When Juli Hennings, this year’s AAPG’s Geosciences in Media Award winner, thinks about all the factors that brought her to this moment in her professional life, there are two that stand out. The first was in Texas at a meeting at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences.
The second was in the Republic of the Congo.
First to the Lone Star state.
In late 2016, her husband Peter, a BEG project manager, heard Scott Tinker, past AAPG president and then-director of BEG, address an all-staff meeting to express his desire to bring a greater understanding of the planet to more listeners and viewers. When her husband relayed this to her, the bells went off.
“I had always been a fan of StarDate, a daily two-minute broadcast from UT’s McDonald Observatory, and had often wondered why there wasn’t a similar science radio show focused specifically on our amazing planet,” she said.
To hear her tell it, the next day, she called Tinker. He laughed and said, “Great minds!” as the StarDate concept and name “EarthDate” had taken shape in early summer 2016. Tinker was thrilled to have heard from Juli, a geologist he had known and respected for many years.
“Looking back,” said Tinker, “EarthDate would not be what it is today, and may not have even made it, without Juli. Her scientific depth, curiosity, creativity, attention to detail, program management talent … make her unique in so many ways.”
With Harry Lynch from Arcos Studios, BEG Assistant Director of External Affairs Mark Blount and many other talented BEG and UT folks, they to put together a program that would, in fact, expose more people to more of the inner and outer workings of the planet.
EarthDate is a public service radio program, whose mission is to engage listeners in Earth science topics with the goal of reconnecting them to the wonders of their world.
Since its inception in 2017, EarthDate, which Tinker narrates, has covered show topics like “Precious Water,” “The Day Earth Shook,” “Magnetic Storms,” “The Many Facets of Salt,” and “Big Bend National Park is 80.”
Translating the Enthusiasm
Hennings, whose experience includes being manager of geoscience excellence at ConocoPhillips, a job that included recruiting, training and knowledge sharing, said, “I heard many stories from students we were recruiting about what first attracted them to science.”
What struck them, she said -- and hence, what struck her – was that their stories always involved engagement with a specific enthusiastic adult who could explain scientific concepts and aspects of the natural world in language they could understand.
“Those translators,” she said, “are so important to learning because scientists often speak the secret language of their specialties, and that may exclude people who don’t own those vocabularies.”
EarthDate tries to demystify the vocabulary. And no one converts complex science into accessible language better than Harry Lynch. He and Tinker had worked together to produce the energy documentary film “Switch” and other educational film content. The partnership of Hennings developing the research stories and Lynch writing them into accessible 90-second scripts proved to be a winning combination.
“The shows provide background from a variety of Earth sciences in a fun and accessible format for both kids and the adults who want to engage with them,” said Hennings.
Such a dynamic is in her blood.
“I was a military kid that moved about every two years to some new place on the globe, so my worldview was different than that of many of my friends,” Hennings said.
While her dad tackled military finance challenges, her mother used her doctorate to teach high school biology wherever they lived, Hennings related.
“I was always super curious, so she enrolled me in an undergrad oceanographic field methods course when I was just 17, the only high schooler in the group,” she said.
You can probably guess what happened next.
“I was hooked!”
Hennings joined AAPG in 1975, and so she has witnessed many examples of geology occurring at the intersection of physics, chemistry, biology and geology on Earth across the vastness of geological time.
“I loved learning about Earth’s natural systems and being able to do at least some of my work outdoors. I was a voracious learner, and the pace of data collection from new technologies and scientific discovery in those days was exhilarating! My entire career was fun because I always felt like I learned something new about Earth every day,” she said.
That is what she hopes the show brings to the audience.
She thinks of Earth scientists as detectives who explore the range of scientific challenges that have happened, are happening, and might happen on Earth.
“They do this through geology, physics, chemistry, biology, botany, paleontology and why not throw in some engineering and materials science? How did life on Earth evolve? What causes volcanism and earthquakes? How did Earth get its water? How do geckos stick to the wall and what can we learn from them?” she said.
Just asking those questions takes her back to an earlier time.
“Most of the time I feel like a little kid asking questions like ‘Why is the sky blue?’ and ‘Why is water blue?’”
And yes, there are EarthDate episodes on those two topics.
The program, she said, was originally aimed at the general public as “good news to hear on your way to or from work.”
But it became more than that.
“We decided to include illustrated downloadable PDFs of my research about topics on our website as a resource for STEM educators to use in their curriculum,” she said.
These learnings that were added to the show took off during the pandemic.
“Now we get many thousands of website hits per month,” she said.
Today, EarthDate is broadcast by more than 460 radio stations in all 50 United States, leading those who make these types of estimates to believe each episode is heard by more than a million listeners.
“We just recorded our 400th weekly episode – that’s eight years of production,” she said.
A Career that Flew By
Before EarthDate, before BEG, she learned about putting projects together at Conoco, where she worked on or managed large multidisciplinary teams that were focused on big scientific and engineering projects and challenges.
“My colleagues were all experts in their fields, so it was a rich learning environment. There were times when my most noted contribution was making geology-speak comprehensible for engineers. Global projects took me to the Congo and Dubai. I worked at every scale, from rank wildcatting in unexplored basins to biogeosteering for horizontal wells on offshore rigs, always in teams. One of my later roles had me organizing multi-day knowledge-sharing conferences for nearly 1,000 Earth scientists, as well as orchestrating the creation and implementation of corporate knowledge sharing wikis. I retired after 35 years that just flew by, and I enjoyed every minute of it,” Hennings recounted.
Not really retired, though.
“I’m still a super curious person so, for me, my EarthDate role is a really enjoyable half-time ‘retirement gig,’” she said.
For Hennings, while there are similarities between her days with Conoco and doing EarthDate now, the work is more solitary.
“I may not be representative of most geoscience positions outside of the corporate world. I am a remote half-time program coordinator, content producer and science writer who produces an episode of EarthDate every week,” she explained.
She also gets to collaborate with researchers from universities and/or the government to ensure a story is complete. Once the episodes are ready, Lynch writes the radio scripts, Mark Blount reviews them and, as mentioned, Tinker edits and narrates the final versions at ChezBoom recording studios. Then they go to the post-production crew in UT BEG Graphics to be polished up by editor Travis Hobbs and graphic designer Jamie Coggins. Finally, they are published at EarthDate.org (by Nancy Cottington) and distributed to the radio stations (by Casey Walker).
Hennings is especially grateful to Tinker, whom she calls a mentor and who has remained a fervent supporter of the show.
She emphasizes that for EarthDate to work, it must remember its audience.
An Inspirational Encounter
And all of this brings us to central Africa. While working as an exploration geologist in the Congo, she became acquainted with a special woman who was working to build a chimpanzee preserve on an island in a local river. That person’s name was Jane Goodall.
“During one of her visits I was asked to be her driver in a convoy through the jungle, so we were able to have an inspirational and personal conversation about her aspirations regarding her newest project, the creation of a ‘Roots and Shoots’ environmental educational program for kids,” said Hennings.
This was a program Goodall launched in 1991 for preschool to university-age students. It now has chapters in more than 140 countries, impacting nearly 150,000 youth and young adults.
“Revered globally,” Hennings said of Goodall, “she is a brilliant and a determined celebrity scientist who was a pioneer in breaking through gender barriers. At 90, she still shares her enthusiasm for science with everyone she contacts, from politicians to indigenous people to young children. She is inspirational and unforgettable.”
Hennings knows that her time behind that wheel decades ago and this award today are inextricably linked.
“The award validates my eight-year dedication to make a variety of scientific topics about Earth accessible and entertaining to both students and the general public,” said Hennings. “Thanks to AAPG for the recognition. At some level, my enthusiasm for EarthDate was ignited by those discussions with Dr. Goodall decades ago.”