rather shorter patterns – there was one time where the

– Cable and Wireless, the telecommunications, had to – the main junction box for the

telecommunications was in Plymouth, which had been abandoned, the old – that was

now evacuated, and so it was too dangerous. And they were having problems with the

telephone system and the Cable and Wireless technicians had to go – wanted to go

into Plymouth to make these repairs. And we’d seen this – at the time there was this

very marked pattern of swelling, explosions and then a period of several hours when

the ground went down and all was quiet and then it would build up. So clearly what

you had to do was you had to wait until one of these explosions happened and then

Stephen Sparks Page 177

C1379/89

Track 6

177

you knew you had several hours where we were pretty confident nothing was going to

happen in the volcano, so the technicians could go in, do the – mend the fuse boxes or

whatever they were doing, and then come out. Similarly we used that pattern when

we as scientists went in the field to fix instruments. We would know there were these

periods when it was very unlikely that the volcano was going to do anything bad so

that was the time – that’s the safe time for people to go in and do things. So – and

then we used the longer pattern to keep – I think that was actually a good thing with

the communication because I remember when I was chief scientist towards the end of

’97 I would – we knew there were these forty or fifty day patterns so nothing very

much is happening at the volcano for three or four weeks and we could go on the

radio and say, well look, the volcano’s pretty quiet at the moment but we’ve had these

cycles, we’ve had these patterns and we’re not going to be surprised if a week or two

from now something happens, you know, there was a significant event. And of

course, because it was in that mode then what we were sort of anticipating did happen

and therefore I think that sort of helped build sort of credibility in the scientists. So

yes, so, as you say, we don’t actually have to understand them necessarily to use them

in a sort of – in a way.

[1:29:33]

Thank you. What did your family feel about you being on Montserrat while this was

going on?

Er, I think they, you know, realised it was an important thing to do. My wife and both

my sons came out at different times. My wife spend some time on Montserrat with

me and we brought both our sons out at different times to – and they – to work on – to

be on the island while I worked. So March/April ’97, they both – they were all out

there with me. So that wasn’t always possible of course, sort of schools and all sorts

of other reasons, so they couldn’t be with me. But I think my wife appreciated how

much, you know, how important the science was to the – doing the science well to –

and the work we were doing was to the local community on Montserrat, that, you

know, I think that she sort of completely understood that. And when my boys came

out they really had a sort of hoot because they were, you know, the older one played

Stephen Sparks Page 178

C1379/89

Track 6

178

for them with sort of a team – for the Montserrat team in soccer for a bit and enjoyed

that and they enjoyed the sort of local Caribbean lifestyle and things. So they really –

they enjoyed it.

Yes, how old were they by this time?

They were – it was – yes, there was [counting] … yes, they’d be fifteen and nineteen,

that sort of age. So, you know, sort of teenagers coming into young men. So they

were sort of – being in the Caribbean and liming it up with the locals, you know, as it

were, was good. They really enjoyed that.

[1:31:33]

And over the – having now – I know you’re going to Montserrat tomorrow, for

example, so over quite a long period you’ve been going back to the same island.

Yeah.

To what extent have you developed relationships with particular local people, you

know, particular friendships and particular –

Oh, very much so with local people. I guess I know quite a lot – a few of the

Montserratians and local people. There’s quite a – the person I suppose I have sort of

befriended most is an American guy called David Lea, who’s a local filmmaker and

videographer and we’ve worked quite closely – we’ve made a couple of educational

films about the island. He’s got fantastic footage. And I’ve become pretty close

friends with him. The – I know all the local staff and many of them pretty well. And

there’s, you know, there was a, you know, a chap called Billy Darroux, who I know

well, who was a local policeman and was seconded to the NVO when we were first

there. He was just a constable, a very sensible guy, and now he’s gone back to being

– he’s not the disaster manager of the island, so he’s in charge of disaster mitigation

and prevention. So he’s sort of risen through the police force over the last fifteen

years and now, you know, emerged as this sort of, you know, sort of a leading

Stephen Sparks Page 179

C1379/89

Track 6

179

experienced person in the Caribbean for the island. So I’ve known him and lots of

different locals. I mean, as I say, it’s like a village so you sort of get to know lots of

different people. The guy who runs – a chap called Winston Kafu Cabey, who runs

the local radio, he was always interviewing us and I always go round, you know, I

always see him when I’m there. He’s a – so it’s – yeah, I mean, I just know a lot of

people there. And my wife actually – when we were first there, there was a huge

number of people evacuated and she befriended a lady who was evacuated to Hackney

and now lives in Hackney and so she sort of goes down and sees her from time to time

and sort of still keeps in touch. So it’s a very, you know, it’s a bit like talking about

Rhode Island, it’s just a lovely place and lovely community under these sort of

exceptionally traumatic circumstances. So it’s a sort of – it’s a sort of very favourite

place to visit in a way.

To what extent has the experience sort of changed your view of what science is for

and the value of science?

I think it’s changed my – it’s certainly pivotal in my life because having such a – as I

say, being involved so intimately in such a traumatic and dramatic event has certainly,

you know, given me a huge amount of insight into the relationship between science

and policy and decision making and the wider society. So that’s been enormously

valuable for me. And I suppose I … yes, I mean, it’s … I don’t think it’s changed my

view of how science should be done, because what’s so clear, and perhaps, you know,

it’s clear in this interview, is that an awful lot of the science that I did with absolutely

no – no other reason that I was curious about what I saw and was – and, you know,

curiosity driven really, I suppose that’s the usual phrase, that a lot of that science has

turned out to be enormously valuable in a real situation and real context and we can

use that science to the benefit of society. I think it’s also convinced me that, if you

say that you have to do science which is immediately obviously going to benefit

society and you restrict it to that, you’re very likely not to do so much great science. I

mean, I think great science comes from this natural curiosity. It doesn’t come from,

you know, doing things for the benefit of society. I mean, that’s not to say you can’t

do things for the benefit of society which are not great science, I think you can, but

you can’t really have one without the other. So …

Stephen Sparks Page 180

C1379/89

Track 6

180

[1:36:46]

Now volcanoes are – they’ve got a kind of popular appeal, and I wondered to what

extent you’ve been asked to contribute to sort of popular science of various kinds,

television programmes, radio programmes.

Yes.

More popular kinds of writing.

Yes. I mean, I’ve done that from time to time when asked. I’ve been involved in, you

know, BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic documentaries on volcanoes from time

to time, including advising on the famous Supervolcano BBC programme that

happened. I’ve done radio interviews and public lectures and occasionally gone into

schools and so forth. So I suppose it’s the sort of general outreach things. Volcanoes

are popular and people like them and so if there are opportunities or people ask me to

do things, I – I’ve never really gone out of my – I wouldn’t say I’ve been particularly

proactive but when I’m asked to do things or people approach me, which they do

quite a lot, I mean, I get lots of – over the years I’ve had lots of telephone calls from

researchers, you know, for some TV company or other that’s – or radio programme

that wants to do a volcano programme and they either ask me for advice or

suggestions or thoughts about the topic, or they’ve invited me to participate in it in

various – so I’ve done a fair amount of that from time to time.

Could you remind us what the BBC Supervolcano programme was?

Yeah, that was the dramatisation of the eruption of – one of the world’s biggest

volcanoes is in Yellowstone National Park and this is a volcano which has had in its

geological past absolutely gigantic eruptions, rather like the ones I was describing

from Argentina. And these are eruptions which are something like a hundred times

bigger than Krakatau in 1883, so these are really gigantic things which would affect a

whole continent. I mean, Yellowstone eruption 6,000 years [600,000 years ago], put

Stephen Sparks Page 181

C1379/89

Track 6

181

ash entirely over – the entire North America would have been covered in ash. So

these would have been likely hugely environmentally destructive and these sorts of

eruptions are called – have been nicknamed really, I mean, it’s not a scientific term,

supervolcano, but it sort of gets across the idea. And so the BBC did a dramatisation

of a future eruption of Yellowstone, a two parter, about three or four years ago, and it

got a lot of attention at the time. And they also did a half hour show about the science

behind the programme, which I participated in. So the actual show was a drama doc,

so it didn’t contain any scientists, there were actors and there was a sort of storyline

that was unfolded. But then they had, you know, a half hour show on the science

behind it, which I participated in, and that got a lot of attention at the time. And

people are still, you know, sort of still talking about, you know – it’s still the topic

that you get. In fact I’ve even been asked yesterday by the European Journal, which

is an opinion piece, about – to give a sort of opinion piece about, you know, the

prospects of surviving – civilisation surviving a super eruption. So I’ll probably write

– that’ll be a popular article.

Could you – do you remember anything in particular about the sort of interaction

with BBC researchers and directors and people in that programme? There are – the

reason I’m asking is there are people, historians of science, who are very interested in

the way that scientists interact with TV.

Yes.

So I wondered how it all worked. How does it work? How is your expertise sort of

sucked into the –

Yeah. I mean, that – I think that was a programme that worked reasonably well. I

mean, I think the drama doc was, you know, they have to make it for a mass audience

so there were elements of, you know, of slight sensationalisation, but not much. I

thought they did a really quite good job. The programme itself, the little science

programme which was wrapped around it on BBC2, was I thought pretty well done.

There was a little – I’m not – I’m struggling to remember exactly whether they bought

in the issue that these things are incredibly rare so extremely unlikely to happen in

Stephen Sparks Page 182

C1379/89

Track 6

182

anyone’s lifetime. So that’s the – with this particular topic the tendency is for the

media to not emphasise – it sort of rather spoils the party to say that these are so rare

that it’s very, very unlikely anybody’s going to live through one of these. You know,

they’re once every 20,000 years and so they’re so rare that you don’t really – maybe

we don’t really care in a sense. But of course that doesn’t feed into the line that, you

know, these are, you know, this sort of idea of a huge volcanic eruption destroying

civilisation is a, you know, it’s a sort of apocalyptic, you know, sort of mythological

element to it that people like and so the companies know that, the media know that,

and so they don’t want to really say this is not very likely at all [laughs].

[1:42:44]

So I think that – so I think that particular programme – I’ve had much less – I did a

Horizon – I was a big part in a Horizon programme on volcanoes about seven or eight

years ago and they filmed in our lab. And on the whole it was a good programme, I

thought, but I very much at that time, and I still think, that Horizon misrepresents –

very commonly misrepresents how science is done.

Why do you say that?

Well, they like – a lot of their programmes, if you watch them, have two sort of ideas

behind the way the programmes are structured. Firstly they love the eureka moment.

They like the idea that science is a series of brilliant breakthroughs where the genius

sort of is sitting there and, you know, the, you know, Archimedes, you know, sort of

sitting in your bathroom or looking at the volcano and you come up with this sort of

fantastic insight. You know, Newton beneath the tree, this idea of the eureka moment

in science is very – to me very overt in the way Horizon presents its programmes.

Now I’m sure there are eureka moments but the vast bulk of science simply doesn’t

work that way, I don’t think. I think if you ask most practicing scientists they don’t

think it works that way either. I mean, it’s a sort of collective activity and people do

make – individuals do make surges forward but often it’s a sort of iterative interactive

thing and the progress is sort of slow and steady. It may build up to some tipping

point where there is a significant surge but on the whole it does not consist of sort of

Stephen Sparks Page 183

C1379/89

Track 6

183

huge eureka moments, and I think they promote that idea too much in Horizon. They

also like the idea again of the – of small numbers of individuals. They’ll always focus

on a small number of individuals, again rather than viewing science as a sort of – a

collective activity of a very large number of people who work together in a way,

albeit competitively. And so I think they – and I can understand why they do that

because it’s a nice, you know, you can see it’s a – it often makes the story – it sort of

highlights the story, doesn’t it? But I just think they tend to distort things sometimes.

How was that played out in the case of the film that you were in in terms of the –

Yeah. I think they – the other thing that I – of course is a big problem, I think, for

scientists working with the media, and even a really good programme like Horizon – I

mean, I’ve got a lot of time – it’s one of the best science programmes there is but, as I

say, that’s – this eureka idea I think is one of their sort of shortcomings. And I don’t

think if you looked at the early Horizon programmes you’d see so much of that, some

of the, you know, my recollection of them. I mean, it’d be interesting to look at them

and see. But the other thing of course is they interview you for an enormous amount

of time, so you’ll spend, you know, maybe two or three hours being interviewed, sort

of lots of questions, and then out of every ninety minutes they’ve filmed and things

you’ve said, they’ll select two minutes to put into the programme and they’ll fit it in

with other experts who say other things which link up or tell the story. And so the

story is always in the hands of the programme editor. Maybe that’s right, but it means

that as a scientist you sort of feel you’ve – you’re – in a way you’re being sort of

manipulated, aren’t you, because you may have some view about what the story you

want to tell is about the science and if they’ve chosen something which – that, you

know, is either out of context or it doesn’t make an important point that you’ve made

somewhere else in the interview, then, you know, your – the science is being

presented in a way that you feel uncomfortable with, or that you could feel

uncomfortable with. And I know – I mean, I know – maybe there’s no other way.

You know, the programme maker’s got to make an attractive TV programme and –

but you – it always give you a sense of being a bit uncomfortable about that sort of

relationship. You’ve got no real influence about what they’re going to – what story

they’re going to decide. And I had a very bad experience on Montserrat because we

Stephen Sparks Page 184

C1379/89

Track 6

184

were doing work with Discovery programme and all those programmes are produced

by – tend to be produced by programme, you know, they’re not – there’s a Discovery

programme but it’s not made by Discovery, it’s made by some TV company that’s

been subcontracted to do it, a sort of production team. And we did one at a quite

sensitive time in the eruption of Montserrat, where I – and they were a very nice

group of people. I mean, and they went round Montserrat. They interviewed me.

They interviewed lots of other people. They interviewed locals. They were talking

about the situation on Montserrat. And we kept – I mean, sort of – because we’d had

previously bad experience, we kept saying to them, okay, Discovery, that’s, you

know, you’ve got a good reputation and we don’t want this sort of sensationalised.

We don’t want this – sort of Montserrat sort of depicted as an apocalyptic desert, you

know, where everybody’s about to die, sort of thing. And we said, you know, you can

see people are getting on with their lives, we’re watching the volcano, it’s still pretty

active but we’ve, you know, we think we know roughly what’s going on and where to

keep people. It’s getting back – this was at a time when the island was getting back to

sort of – some sort of sense of normality. And they said, oh yes, yes, you know, we

won’t – this. And then, you know, sort of as soon as the programme started,

‘Montserrat, the ticking time bomb in the Caribbean,’ [laughs], ‘when is it going to

blow,’ sort of. And then the whole programme was around this sort of storyline of,

you know, that this was a sort of really dangerous place. And of course it upset

relatives of people who were living on Montserrat. And of course you’re then

associated with it, because I was appearing on it and giving little, you know, they got

little clips of interviews with me and other people from the observatory, so you’re

then associated with it and then the local people get annoyed because nobody wants to

invest in the economy, the relatives in London or Atlanta see this programme and then

they’re ringing up, my god, why don’t you – this sounds terrible, why don’t you

leave, and things like that. So it’s very malign I think to the local community and I

found that very – those sorts of – that way of sort of manipulation, if you like, is a,

you know, a bad aspect to the media.

[1:50:45]

Stephen Sparks Page 185

C1379/89

Track 6

185

In the Horizon programme, in terms of the filming in the laboratory, what did they

want to film and what ended up being shown?

I think they filmed some of our experiments about collapsing columns and things like

that, when we put dense fountains into a tank and they collapsed like a pyroclastic

flow or went upwards. I think they did some film of that. I think they did one of –

they might have done some of my colleague’s work on shock tubes. I think they did

that. They did a series – they showed, you know, some of the experiments and how it

linked. I mean, it was a pretty – I think it was a pretty good programme actually. I

mean, my recollection of it. As I say, it’s this – they did present it as this sort of

eureka – this eureka idea was definitely very prominent.

In this case what was the eureka idea?

I suppose it was this idea of collapsing columns and things going up and so forth.

But, you know, it was – in several places they would do, you know, depict something

which is actually a collective enterprise of the science community, where several

different scientists at different institutions round the world have actually contributed

to this particular idea, but it’s sort of, you know, I just feel that it was the tendency to

make it always just this single person who’d done it all. And, as I say, I don’t find

that – I think it’s a bit of a distortion of the science method – of the way science

works.

And what do you get in terms of direction – in the case of this Horizon film, what did

you get in terms of direction about how they wanted you to present – how they wanted

you to talk to, you know, or act.

Well, I think they – they spend a lot of time filming. Sometimes you’re commenting

on the experiment. I remember – again, you spend an awful lot of time being

interviewed and lots and lots of different questions about things. An awful lot of that

is not used at all. So again it’s the sort of two minutes out of ninety minutes sort of

scenario. So you don’t really quite know what – I guess you’re sometimes not always

clear what the programme producer and director are really quite – what they’re trying

Stephen Sparks Page 186

C1379/89

Track 6

186

to – you don’t quite know what story they’re trying to tell. And they may – it’s quite

possible they don’t know themselves until they’ve done all the interviews and they

start looking at the stuff and they see how, you know, a storyline that makes good TV

emerges out of all the interviews they’ve done. I’m sure that may be one of the things

that happens. And then they’ve got, you know, the film on the production table of

clips and they’re sort of splicing them together and sort of seeing how they’re

organised and how the interviews fit in with the visuals and things like that. So I

suspect the storyline sort of emerges sometimes as they’re going along, although

maybe they also have a broad plan when they begin.

[1:53:55]

Could you tell me the story about your involvement in the recent Icelandic volcano,

which affected aeroplanes and so on?

Yes. I – when the Iceland ash stopped all the aircraft in April 2010, I was actually in

Paris at the time at a disaster risk reduction international meeting, where sort of – all

the disaster people were stuck in Paris [laughs]. So I had to make my way back to the

UK. I got an email from John Bebington’s office inviting me to join the scientific

advisory group that was considering the crisis. So it took me about thirty hours to get

home and then I, early that week, went down to the sort of first committee meeting of

the group that was considering – advising the government on the ash. And then I sat

in on that with my colleague, Willy Aspinall, and another colleague at Bristol and

people from the BTS and the Met Office and Civil Aviation Authority, a wide variety

of people around the table. And John Bebington was sort of asking for sort of, you

know, advice on the situation and how they responded.

What do you remember about what he – the sort of members of the panel contributed

to the –

Well, it was – obviously the Met Office do the forecasting of the ash using their

weather forecasting models. We as volcanologists provide the information on what

the volcano is doing and how much ash it’s putting into the atmosphere. And so we –

Stephen Sparks Page 187

C1379/89

Track 6

187

we were I suppose trying to – to some extent one of the major outcomes was the view

that the volcanologists and the atmospheric scientists at the Met Office needed to

work together much more closely so that the – the assumptions that the Met Office

were making in developing their models were the correct assumptions about how the

volcano was behaving. And so there was quite a lot of discussion around that issue.

And we had some concerns that the right numbers were being put in and we wanted to

sort of make sure they – our Met Office colleagues understood what was happening at

the volcano and how they should – what’s called the source step [term], in other

words that’s really it, how much ash is being put into the atmosphere and what

happens close to the volcano. And so we were sort of discussing that issue quite a lot.

Of course that was quite critical because that was – what you assume goes in from the

volcano determines what you – what happens – where you can fly and where you

can’t fly. And that became a very acute issue very quickly because the engine

manufacturers at the time – the airlines put a lot of pressure on the government and

the engine manufacturers as well to say what – how much ash could you fly through

safely. And so they came up with a figure, an amount of ash, and when there was so

little ash in the air that you could fly the aircraft through it. And before that anywhere

you had any ash whatsoever you couldn’t fly. And that’s why the, you know, the

whole of Europe stopped for six days. When they changed it to being some threshold,

in other words there was a definite value of the concentration of ash in the atmosphere

that you could fly, then it really changed things very fundamentally from a science

point of view. Because all the Met Office had been asked to do was to say where the

ash was, they didn’t have to say how much ash there was. As soon as that decision

that you could fly came around then the request from the – for the Met Office and the

modellers was to say where it was dilute and where it wasn’t, and that’s scientifically

much, much more challenging and much more difficult to do. And so there was a lot

of discussion around that issue as well and some of those issues are not yet resolved.

I’m going to the next meeting of John Bebington’s on 2 November in London to talk

more about some of the issues that have arisen. So it’s still an ongoing issue of how

to do that.

[1:59:00]

Stephen Sparks Page 188

C1379/89

Track 6

188

At the time during the six days was it necessary to make new measurements or to look

at the volcano?

Well, it was of course. The Icelanders were making a lot of the critical

measurements. They were using radar to measure the activity of the volcano, for

example. So the information from the Met Office – sorry, the Iceland Met Office,

who was very critical to – and of course, because it was a very rapidly evolving

situation, new information was coming in all the time. So it was a bit like the

Montserrat thing, it’s when the volcano’s very active, everybody’s extremely busy

and new information’s coming in and that new information has to be digested quickly

and assessed. And that was definitely happening. And then you’ve got – in the case

of the ash, you’ve got lots of different actors. You’ve got the Civil Aviation

Authority. You’ve got the government, the cabinet office. You’ve got the – you’ve

got the air traffic control people, you’ve got the airlines, you’ve got the engine

manufacturers, all these – you’ve got the media, you’ve got CEOs of big airlines,

Willie Walsh and Michael O’Leary sounding off in the media. So there’s all these

things happening simultaneously and so it’s a very sort of frenetic environment, which

is sort of constantly changing when you’ve got an emergency like that.

And what were you – do you remember what you were able to sort of advise in detail

based on what data you could receive from –

Yes. What I think – the main tangible outcome from my point of view is that we were

asked to get together with the Met Office, specifically between the volcanologists and

the Met Office, and to sort out how we interfaced our understanding of what was

going on in the volcano and what was under their weather forecasting model. And so

we had some very productive meetings with the Met Office out away from the main

committee, where we just got Met Office scientists and volcanologists working

together and we started to develop – at the time I think there was a lot of

misunderstanding about volcanoes by the Met Office and probably misunderstanding

by us, the volcanologists, about the nature of the models they were running. And so

those meetings were very good because they really established this sort of cross

disciplinary communication between atmospheric meteorologists and volcanologists.

Stephen Sparks Page 189

C1379/89

Track 6

189

And we, you know, we made some really good progress. We’re still working with the

Met Office and I think that’s a very good outcome because, I mean, I think it has

eventually meant that the forecasting models are on a much more robust sound

scientific basis than they were.

Who did you work with at the – were you one of the volcanologists who was –

I was working with one of the volcanologists, yeah.

Who at the Met Office were you working with?

It was – we were working with quite a few different people. In fact one of the

problems we had is that the Met Office is an enormous organisation and it was

actually very confusing for us to understand actually who did what. So we met

different Met Office people in different meetings and they would never – sometimes

not be the same person. And we interacted with people in the Met Office and it

wasn’t always the same people. And we really found it pretty confusing, I think, the

geologists/volcanologists, about who did what, who was responsible for what, you

know, whether we – if we talked to x, would they be telling y. And it was very – it

was a confusing – there was a sort of – I remember really quite a lot of confusion in

understanding how the Met Office worked and what its hierarchies were and who was

responsible for what. I’m not sure I still even do now [laughs]. So I think that was a

little bit of a difficulty because we’d sometimes talk to one group or one person and

think they’d understood what we were saying and then the next time we talked to

somebody else from the Met Office it was clear that they didn’t understand what we’d

just told this other person. So there was – or discussed with this other person. So it

could be quite confusing.

Did you have any links with Julia Slingo, I think who was director of –

Oh Julia, yes, only on a sort of very high level. She was on – Julia was on the

committee. She was very supportive of the volcanologists and the Met Office people

getting together so she sort of facilitated that. And I think she was, you know, she

Stephen Sparks Page 190

C1379/89

Track 6

190

was – she was, you know, sort of instrumental in making it a much better working –

improving the working relationships between the two groups.

[2:04:12]

What was the sort of key misunderstandings of volcanoes that the meteorologists were

working with initially?

Well, that gets a bit technical in a way but I’ll try and explain it as best I can. If you

have a – if you want to predict where the ash is and you want to predict how much ash

is in the atmosphere over Britain, which is a long way from – 800 kilometres from

Iceland, you firstly have to know how much ash is put into the atmosphere by the

volcano at the time, so a flux of ash. Then you have to know how much of that ash

actually falls out quite close to the volcano. Now to simplify this a little bit, the Met

Office did not really understand that most of it fell out near the volcano. So if you

assume that most of it that came out of the volcano gets to Britain then you’re going

to get a lot more ash than if a lot of it falls out near the volcano. And they hadn’t –

initially they hadn’t really appreciated that. Now the volcanologists knew. I mean,

we’d known that for twenty, thirty years, so it wasn’t new science to us, but then

we’re in a completely different field and we don’t interact with the meteorologists

much and they hadn’t sort of appreciated that point. And that was one of the sort of

early things that we discussed with them and they sort of realised what, you know,

realised this point and they sort of made the adjustments to the models to take that

account.

Does that mean then early on in this sort of crisis their predictions about the amount

of dust in the atmosphere were exaggerated?

Well, you see, the point actually was they didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to

tell you how much ash there was. That wasn’t the rules. It was zero tolerance. So all

they had to say was where the ash was, okay [laughs]. That’s all they had to do and

they could do that quite well with their models, I think, reasonably well. And then

you just don’t fly where the ash – there’s any ash at all, so in a way that wouldn’t

Stephen Sparks Page 191

C1379/89

Track 6

191

have mattered very much early on. But as soon as the rules were changed so that you

actually had to say whether there was enough ash to cause a problem to a flight or not,

then the rules have changed and you have to actually say how much ash is and then

this does matter and it matters in a very big way. And so that very early dialogue

happened right at this point where the Met Office were being sort of asked to do

something they hadn’t been asked to do before, which was predict how much ash was

in the air. And that – I think the sort of dialogue they had with us made them

appreciate that if they were going to do that they needed to understand this point that

most of the ash falls out near the volcano. And then of course, if it mostly falls out

near the volcano, how do you actually find out how much there is. And you then

come into using satellite technology to look at the cloud and try and estimate from the

cloud how much ash is in the atmosphere. And that’s where one of my colleagues,

Matt Watson, comes in. He’s an expert in that. He was involved in these discussions.

What is the sort of protocol – when you’re contacted by – was John Bebington then

the chief scientific advisor?

He was, yes.

When you’re contacted by a chief scientific advisor asking you for help, is it optional,

I suppose is the question I’ve got? I mean –

Well, I don’t know whether it’s optional or not. I suppose it is optional, the

volunteering. You don’t get paid any fees or anything, you just get travel expenses

for doing the stuff and you have to – and it is quite demanding because they’re going

to be asking you to not just come to a meeting but to do some things like go and meet

the Met Office, go and do some – maybe do some calculations or do some stuff which

helps inform the process. So that’s then disrupting people from the things that they

would normally be doing. So – but I think the vast bulk of scientists would of course

want to help and that’s what usually happens. I’m not aware of many people who’ve

said, no, I’m not going to get involved when they’re asked.

[End of Track 6]

Stephen Sparks Page 192

C1379/89

Track 7

192

Track 7

Could you tell me about your involvement with the sort of inside of the Royal Society

since becoming a fellow of it?

Yes. I mean, I’ve been involved in a number of ways, probably less so in the last

several years with one exception. I’ve been on their – the selection committee for

new fellows a couple of times. I’ve been on the council once. I’ve chaired something

called the Hooke Committee, which organises the discussion meetings of the Royal

Society, organised a couple of those myself as well. And I’ve been on various – a

couple of taskforces or, you know, reports that have been done by the Royal Society

over the years. So I’ve been sort of in and out of sort of committee work, you know,

actually ever since being a fellow, so I’ve always had some involvement or, you

know, selection for university research fellows for the Royal Society or overseas

grants, so I’ve been on a number of the committees over the years. So I’ve – so I

guess I’ve done my sort of share. I haven’t really done very much the last few years

at the RS except now I’m just recently – back in February I was appointed as chair of

the advisory committee on maths education, called ACME, which is largely funded by

the Royal Society, or not – it’s funded jointly by the Royal Society and the

Department of Education and the Gatsby Foundation and Wellcome put money in.

And I’ve – but it’s run out of the Royal Society, so I work with people in the Royal

Society too on that particular topic.

Could you describe what you do for that committee, I mean, precisely what you do?

Yes. Well, I chair a committee of experts in mathematics education and this

committee both responds to requests from government for information on policy or

topics but also is proactive. The committee can take a topic like A levels or primary

school mathematics or whatever the topic is and they can – it can produce its own

report and their own study. And so the committee I run – I don’t run actually, I chair,

which is a different thing from running, is organised through the Royal Society, so

there’s sort of three secretariat – on the secretariat, who do a lot of the real work. And

then the committee members are paid for their time, so they’re sort of – it’s a sort of

Stephen Sparks Page 193

C1379/89

Track 7

193

professional arrangement, so these are professional educational experts who then

provide the evidence and the analysis which informs the sort of public debate on

maths education and informs the Department of Education about, you know,

particular issues. And they always have had – the committee’s been existing for ten

years. They’ve always had a non mathematician as the chair, who’s also a fellow of

the Royal Society, and they usually look for somebody who has used maths a lot but

isn’t a mathematician. And so I sort of fitted in there and then my predecessor Julie

Higgins is the same – who’s a material scientist, was the same sort of – that was the

same rationale for her to be the chair. So I’ve done it for about eight months. It’s

very interesting work. It’s another dimension of the interface between policy and

evidence, which is – so there is some, if you like, synergy with some of the things I’ve

done before in the context of volcanoes and radioactive waste. You know, the same

sort of political issues, generic political issues, emerge. So it’s very interesting.

Obviously you actually do have sort of direct contact with ministers or their civil

servants or their special advisors. The ACME is actually funded by the – partly

funded by the Department of Education, so they can sort of call on ACME to provide

information like – they’ve asked ACME to – one of our big projects is to coordinate

the maths community’s views on post sixteen education in maths, where the UK is

completely out of kilter with any other country.

Is it?

Yep.

In what way is it?

Well, almost – only a minority of our children go to post sixteen education and do any

maths at all, so they stop at GCSE and that’s it, unless they get an A and go on and do

an AS level or an A level. That’s about fifteen percent of children, you know, in post

sixteen will be doing A level maths or further maths or AS level, but the eighty-five

percent don’t do any at all. So in almost every country we’re competing with, the vast

bulk of kids post sixteen do continue to do some maths and that’s I think rightly seen

as a really serious problem. And the – Michael Gove, the current secretary of state,

Stephen Sparks Page 194

C1379/89

Track 7

194

wants to see at least eighty percent of kids do maths post sixteen and I think most

people are very supportive of that idea. How you get there is the problem. It’s a huge

challenge and our committee are working on producing a report for the DFE, which

informs their thinking about how they do this.

What are you gathering for that report? Who are you speaking to and – in other

words, you talked about the relationship between evidence and policy. Well, what is

the nature of the evidence that you’re –

Well, the evidence is the – things like the Nuffield Foundation, which does a lot of

educational research, individual educational researchers in universities, mathematics

associations and mathematical societies, Association of Mathematics. There’s a wide

range of bodies, organisations and individuals who have various sorts of evidence. By

far the most compelling is the simple table that says the proportion of kids post

sixteen who do maths in different countries. And if you take all the OECD developed

countries you will find that we’re a complete outlier in terms of mathematics

education post sixteen. You then couple that with the observation that almost all

universities now have very substantial remedial mathematics facilities in terms of

teams and education within them because they have to make up for the deficiencies of

this school education. And that’s – and you then look at the sort of recent survey that

half the population are not even up to the required standard for an eleven year old,

that’s nationally, you can see that there’s a major problem for a country which is

trying to make its way by being clever and in a world where jobs are going to be –

increasingly require numeracy. So I think everyone’s seen that as a big problem and

so the question is how do you – what do you do about it. That’s the – and so that’s

what our committee is thinking about.

[8:26]

So we are thinking more about what, you know, what are the options, how do we do

this.

Have you come to any conclusions about why we’re in the position of being –

Stephen Sparks Page 195

C1379/89

Track 7

195

Well, I have a personal view but it’s a purely personal view.

Okay, what is that?

I think it’s because – the history of education in Britain goes back to really deep

historical roots and it’s made – and it’s rooted in an elitist system for education, which

led to A levels being created in 1951 for university educat’ - entrants when only three

or four percent of children went to university, perhaps even less than that in 1951.

And we have an educational system which specialises very early, much earlier than

any other education system, and I would say that, if you look back at the history of

education, you can pinpoint that that was a consequence of a view of education which

was developed in the 1930s and ‘40s and led to the 1944 Education Act. And some of

that – those views are now known to be flawed, seriously flawed, and – but it led to

secondary moderns and grammar schools. It led to A levels as a sort of elite exam

and specialism. And we’re sort of saddled with a historical legacy and no single

government since then has really – although there’ve been – successive governments

have had ambitions to reform education fundamentally, they’ve either never had the –

if you like, the commitment to really changing things fundamentally, or if they’ve

tried they’ve never been in government long enough to do it completely or

thoroughly. So we’ve sort of got a mishmash of secondary education in Britain.

We’ve got places that do the eleven plus and places that don’t, places that have

secondary moderns and grammar schools, places that don’t, comprehensives. We’ve

got city academics that Labour introduced. We’ve got free schools now that Michael

Gove wants to bring in. We’ve got academies. We’ve got a complete mishmash of

different educational concepts for secondary education, which are – which is – we’ve

acquired historically and nobody quite knows how to unravel it all. I mean, that

would be my view. And you can, you know, I was going to be sort of slightly

provocative. I know people who think this is correct but this is just my opinion. I

think if you went back to the 1930s and you looked at the psychologists of the time

who developed behavioural psychology and invented the IQ test, you’d come up with

a lot of the explanations of where we are. You would come up with people who

thought that – and thought their evidence at the time was pointing to a very strong

Stephen Sparks Page 196

C1379/89

Track 7

196

genetic control on people’s abilities and that therefore you could take an exam at

Eleven Plus and that would tell you whether you went to a secondary modern and you

became a road sweeper or you went to a grammar school and became a lawyer. And

that was rooted in that very early work, which we now know, some of it is

scientifically flawed. But that was the science of the time which informed an

educational system which we still have strong resonance with or remnants of. So

we’ve ended up – and it’s a very roundabout way, but we’ve ended up with a situation

where people are asked to specialise too early, I think, a lot of it, and that’s why, you

know, you go to a – you’ve done ten or eleven GCSEs, or formerly O levels, and so

you had a relatively broad up to sixteen, and then suddenly you’re in the sixth form

and you’ve just got to choose three subjects. And politicians down the ages have been

very reluctant to challenge A levels because they – it’s a sort of thing that everybody

in Britain understands, maybe not the rest of the world but Britain understands, and so

changing it is a really difficult thing to do. But it narrows people down and it means

if you’re going to do three A levels, how do you do some maths as well or some

literacy, for example. So I think that’s where we’ve ended up. We’ve had an

educational system which has evolved with time in a way which hasn’t been – isn’t

entirely strategic and therefore we’ve ended up with this sort of specialism. And how

we get out of that, I mean, it’s – I think – my personal view is that the idea that Gove

has got about EBacc for – instead of GCSEs for maths, English and – is it maths,

English and science? That seems to have some merit. It’s sort of the baccalaureate

idea is starting. And I think even – I’ve heard that there may even be some thinking

in the Department of Education about producing a sort of A level ABacc, which

would be a move into a, you know, sort of broader education structure where it would

be much easier to have people do a bit of maths after sixteen. So that would be my

sort of potted [laughs] and very personal view of, you know, what happened. Of

course you can relate it to a sort of personal issue, that I failed the eleven plus so

maybe I’ve got a sort of bias [laughs] that that wasn’t a very good exam.

[15:06]

And how does the committee, you know, how precisely does the committee

communicate with government?

Stephen Sparks Page 197

C1379/89

Track 7

197

How does it communicate?

Yeah. By talking, you know, when and how.

Yes, it’s a variety of ways. The Royal Society has a wonderful secretariat who do a

lot of the work behind the scenes, three people, who worked produce the ACME

reports. They keep an – they do a tremendous amount of work going to various

meetings and conferences and things to do with maths education so that they network

and have, you know, their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in maths education.

They talk to people. Then at the other end they have – they develop relationships with

the special advisors to ministers, the civil servants in the DFE and develop personal

relationships with them so that those civil servants can call up and ask questions and

interact. They sometimes come to our – are invited to our meetings so we can have a

discussion with them or – like we had the chair of Ofqual come to one of our

meetings, so people, you know, so people in the maths education – people who are in

– chief executives of exam boards who are going to control the, you know, influence

the assessment process. So – and then meetings occasionally with ministers. There’s

a sort of – about every three months there’s a meeting between Department of

Education ministers and representatives of the science and maths community to talk

about STEM, and I get invited to that. So there’s a whole range of communication

mechanisms that have been developed in order to sort of get this sort of

communication and exchange going.

[17:06]

Thank you. And could you tell me now about more recent work with the mining

industry? More recently meaning since you’ve come to Bristol.

Yeah. I guess – I’ve had two sort of interactions, one which is ongoing and one which

started about 2003. And it was sort of serendipity actually again, completely a matter

of luck. About 2003 De Beers, the diamond mining company in Southern Africa,

decided that they would put a team of – a sort of think tank team for science and

Stephen Sparks Page 198

C1379/89

Track 7

198

technology in Wells in Somerset, which is sort of fifteen miles from Bristol. And

why they chose Wells I don’t really know but they did. And they certainly chose

Britain because their main interests are in Southern Africa, Canada and Russia, there

are no diamond mines in Britain, and sort of – Britain’s a sort of hub and, you know,

you can get to Russia or Canada or Southern Africa easier than if you were in, you

know, South Africa. So they chose Britain as the place and they chose Wells, which

is quite close to Bristol University. And I got rung up by a very enthusiastic guy

called Matthew Field, who worked in this think tank, he was their sort of senior

geologist, and he said, you know, ‘We know you do volcanology and volcanic rocks

at Bristol. Would you be interested in looking at some of our mines?’ The diamonds

are in little – in rocks called kimberlites, which are little – essentially little volcanoes.

And I said, ‘Yeah, come and talk.’ And we started talking. We had a visit to

Southern Africa to look at some mines and it was pretty clear that this was an

absolutely great example of the opportunity for real synergy between industry and

academia because they wanted to – they were finding it more difficult to find

diamonds. Their mining strategy depends on their understanding of the geology of

the mines, you know, bits where there’s a lot of diamonds, bits where there aren’t.

They wanted to be able to predict that. So from their point of view, they wanted to

get cleverer at finding diamonds and mining them out. And so they thought, I think

rightly, that academia could help there by looking at the sort of fundamentals. We

found it of huge interest because in an active volcano you can’t go down and look at

what’s inside the vent. If it’s erupting it’s not going to be a good idea and even when

it’s not erupting it’s virtually impossible to go, you know, a kilometre down

underground and see what’s there. So we had very little direct observations of

volcanic vents. In these kimberlites, which are volcanic vents, they’re mining out

volcanic vents and so there’s a fantastic opportunity to actually see, in enormous

detail that mining allows, the sort of insides of a volcanic event and find out what’s

going on – and make some inferences about what’s going on. So there was a real

synergy and we – after some discussions they gave us really quite a lot of money to

have a significant research programme on these rocks and on their mines and they

funded some young researchers and some PhD students. And we had, for about five

or six years until the diamond market crashed, you know, just in 2008, ’09, the thing

fell, you know, luxury goods just fell through the floor, but over about a five year

Stephen Sparks Page 199

C1379/89

Track 7

199

period we had a very productive and interesting relationship with them and did some

really very interesting research.

What did involve in detail, the research? How do you – how as a geologist do you

study a diamond mind?

Well, you – it’s absolutely the traditional geological tools. You go down in the mines

and you map the different rock types. You use drill cores to say where the different

rock types are and you look at what sorts of rocks are down these old volcanic vents.

And then you make inferences from the observations the grain size, the thickness of

the units, the size of the units, what they’re made of, all these sort of basic geological

observations. You compile them all, you take samples back to the laboratory and you

look at the minerals and they tell you other things about the origin of the rocks and

what was going on. And then you use that like a jigsaw puzzle, like any bit of

geology, you try and put all these bits of evidence together and you try and synthesise

it into a sort of, you know, it’s inductive science, you’re trying to – you construct

what, you know, what sort of model or what processes fit best with the observations

you can see. So it’s a very similar style to all the other research that I’ve done. We

got students doing little experiments in the laboratory and that worked well and

worked with some mechanical engineers on flow through beds. You probably

remember that I talked about much earlier, even in my PhD, I got interested in

fluidisation of sand by passing gas through sand, and then when I was at CALTECH

we did experiments on gases – sand at high pressure exploding. And then of course

when you get in a volcanic vent that’s exactly the situation. You’ve got a volcano

erupting huge amounts of gas through a hole in the ground with lots of fragments in it

and so you expect some of the same processes to go on. And so you can start thinking

about the geology in terms of these sort of physical concepts and start to build up a

picture of what went on.

And was it a – did it lead to the companies being able to determine where diamonds

were more likely and less likely?

Stephen Sparks Page 200

C1379/89

Track 7

200

Yes, I think they – it advanced the field significantly. The work we did has had really

quite a big influence. We had lots of fights with some of the older kimberlite

geologists and still do. And it’s a rather strange world because the diamond business

and the geologist who’ve been working in the diamond industries have been sort of

working in a – in a sort of – to some extent in a vacuum, or at least it’s a very inward

looking – it’s traditionally been very inward looking, the sort of consultants and the

mining company geologists and the odd academic. But they’ve been sort of talking to

each other and they’d never really looked at these rocks, I don’t think, in any serious

way as little volcanoes and then taken the understanding of people like myself and

other colleagues round the world could bring to – who knew about volcanoes could

bring to the understanding. And so they came up with some – there’s some very good

work but there’s also some sort of slightly quixotic and to some extent bizarre ideas

that emerged. And of course we were – had to come to the conclusion that some of

these really weren’t – really weren’t sustainable as ideas and so that was a bit

challenging to this community. And so we probably had more fights than sort of – on

the research in that project than I’ve had before, but in a way it was quite entertaining

and fun in a way to, you know, sort of really try and persuade this community that

there were some other alternative ways of looking at these rocks. And we found, you

know, a really simple result, which is that these kimberlites, little volcanoes, they

occur in clusters and if you drill into the top of one and you find that there’s certain

sizes and quality of diamonds, if you think all the material from that pipe or that little

volcano comes from the same volcano and filled up the hole, then you might expect

the diamonds near the surface to be the same as the diamonds at depth, or have some

similarities. We were able to show that sometimes these little volcanoes erupted and

they’re only half full and then a neighbouring volcano with completely different

diamonds erupted and it put its diamonds into the old hole. So that meant the

diamonds in the shallow part of the hole are completely different, or could be

completely different, from the ones at depth. So that sort of conceptual understanding

– that’s an example, they’re – the conceptual understanding is changed so that, you

know, you start to look at the geology and interpret it and the way you’re going to

mine it out in really very different ways. And we found out a lot of things about the

geology of that sort, which I think have been very helpful for them to understand the

geology of these volcanoes.

Stephen Sparks Page 201

C1379/89

Track 7

201

[27:12]

And you said there was more recent work that was ongoing.

Yeah, we’ve – we’re just starting a project, which is – we went – we’ve been having

conversations for a couple of years with BHP Billiton, a huge mining company based

in Australia but multinational. It’s the world’s biggest mining company. And we’ve

sort of persuaded them that we should do something similar to the kimberlite project

for copper. You know, the world’s struggling to get enough copper to keep going,

copper price goes up, they need new mines, need new places to get copper. And

copper ore deposits are very largely, not entirely, but many of the big ones are old

volcanoes. So we’ve put to them the same simple argument, that if you bring in a

group of guys who know about how volcanoes work, modern volcanoes, and we start

looking at these old ones then maybe we’ll start seeing things which help you find

them and help you understand them so that you can develop the mines in a more

efficient way. So it’s a similar sort of argument. And we’re just starting that project,

which will be largely in Chile.

And that’s a – and so the fieldwork is going to start …

The fieldwork will start this coming year, yeah.

I see.

I mean, given the stage I am in my career, I’m not planning to spend a huge amount of

time out there, so we’ve got – we managed to persuade them to get a lectureship in the

department, which we’ve just hired, and that lecturer is a – so I guess it’s going to be

sort of the new generation of geologists who do a lot more of the fieldwork that I do.

As I say, I’m not planning to spend huge amounts of time out there.

[29:16]

Stephen Sparks Page 202

C1379/89

Track 7

202

And could you talk about current work on the global volcano –

Model, yes, that’s right, yeah. That’s an idea that myself and a colleague in the

British Geological Survey had, which is to try and develop an international network of

– within volcanology, which collates, compiles and analyses data on a global basis

and also analyses – uses that information to assess hazard and risk round the world on

a sort of global basis. And it’s partly coordination but it’s also trying to get the whole

world’s community of volcanologists to work better together so we produce more

standardisation in the way we analyse data, the way we assess hazards, so that we

don’t do something completely different in Indonesia which can’t be compared with

Chile, which is unfortunately the case. That we have models where there are

protocols which mean that there are more standards so that we up the game in terms

of having global databases and global analysis of risk and hazard which allow us to be

much more robust and systematic about the way we map hazard and risk. That’s the

concept. So we’ve got some money from NERC and we’ve managed to get about

fifteen global – round the world, about fifteen institutions involved in this project.

And it’s early days but the vision is that this will become a sort of sustainable activity,

which will eventually evolve into a sort of more harmonised way of presenting the

science and evidence and information in volcanology. That’s the sort of idea. We are

doing – we’ve already done some – quite a lot of work for the World Bank,

developing – some of the early work on this for the World Bank on certain developing

countries where we’ve systematically assessed the hazard, the vulnerability – really

actually the exposure of populations, the exposure of infrastructure, and converted

that into risk indexes. And then we’ve looked at the capacity of different countries to

monitor the volcanoes and address their hazards, you know, if you like, go into

disaster risk reduction. And we’ve done a study, which we presented to the World

Bank about a year ago. We’re now being commissioned by the UN ISDR to make the

first global assessment of hazard and risk from volcanism for the UN, for their 2015

report. So we’ve got about – so the global volcano model will work – when I say –

what global volcano model really means is these sort of fifteen institutions will work

together to create a systematic assessment of volcanic risk round the world. And

that’s never been done before so that’s the sort of – that’s the idea and we’ll present

that in the UN document.

Stephen Sparks Page 203

C1379/89

Track 7

203

I think it might surprise people that there isn’t already a kind of global identification

of volcanoes with an attached risk for each one.

Yes, there’s a global – the Smithsonian do a wonderful job of documenting volcanism

round the world. They know – they’ve got a website where you can find every

volcano in the world and you can find some basic information on it. But that’s not a

risk analysis, that’s just saying there’s a volcano here, it’s got this history, it does this

or that. That information and ancillary information hasn’t been converted into a

proper thorough risk assessment.

For an individual volcano, how do you calculate its risk?

Er, we … we calculate its risk by firstly saying that you have to define what you mean

by risk, what’s at risk. It’s a loss business. So we at the moment only define risk in

terms of loss of life, potential loss of life. So the simplest thing you can possibly do is

you can look at volcanoes around the world. You look at how far the volcano can

reach and where people have been killed historically and you can say, well, it’s – on

the whole it’s pretty dangerous thirty kilometres from most volcanoes. At a hundred

kilometres you’re probably pretty well safe. Between 130 [130 30 and 100

kilometres], well, you know, there might be something but you’re probably okay.

This is a very crude thing. Then you simply count up the number of people within

thirty kilometres of the volcano and that’s the exposed population. And you could

only go from – you then take the hazard of the volcano, which you can measure from

its history, and you multiply its hazard index by its exposure and that comes up with a

sort of risk number. It’s not truly risk in the sense that by measuring populations

we’re measuring exposure, we’re not measuring vulnerability. So there might be

100,000 people living round a volcano in a developed country where there’s really

good early warning systems and evacuation plans and so forth, and when the volcano

erupts they’re all safely evacuated and they’re – the exposure’s the same but the

vulnerability is different. On the other hand you might have another volcano, perhaps

in a less developed country or with less infrastructure, has poor evacuation plans,

whatever and very – perhaps very poor people living in the volcano, not so many

Stephen Sparks Page 204

C1379/89

Track 7

204

communication systems. They’ve got the same exposure but they’re very much more

vulnerable. So if we really wanted to assess the true risk we’d have to take that into

account as well, but that’s a difficult thing to do, how you measure that. So at the

moment we just do it by a very simple thing, how many people live round the

volcano, or how many roads are there above some level, how many airports are there,

where’s the hospitals, those sort of simple things you can quantify, where are the

exposed elements. So that’s the sort of – as I say, that’s what we’re sort of aiming

that the global volcano model will enable people to do. So it’s not just that you can’t

do it, it’s that actually you can’t – the evidence base on which you could do it isn’t

even there. So we have to create the databases which allow you to do that sort of, you

know, sort of basic risk assessment.

And does this project have a role in trying to boost the kind of – the scientific

capability in less developed countries that are affected by volcanoes?

Yes. In fact the principle reason the World Bank gave us the study was that they

wanted to know which of these countries was basically in quite good shape to deal

with their volcanoes and which weren’t. I mean, they didn’t ask us that explicitly but

we were writing the report for World Bank economists and that’s really at the back of

their mind is, if you go to Columbia and Guatemala, which of those countries is best –

is going to be able to cope with a future eruption. They’ve both got lots of volcanoes.

But if you look at Columbia you will find that a lot of their high risk volcanoes are

really well monitored and they’re quite sophisticated. If you go to Guatemala you’ll

find a really poor monitoring capacity and they don’t even monitor at all some of their

high risk volcanoes close to big populations. So, you know, you’re a World Bank

economist, you might – well, I don’t know how they think but I mean, you would

think, well, Columbia seems to do reasonable sensible things with the money that they

get for aid or loans from the World Bank, they invest in their science and their

institutions and they, you know, they’re relatively sophisticated, they do a – in this

particular context they do quite a good job, well, maybe we should put – that’s a place

worth continuing to invest in. Guatemala, well, they clearly need capacity building

but then maybe the governance issues in Guatemala are very difficult and therefore

that’s not a – they’re going to have to take into account other issues, aren’t they, with

Stephen Sparks Page 205

C1379/89

Track 7

205

– so they might invest in – give them a lot of seismometers but nobody looks after

them, or something like that. So it’s information that’ll inform their loans because

since the Asian tsunami the World Bank has basically – the disaster risk reduction

issue has raised right up the scale of organisations like the UN and the World Bank,

that we really have to do much better at reducing the impact of natural hazards and

disasters. And so this is part of the sort of information which informs that sort of

policy debate.

[39:41]

So – which does actually – there is something I probably should say but it’s – because

I think for me it’s very personally satisfying, is my younger son, who I sort of

mentioned right early on, he didn’t – he went – he didn’t really show much interest in

my area until he went in the field with me. He went to Chile and helped with some

fieldwork and he came to Montserrat. And he then went to Plymouth University to do

a geography degree and he got very interested in development and – development

issues and after he’d finished his degree in Plymouth, he said – he did his project on

Montserrat actually, about the impact of the eruption on the – so he went out to

Montserrat and looked at the impact of the eruption on the people and things like that

for his undergraduate thesis. And then he sort of looked, you know, like a lot of

people, they looked – he looked round and got a sort of rather dull job in an insurance

company for part time, and then he did voluntary work for something called Tree Aid

which is a Sub Saharan African charity and he did that with some paid, you know,

sort of intern thing. Did that for a bit, then he got a job with a charity called Send a

Cow, which is again an agricultural project. He then decided to do an MSc at

Reading in sustainable livelihoods and development, got that, did some fieldwork in

Uganda with farmers and now he’s now working in a company called Development

Initiatives and he’s now become the sort of – the expert in this group, this

organisation, which analyses disaster and humanitarian aid and he’s now their disaster

expert. So he’s producing reports which he’s given to – he went to New York to –

with a colleague to present this report to the UN in New York and he’s been to

Geneva. So he’s now suddenly – our sort of interests, you know, are overlapping

quite strongly. I mean, he’s interested in disaster risk reduction and he’s sort of more

Stephen Sparks Page 206

C1379/89

Track 7

206

looking at it from an economic point of view, but it’s really quite interesting. So it’s

been very nice that he’s sort of moved into something that overlaps a bit with, you

know, some of my work.

Are you able to discuss this with him then?

Oh yes, yes. I mean, I actually, you know, sort of read some of his stuff and then sort

of make some suggestions and things about it. But what he’s done is very interesting

because he – Development Initiatives, his company, basically they are funded by

government, Swedish, Canadian, British, to create information databases and analyse

that information on humanitarian aid, who’s spending it, what are they spending it on,

where are they spending it. And governments like that because then that’s

information they can use to inform their aid strategy. And he’s looking at the problem

that everyone thinks that if you spend much more money on disasters by pre-empting

them and being prepared, that would be money much better spent than just spending it

on emergency relief. But almost all the aid money goes into emergency relief. I

mean, it’s literally ninety-nine percent. And the governments since the Hyogo

Framework have said that – many governments have signed up to the idea that out of

the ten percent of the total aid – the idea is ten percent of the total aid budget should

go to disasters, the other ninety percent is all the other aids, humanitarian aid, bit.

And out of that ten percent, ten percent of that ten percent should go to preparedness

and preparing for disasters in communities before the disaster happens. And he’s

been analysing this data and he’s been able to show very nicely that – well, firstly that

almost no government has met that commitment first and then even the money that

has met that commitment is spent on places which have just had a disaster. So almost

all of that money is spent on Haiti, Pakistan and Thailand, where they’ve just had a

disaster [laughs]. So it’s still reactive, not proactive. So his work’s going in a very

interesting direction so I’m sort of having a lot of sort of fun interacting with him on

that.

[44:35]

Stephen Sparks Page 207

C1379/89

Track 7

207

And would you like finally just to say how your – is this your younger son you’re

talking about now?

That’s the younger son, yeah.

How your older son’s career developed. I think we last discussed him at the point

that he was a teenager.

Yeah, he’s a totally different character. And what’s interesting is he probably did a

bit better at school than the younger one but he has a very different approach to life.

He’s just been married. And he worked – he got a degree in geography as well at

Leeds and then he worked for several years in an insurance company and I think was

doing alright, you know, sort of – but found it terribly dull. He loves football and

outdoor things and he decided this really wasn’t for him. And so he’s – he went –

decided – he quit his job, he went off to Australia for a few months, came back, met

his new wife, who he’s just married. This is about four years ago. And he said,

‘Well, I’m going to become an electrician.’ So he’s trained himself up as an

electrician and so he’s now a qualified electrician and he works – he’s got a well paid

job for BT but it’s actually a bit – he’s got a dilemma. He’s got a job which is really

well paid but it’s actually rather dull. He changes switches for internet connections

for BT and it’s all night work. So he gets really well paid and a lot of it’s night work,

because you want the internets to be – changed, you know, a customer says they want

their provider changed, you have to do that at night when they’re not – so he gets this

– it’s really well paid and he wants to become an electrician, so he’s – sort of

sometimes during the day he’s going around with a mate he knows sort of – he’s got

pals now in the – he’s met people and he now gets jobs for doing electrical work in

houses and things. But of course he can’t do – he’d really like to quit this well paid

job and do that [laughs] but he can’t. So he’s – so that’s what he’s done. So he’s

gone into a sort of very non – if you like, you know, a very different direction, if you

like, a non academic direction. So he’s …

[End of Track 7]