Professor David Pyle elected Fellow of the Royal Society

We are thrilled to announce that David Pyle, Professor of Earth Sciences, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

David is an internationally recognised volcanologist, and his election is in acknowledgment of his contributions to the understanding of processes, timings and impacts of volcanic eruptions, for creative use of archival materials to understand past volcanic crises, and engagement with wider publics. He has worked on volcanoes around the globe during his career, and has been dedicated to researching the causes and consequences of volcanic activity.

“I am delighted and honoured to receive this recognition, which owes so much to the support I have had from so many talented and creative colleagues, collaborators and students from around the world, over many years.”

- Professor David Pyle

The Royal Society is the UK’s national academy of sciences and the oldest science academy in continuous existence, and being elected a Fellow is an extremely prestigious honour. Each year, up to 85 new Fellows are elected, each of whom have made “a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science”. Amongst its most celebrated fellows are Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Stephen Hawking, and Inge Lehmann.

“I am delighted that David Pyle has been elected to the Royal Society. It’s a well-deserved recognition of his outstanding and sustained contributions to volcanology, including his creative use of historical records and his thoughtful engagement with communities around volcanoes. We are immensely proud to celebrate this honour with him.”

- Professor Mike Kendall, Head of Department

In celebration of him receiving this well-deserved accolade, we sat down with David to hear more about his research career, commitment to public and policy engagement, and fascination with volcanoes…

What inspired you to get into Earth Sciences?

My origin story! At the age of seven, I lived in Chile for a year, which of course is the land of the Andes. I was probably already collecting rocks before then, but I definitely came back with a passion for volcanoes. It was during this time that I saw my first volcano, which was Villarrica in Southern Chile. I remember visiting as a family, getting to the end of this dusty track, and sitting on what I thought at the time was a lava flow – I now know it was a lahar! So that was definitely the “volcanoes moment”. So much so that a few years ago, I met my primary school teacher from when I was around 9 or 10 years old, and the first question she asked was “are you still interested in volcanoes?”. Clearly it had made an impression on her how much I talked about them!

I hope you could conclusively say you are still interested in volcanoes!

Absolutely.

Is there a particular moment when you decided to study volcanoes and make them your career?

There was definitely a great deal of hedging my bets with what to study. I remember I made the decision to stop taking Geography at the age of 14, rather than taking it at O-Level (as it was then) because the number of subjects I could take was limited. And at that point I chose a language instead, motivated by the belief that I didn’t think I could pick up a language from scratch later, and that Physical Geography was something I was already interested in. And then when I went to University I chose a Natural Sciences course, so that if Earth Sciences wasn’t for me, I had other options. But then I did end up specialising in Geology after all!

What drives you as a researcher?

This is something that evolves with time, in my experience. In the end, there is always a level of fascination with how the Earth works, and I think it is tempered as you move through your career. I’ve discovered that geoscience itself has so many rich elements to it. I’m interested in how the complex parts of Earth fit together, and complex means the bits that include the humans. The boundary between what is pure research and what is public engagement is blurred in geoscience, when we are dealing with the planet Earth. Being able to communicate and learn from people who have lived experience is a rich part of my learning. I think another motivation is finding people you enjoy working with. It is so rewarding to work on things together as a group. The final thing is realising that you can look at niche areas, which appear to be niche because you’ve not thought of them before, but you stumble across a community of people who are approaching the problem from another direction, for whom it is an important question. And you realise that’s also rewarding.

What developments in volcanic research do you think will happen in the coming years? Where are we headed?

In monitoring dynamic systems we are in a really interesting position, because we’ve got satellite instruments collecting terabytes of data annually, and we’ve got ground-based instruments that increasingly are able to record all sorts of spectrums of volcano behaviour. And these are the areas that are definitely ripe for machine learning and AI-style approaches. And I think what we haven’t found out yet is if this is going to give us the capacity to be even more precise in our descriptions of how the Earth works, or whether it is actually going to delivery capacity to anticipate an eruption sufficiently far in advance that we can make useful forecast predictions. But where there are problems that you can solve using advanced mathematical or data analysis skills, there is still lots of space for someone with a less mathematical geoscience background to say “actually, the context of this is…”. The more we are able to measure the contemporary Earth, the more important it is that we don’t forget what we know about the older Earth. The really interesting challenge is how you link those two things together. It won’t be too long in the future before are going to look back to the data collected fifty years ago and say “wow those aren’t data we recognise”, because the way we are recording information, and the things we are able to measure, are different.

Why is outreach and public engagement important to you?

As someone who works on volcanoes, it’s very easy to fall into outreach at a small scale. People outside universities are interested in natural phenomena, and there’s volcanoes in the primary school curriculum, so you get asked to give public talks, and you can bring a rock in to a classroom. But the revelation for me was that there is nothing that limits your imagination in terms of the scale or ambition of outward facing projects. And it’s great fun to do, and they open a whole new set of doors. I was very fortunate to be involved with a group who built a giant fibreglass volcano that we ran outside the Natural History Museum. It was vast and it had pyrotechnics, and people loved it. It was also completely impractical (laughs). It was too big to transport, it was too expensive to run! So that was a big learning curve, but it was also a rewarding experience. A couple of years after I was asked if I wanted to curate a public exhibition at the Bodleian libraries. That was such great fun because it was image-led. I was looking for representations of volcanoes in prints and manuscripts. And it was fascinating moving into a world that we don’t normally encounter.

What is your proudest achievement of your career?

Gosh. It’s really interesting – I think lots of people are motivated in different ways. One of the things I decided early on is that in research, you have to celebrate all of your successes. It doesn’t matter how small. You have to mark every occasion, because if you don’t do it yourself, nobody else will do it for you. And the second thing I decided early on is that I could dream big dreams – dream as big a dream as you want – but I couldn’t set myself milestones that I wasn’t in control of achieving. If you are running a project, you’ve designed it and you are managing it, you can have milestones and have ambitions for what is going to be delivered, and that’s great. But when it comes to external recognition, it’s a strange sensation because you haven’t sought it. I didn’t do the research for that end result. But it is a moment for reflection. Being elected FRS means so much. I’m very proud that I’ve had recognition for my teaching and for public engagement, and now after many decades of research, receiving an accolade for that.

What’s your favourite volcano?

(Laughs) So my favourite volcano would still be Volcan Villarrica in Southern Chile, that I first saw when I was about 7. It is the archetypal volcano, with a cone shape and snow on top, and ash and fumes coming out of it!

Have you ever studied Villarrica, or have you only ever admired it?

Yes! I returned to Villarrica 30 years after I first saw it – and Tamsin Mather and I climbed it four times, carrying implausible amounts of sampling equipment!

If you could tell policy makers in volcanic regions one thing, what would it be?

That’s an interesting question. I’ve just recently given a couple of talks about a volcanologist from the 1930s called Frank Peret, and a quote of his is “the people are to be trusted”. Which is actually quite a nice thing to say! In volcanic areas, you feel the motivation for working long-term in those areas. You can actually influence the way that communities look after the volcano, or respond, and that can then feed into the long-term decisions which can help to reduce the impact of future events. There is a tendency for scientists to operate under the “deficit model”, where you assume that somebody hasn’t acted because you haven’t told them enough about the problem. But increasingly, when you look at threats like climate change, I don’t think that is the reason why governments and policymakers of the world haven’t been able to respond in a way that you might want them to rationally. So, the whole question of how to interact with policy is a dynamic one. It’s also a good reason to be working in Oxford at the moment.

How has the research landscape changed during your career?

It’s changed immeasurably in that research funding is much more competitive, and it’s much easier to collaborate internationally and work across teams. There are lots of things that I have learnt to do since finishing my PhD, which just weren’t part of the training landscape of the time. Something that hasn’t changed really is the benefits of working in a university. They are dynamic environments with great people to work with, and every new generation of students who come in challenge you to think about what you are doing and why, and what are the interesting things to do next. And I think our undergraduate students in particular don’t realise how much impact they have on us, as the teachers. We’re not just delivering information or imparting knowledge, there is a feedback to it.

How did you react to finding out that you had been elected as an FRS?

So I was actually in the Bodleian Tea Rooms (laughs), catching up with some reading, and the email came in. It was a moment when all at once you feel tearful, on cloud nine, and you just feel “what a wonderful world”! It’s obviously a very competitive process and you never know how your peers are going to respond to your nomination. I didn’t actually put my papers in until last year, and I really should thank Mike Kendall for supporting me with that.

What’s your favourite piece of fiction or movie that involves volcanoes?

So, there are two answers for this. In terms of books, I have accumulated a huge array of fictionalisations of volcanic eruptions, which I haven’t read yet (laughs). In Japanese it’s called tsundoku – books you have that you will read in the future, but might not! In terms of movies, I really loved the Pixar short made a few years ago, which was an animated cartoon…

Do you mean Lava?

Yes! The story of the volcano growing next to the other volcano is just delightful.

What would you say to someone just starting out in volcanology?

When you start out, there is a fear that your peers or the people whose papers you are reading have always known what the “big question” is. And there is lots of narrative around the idea that it’s not enough to study a problem, it needs to be a big problem. I’ve gone off reading in a whole variety of different areas. They would say that lacks focus these days… (laughs) Everything you do early on is an investment in your future. You just never know which ones will pay off. So I think it’s absolutely fine not to know what you’re going to do next, and the best place to start with a problem is at the beginning. Some of the best-known exemplars of eruptions – whether it’s Krakatoa or Pinatubo – are so iconic, people don’t actually go back and look at them with fresh eyes for such a long time. But sometimes it is going back that’s really valuable.