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Speaker 1: You're listening to a Towson University podcast. [music]

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Mark Ginsberg: Welcome to On the Mark, where we have candid conversations about meaningful and consequential work happening here at Towson University. I'm Mark Ginsberg, President of TU, located in Towson, Maryland. On this podcast, we're introducing you to members of our university community who are engaged in high-impact teaching, research, and student success practices.

Today, I'm pleased to be joined by Dr. Joel Moore. Dr. Moore is a professor of geosciences in TU's Fisher College of Science and Mathematics, where he has taught for nearly 15 years. His research bridges interdisciplinary studies of geochemistry, environmental science, and the field of sustainability, with recent projects spanning from Baltimore's water system to the Chesapeake Bay. We share an alma mater. Both Dr. Moore and I are graduates of the Penn State University, where Dr. Moore received his PhD in geosciences. We often like to say together: “we are.” Joel, thank you very much for being here today.

I thought we'd start with a general question, because it's something I actually don't know a whole lot about and I'm intrigued by. That's the area of geochemistry. You're a geochemist by background and by trade. Tell us a little bit about what geochemistry is.

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Joel Moore: Yes, happy to do so. Thanks for the invitation. Really excited to be here.

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Mark Ginsberg: Oh, delighted to have you.

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Joel Moore: I'm a low-temperature geochemist. Meaning I focus on water, focus on soil. How does rock turn into soil? That sort of process takes place over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. A lot of my work these days is focused on, how do humans change water and soil chemistry? I'm involved in National Science Foundation, big efforts called the Urban Critical Zone Cluster, where there are colleagues from eight institutions, including a couple other in the University System of Maryland.

We're looking at urban watersheds on the East Coast from Philadelphia down to Raleigh and now down to Georgia and Atlanta. One of my big areas of focus since coming to TU and started in part in collaboration with my many fantastic colleagues here in environmental science and studies, is looking at the effects of road salt on groundwater and reservoir and stream chemistry.

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Mark Ginsberg: Right, and a very important issue, particularly in areas that get a lot of winter weather and snow and the like, and all that that involves. Tell us a little bit more about the Urban Critical Zone Cluster. That's the project you just mentioned.

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Joel Moore: We're wrapping up year five now.

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Mark Ginsberg: It's been going on for a while.

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Joel Moore: Yes, we're sort of winding down, and certainly COVID, et cetera, disrupted us, and so we have lots of data and samples we've collected over the last five years. Students from Temple and UMBC, going out and collecting samples every couple of weeks, and then they're sending a bunch of their samples here to test, and where we're analyzing stream chemistry and the urban environmental biogeochemistry.

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Mark Ginsberg: One of the really notable things about the project is it's both this interdisciplinarity, but also it's across university collaboration. There are 10 or 12 universities involved in this? Is that right?

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Joel Moore: Yes, UMBC,

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Mark Ginsberg: UMBC.

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Joel Moore: College Park,

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Mark Ginsberg: College Park as well.

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Joel Moore: University of Pittsburgh, et cetera. Geographers, geomorphologists, and groundwater people. A wide range. Biogeochemist Peter Groffman is involved at CUNY, City University of New York.

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Mark Ginsberg: Interesting.

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Joel Moore: It's a great group.

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Mark Ginsberg: Probably contributes to the success of the project, having such a wide range of expertise.

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Joel Moore: Yes, absolutely. We all bring our different angles on some of the same problems, and that diversity of perspective gives us interesting and hopefully unique insights into what we're learning about urban centers across the East Coast.

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Mark Ginsberg: I also know that one of your other roles is the director of our Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences and Studies program, the academic program. Not only you, a well-respected, nationally regarded researcher, but you're also directing an academic program here 鶹ɫ. Tell us a bit about that program.

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Joel Moore: Yes, it's a fantastic program. Certainly one of the things that drew me to Towson in the first place, I'd like to circle back slightly to my geochemistry. I very much come out of the geosciences, but have always been interested in interdisciplinary approaches to research. The Environmental Science and Studies program was a big draw to me coming to Towson. I've been pretty involved since I arrived. For the last two or the last three years, I've been director. We've got about 140, 150 undergraduates. I think it's maybe the oldest or second-oldest environmental program in the state.

We also have a master's program with about 35 students currently. We draw in faculty from Fisher College from biology, chemistry and physics, astronomy, and geosciences. Then College of Liberal Arts contributes a ton, particularly from geography. Then we have faculty involved from every college, from Fine Arts, from Health Professions, Business and Economics. It's a pretty amazing program.

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Mark Ginsberg: That's one of the things that I think differentiates Towson as well is we have adjunct faculty who are actually really expert in their fields, who may have been doing other things, working in federal agencies, involved in other projects, who come to the university and are involved adjunctively, meaning they're here not full time, but they're certainly a very integral and integrated part of the university's academic mission.

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Joel Moore: I think a couple of things that some newly transferred-in students mentioned to me as part of the draw to, TU, as opposed to maybe other places, was that we have a lot of science and hands-on research in our environmental program, our class sizes tended to be smaller than other places they were looking.

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Mark Ginsberg: And fabulous facilities, the Fisher College of Science and Mathematics, in a building that's relatively new, that has all the most updated equipment. It's a really a fabulous facility. Well, back to geochemistry for a second. What I learned a little bit is that it really is quite interdisciplinary, and it seems like one of the imperatives in geochemistry is to understand the materials that make up the earth and the processes by which they evolve. I'm curious, what is the earth made up of?

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Joel Moore: The interior of the earth is mostly iron and silicon. The exterior, the thin crust that we live on, is mostly silicon, and made up of various minerals that have silicon. As those minerals break down and form soils, that's what filters out the rainwater that we pull out of streams and out of groundwater to drink. It supports our agriculture and all our crops. One thing that emerged out of the area of geochemistry I'm in, and really tried to tie together various fields, people who study how trees move around water, and environmental engineers is called Critical Zone Science. It's really trying to take an interdisciplinary approach to the critical-

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Mark Ginsberg: Critical Zone science.

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Joel Moore: Yes. The Critical Zone is the zone from the top of the tree canopy down to the bottom of groundwater, and that zone on which we rely for essentially everything that keeps us alive. Food, water, et cetera.

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Mark Ginsberg: Interesting. That really is a broad range from the top of the tree canopy to where the groundwater goes, and the issues and the challenges that geochemists are working on, sounds like there are really multiple. What are some of the areas of work that geochemists are now fully engaged in?

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Joel Moore: Some of the things I'm working on are, as we put road salt on roads and parking lots, how does that move into our streams and affect our water quality and our drinking water, and the organisms that live in the stream? Road salt has many good things. It makes our roads and parking lot safer. But trying to figure out how can we reduce the amount we put down but sustainably, or maintain our water quality as best we can? Other people are working on more of the rocks themselves. Critical minerals have been an important issue that's risen in the US. Our phones are made up of various minerals that have to find the geological resources and extract those rare earth elements, et cetera, hazards related to volcanoes. Geochemistry has a wide range, from how do volcanoes erupt, to how do you get clean drinking water?

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Mark Ginsberg: Interesting. I just was in Iceland over the summer, and I saw the power of volcanoes generally and have a real appreciation for that. It's also been studied. I think that geochemistry gives us tools, tools to trace things like pollutants, trace things like the volcanic eruptions that take place, to understand the cycle of critical elements. Frankly, although this is not without controversy, it's not without those who have challenged it to think about the long-term impact of human activity.

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Joel Moore: Yes, of course.

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Mark Ginsberg: How does that all fit together in the work that you do, in the work that geochemists do?

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Joel Moore: There are various ways to approach it. What I studied most in my PhD was, how do the minerals in rocks break down to form soils? How do we understand how that process occurs over often hundreds of thousands of years? If you understand that, then hopefully we can do things like agriculture a little more sustainably. People in that field have one of the areas we've pivoted to is understanding, are there ways we can start to maybe pull a little bit of CO2 out of the atmosphere? As we continue to burn fossil fuels, CO2 goes up in the atmosphere, temperatures go up.

There are lots of great gains we've had as a civilization from that, but there are downsides. Climate change poses a threat to all of us. What are some of the many ways we can adapt? Maybe we can grind up some of that basalt from Iceland, spread it on farm fields. As that basalt dissolves, maybe that can pull some CO2 out of the atmosphere and provide some nutrients to the plants.

Then Iceland, I know some Icelandic geology. [crosstalk] That's for sure. Some geologists in Iceland who they're taking CO2 from, say power plants and injecting it down into the basalt, the calcium-rich rock that Iceland is made of, and the CO2 dissolves it, and then that can trap some CO2 and pull it out of the atmosphere. There are big questions about how much we could scale that.

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Mark Ginsberg: Those are big questions.

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Joel Moore: Things to explore, as one of the many ways we can seek to address the problems posed by fossil fuel burning and climate change.

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Mark Ginsberg: Yes, but potentially one of the possible solutions to the challenges that we face. One of the other challenges we face, I know that you've been working on is what are the implications of all the road salt we use? I hadn't really thought about that, but having lived in central Pennsylvania for a while at Penn State, having come to the Baltimore region many years ago from upstate New York, road salt is part of everyday life. It also sounds like it's also affecting everyday life.

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Joel Moore: Yes, it definitely has a growing number of things we realize are problematic. One of our faculty here at Towson, John Sivey in chemistry, studies disinfection byproducts. When you add chlorine to drinking water, it can produce carcinogens. When they're treating drinking water, they're always trying to balance that. Well, it turns out that chloride from road salt increases the formation rates of disinfection byproducts. Something we've just started figuring out in the last 5, 10 years. It increases the corrosivity of the water. The chloride does. You can adjust for that and often in a drinking water treatment plant. But if you're in a well, say out in Baltimore or Carroll County, you're not necessarily treating your water.

That chloride can start to corrode at your water heater and your pipes. You might need to start to replace those on a regular basis, or put in a reverse osmosis system, which is going to cost you $20,000, $25,000. Then one of the things as we work to clean up the Chesapeake and improve the ecosystems across the watershed, salt ends up often being harmful to many of the organisms in the stream.

One of the things that Maryland's doing a good job moving forward to start to figure out how to reduce the amount of salt that we're using and be smart about it so that we're keeping roads and parking lots safe, but putting less down where we can. It's going to be a decades-long endeavor because we've built up salt over the last 40 or 50 years. It's going to be a big education effort, to make people aware of, how much salt you put down on your sidewalk outside your house is going to be a lot less than you think is the safe amount.

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Mark Ginsberg: From what I'm inferring, what you're saying too that, once you put salt down, it gets into the water table, into the groundwater systems, it doesn't leave for very long. It stays there for quite a long time.

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Joel Moore: Yes, it does. Once it gets into the water, it goes out into the stream. Eventually, it's a system after decades. Part of the reason we use road salt, usually sodium chloride, is because it's really soluble. That's part of what makes it effective. There's not really any easy way to remove it once it's in your soil or ground water.

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Mark Ginsberg: It works, but it also has an unintended consequence.

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Joel Moore: Exactly.

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Mark Ginsberg: One of those unintended consequences, how does it affect the life in the water? You're saying it certainly has an effect on drinking water. We know that the rise of levels of toxicity in drinking water. It must also have an effect on fish and other wildlife that are in the water.

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Joel Moore: Yes, it has an effect often. What are the sort of canaries in the coal mine, as it were? What Maryland and many other places have used as a way to look at stream ecosystem health are benthic macroinvertebrates, so the insects that live in the sediments and in the streams. Mayflies and those sorts of things. They turn out to be particularly sensitive to chloride. A big part of it, I'm not a biologist, but from my reading about this is, they're used to living in a really dilute pure water. When you start adding salt, then they have to basically ramp up their metabolism. They have to work harder to basically keep that salt out, and that causes them stress and then can cause the numbers of those to go down. They're at that sort of the bottom of the food chain, or food web. If you effect them, then changes start to propagate up through the food chain.

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Mark Ginsberg: How does that affect other pollutants in the water? I wonder if it acts almost like an accelerant for other problems that could occur in our water systems?

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Joel Moore: Yes. I've talked thus far mostly about the chloride, which is the negatively charged, anion that comes from road salt, but sodium comes from road salt  as well. People, including here at Towson, have studied how does adding salt into stormwater basins or into different parts of the watershed, maybe knock metals off of soils and have them move into the dissolve phase into groundwater, and into streams?

Our tires often have zinc in them because of the way they make tires. Some of that sodium can move that zinc more quickly through the system, rather than keeping it trapped in a stormwater basin, it might move out into the groundwater or streams. Then we often have copper in our brakes. Every time we tap the brakes, we fleck off little bits of copper so that the salt can promote the movement of that. Some places have banned it, like Washington state recently banned copper in brake pads because copper is danger to the salmon. Of course, salmon is really important to the Northwest.

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Mark Ginsberg: I think it's very important to the economy of that region, but also to the diet for many of us.

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Joel Moore: Yes, for sure.

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Mark Ginsberg: This is all very interesting. The net effect of what you're saying is, even though the road salt has been viewed for decades as a help to us, it turns out it's got some really significant byproducts.

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Joel Moore: For the negative effects. It's easy to see the roads, there's ice on the road. This is dangerous. Getting people to think about the long-term effects and how do we balance those out is part of the process.

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Mark Ginsberg: Are there newer alternatives that we're using now to address the problem of ice on roads that are alternatives to salt?

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Joel Moore: Unfortunately, everything has tradeoffs. Some alternatives are calcium chloride or magnesium chloride. I think we tend to use magnesium chloride more here on campus. That has the positive of being a little gentler on the plants near sidewalks or near roads, but often results in double the amount of chloride in the stream. It helps in one area, but not in another.

Things like beet juice or with some salt mixed in, and other things have been proposed, but often those things have their own trade-off. Beet juice is an organic product, of course, and that introduces dissolved organic carbon into streams, which can have negative effects as well. Unfortunately, like a lot of environmental problems, there's no silver bullet. You have to attack it from multiple angles.

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Mark Ginsberg: You have to think about the risk analysis and where's the cost-benefit? Also to think critically and scientifically, not just what we think, but what we have come to know about the implications of this. You mentioned another concept earlier on in our conversation, which I'm curious about. It's Critical Zone science. What is that?

00:17:37

Joel Moore: That is really trying to take a multidisciplinary approach to understand the complex area between the tree tops and the groundwater, where humans, most of the organisms we interact with, understand what are the processes that are going on there. Our Urban Critical Zone Cluster is one of nine across the country. There's one mostly focused in the western US where they're looking at the Critical Zone to understand how water cycles through there, because, of course, water issues are huge in the Western US.

As you change from mostly snowfall to more rainfall with climate change, how's that going to affect water in the streams and the mountains that come down into the lower areas where people need it for irrigation or for drinking water? There's one Critical Zone group that's drilled bedrock across the country in North Carolina and in California. Instead of trying to understand once you get 100, 150ft down what's happening down there, which in a million or a couple million years is going to be up here at the surface and trying to understand those long-term processes that can be really important for shaping the landscape we look at now and don't quite realize everything that's below the surface.

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Mark Ginsberg: If you look at some of the changes going on in the planet earth today, this concept, the Critical Zone is an important concept.

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Joel Moore: Yes.

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Mark Ginsberg: How has it helped us to understand some of the challenges about climate change?

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Joel Moore: Well, I think it's helping us understand, if you think about water cycling with warmer temperatures, higher evapotranspiration, et cetera, often how water moves into streams is or always it's sort of modulated or moderated or buffered by the Critical Zone. The Critical Zone is going to be different in Maryland versus New York, versus California.

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Mark Ginsberg: Pretty idiosyncratic in that way.

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Joel Moore: Yes, depending on our geological history. We had glaciers that were two miles thick in New York and in the northern Midwest. 20,000 years ago, we never had those here in Maryland, or maybe hundreds of millions of years ago, but not recently. Then California has evolved in a different way because of its different climate and the different geology underlying. Pulling together all those pieces of the ecology, the geology, the geochemistry, how water moves through the system, and trying to take a holistic and multidisciplinary look at that.

00:20:01

Mark Ginsberg: One of the researchers in this field, a woman named Gail Ashley, recently wrote, "I called it the Critical Zone because it's critical for life and it's critical to know more about it because of the potential for damaging life." Big stuff.

00:20:15

Joel Moore: Yes, it's exciting and it's sometimes a little depressing. I think in the end it's hopeful as we figure out how we best approach the coming decades. The better we understand it scientifically, hopefully the better off we're going to be facing these. To cycle back real quickly to the Environmental Science and Studies program, I think one of the exciting parts of that is the scientific parts of this research are, of course, essential, but then moving that into policy and into management involves the social sciences and often the humanities. One of the real benefits of our Environmental Science and Studies program is all our students get that, whether they're focused on science, they're still going to take a number of social science and humanities courses.

If they're so focused on the studies and policy side, they're still going to take a number of science courses so that they can talk to each other and understand what's happening in the different spheres, and hopefully work together. [crosstalk]

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Mark Ginsberg: You're trying to push for our students to become well-rounded in their understanding and also fluent and being able to address many of these issues across domains, across fields of study that is.

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Joel Moore: Yes, absolutely.

00:21:25

Mark Ginsberg: When you think of the Critical Zone, I wonder what kinds of findings have come out of it and what have been some of the implications of those findings? It sounds like it's a very critical concept for understanding not just climate change, but also the changes taking place by natural and unnatural means on our planet.

00:21:44

Joel Moore: I think one of the challenges to it is it's very much place-based because it is-- depends on that history of tens of thousands to millions of years. One of the other Critical Zone clusters is focused in the Midwest. What are the impacts of agriculture and also of the geological history there?

One of the big efforts in the US over the last few decades has been to reduce the nutrients and sediment going down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, because there's a dead zone that forms off the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico each year. As they work on management efforts across the Midwest, understanding the Critical Zone where erosion takes place naturally, where it's being accentuated by agriculture, turns out, like anything, when you look at it closely, to be more complicated than we originally realized. Sometimes, some of the geological history is working against some of our efforts, but then we can figure out different ways to reduce the impact of our agriculture in parts of the US.

00:22:46

Mark Ginsberg: Well, this whole concept, both the practice of geochemistry, and an understanding of geochemistry principles, but the application of the Critical Zone Science world, really do sound to be very, very important as we think about the future of our society, the future of our planet. What are some of the things that you're thinking are going to come from this in the next decade or so? Obviously, there's work taking place, but there are big goals and big thoughts about what the impact could be.

00:23:15

Joel Moore: Yes, that's a fantastic question. I think that's one that in the US we're trying to figure out. Partly, we had a funding mechanism for some of these Critical Zone, Focus Clusters. There's still some funding available, but it is a concept that's taken off there at big efforts in Europe, in Australia and China to really take this Critical Zone approach, and really understand watersheds and regions, and really holistically. I think, as with a lot of scientific questions and problems, US scientists will be talking with our colleagues around the globe, meeting at conferences, sharing our research, and developing our further questions.

One of the big focus is comparing and contrasting the idiosyncrasies of our different places. What can we learn from that comparison and contrasting of those?

00:24:12

Mark Ginsberg: Well, there are big questions that remain unanswered in this field in Critical Zone theory, and geochemists and other people in the environmental science field. Hopefully will be able to answer some of these big rock issues over time. I'm sure your students who you're training are not only excited by the opportunities, but also challenged by the big issues that are out there.

00:24:32

Joel Moore: Yes, my students, I've had a number of master's students in the last 10 years. At this point, some of them have fanned across the country working for departments of environment, environmental protection, et cetera, with Washington State and Minnesota, and of course, several here in Maryland.

00:24:49

Mark Ginsberg: Let me ask you a related question about a Critical Zone, the work you're doing, and it's the general question, but how is technology shaping it? Everybody's talking about the innovations in technology, artificial intelligence, and the like. What are some of the breakthroughs that might be on the horizon as we think about the adaptation of some of the newer technologies?

00:25:07

Joel Moore: Excellent question. One of the things that we've done a lot more and more of in the last 10 years is deployed sensors out in the field. We're collecting data, say, every 5, 10, 15 minutes. We're accumulating millions and billions of data points, and that's fantastic. But those can be challenging to analyze without using some of the tools of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning. US geological surveying colleagues and I published a paper last year where we used some data that people had collected over the last 20 years across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Then we took land use characteristics, geology, et cetera, and we predicted the specific conductance, which is often a measure of chloride across the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Looked at what are the factors affecting it. That turns out one of the big factors is urbanization. Then, of course, some of the bedrock, which is a Critical Zone issue is one of the other big factors. We're looking at areas where conductivity and probably in many cases chloride has gone up, unsurprisingly, that's Baltimore, Washington, areas like that.

Trying to understand the context and then where might we focus some of our management efforts for fisheries and stream ecosystems, et cetera.

00:26:29

Mark Ginsberg: There really are some practical things that are coming about that technology will be there to help and assist, and provide an additional resource to you and other researchers.

00:26:38

Joel Moore: I'm excited about doing more of this machine learning and approaches. I'm working with Chris Cornwell in math this semester. He's teaching a class on this topic. I'm providing some data, and I'm really excited to work with the students in this class to explore some of the data from our drinking water systems at last 40 years, and what patterns will they pull out of this exciting data?

00:27:00

Mark Ginsberg: The implications for human society, the implications of climate change, and generally, in the work that you do. If I'm hearing you right, this whole concept going back to the salt in water and the contamination and the pollutants that are doing damage to our water systems, it's both related to climate change but also affecting climate change, both at the same time. The interface between the two.

00:27:25

Joel Moore: There is. Yes, they definitely interact in something I haven't talked about yet is stormwater management.

00:27:31

Mark Ginsberg: Talk a little bit about that. That's another area of your work, I know.

00:27:33

Joel Moore: That's important here in Maryland in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. There have been a number of people, myself included, working in that issue here at Towson. I talk about that a lot in my classes is as we put parking lots down, roads down, when precipitation lands on those that can run really quickly into streams and cause flooding and erosion, and other issues. We're attempting to manage that better in stormwater management ponds and basins. Now, the way those are designed are based on the data of 20 or 30 years ago. I think we're working to get more modern data. It's a challenge. Climate change means more intense precipitation here in Maryland. Not only are we not looking to the future [crosstalk]

00:28:18

Mark Ginsberg: Stormwater becomes really important.

00:28:20

Joel Moore: Exactly. Yes. Trying to move our data and research forward so that we're designing this stormwater to meet the challenges of the future rather than the climate of 25 or 40 years ago.

00:28:32

Mark Ginsberg: Well, and in summary, what you're saying, too, is that the impact of all of what we've been talking about, of stormwater, of salinization, of Critical Zone science and theories, the cumulative impact of all these various things is really consequential, really traumatic, and of high impact.

00:28:51

Joel Moore: Yes. For sure. Hopefully, we're training. Our goal is to train our students to help us and our society address and attack those problems and deal with them.

00:29:00

Mark Ginsberg: Well, one of the people researching this area recently said that the criticality of Critical Zone science lies in its functionality to sustain life, but it fundamentally relates to the well-being of our entire society.

00:29:13

Joel Moore: Absolutely.

00:29:14

Mark Ginsberg: Thank you very much for the work that you do and the various contributions that you make both as a researcher and scientist, as a scholar, but also as a professor and teacher of the next generation of our students who are going to make a big impact in the field as you're doing today on your field. Once again, it's been a pleasure to have Dr. Joel Moore, a professor of geosciences here at Towson University's Fisher College of Science and Mathematics. Joel, we appreciate your being here, appreciate your work you do, and wish you the best of luck as you continue to make society better for all of us and helping to prevent the problems that, hopefully, we can prevent from happening that will affect us all.

00:29:50

Joel Moore: Thanks for the opportunity to chat.

00:29:52

Mark Ginsberg: Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing you on the next edition of On the Mark. Thank you for joining us today. We look forward to having you with us in future editions of our university podcast, On the Mark. Thank you, Joel, and thank you for joining us.

00:30:07

Joel Moore: Thanks.

00:30:09

Mark Ginsberg: Thank you for listening to On the Mark. If you like what you've heard, please give us a follow or leave a review. It helps ensure that we can keep bringing you more candid conversations about the consequential impact of higher education. If you have feedback about our podcast, feel free to send me a message at onthemark@towson.edu.

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00:30:36

Speaker 1: Founded in 1866, Towson University is a top-ranked comprehensive public research university recognized as Maryland's number one public institution by The Wall Street Journal. As Greater Baltimore's largest university, TU proudly serves as an engine of opportunity for nearly 20,000 students, the state of Maryland, and beyond. Explore more than 190 top-ranked undergraduate and graduate degree programs and make our momentum yours at towson.edu.

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