Ben Holtzman is a geophysicist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in New York. He studies the mechanical behavior of rocks, with a broad range of applications, including how magmas move through the planet’s interior to feed volcanoes, how seismic waves move through the deep Earth, and how earthquakes occur. He also works on “deep geothermal heat mining”– finding new ways to access the Earth’s internal heat to generate electricity without producing greenhouse gases. Ben is the founder of the Seismic Sound Lab and is Scientist-in-Residence at the Computer Music Center at Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in Geophysics at the University of Minnesota, and has worked at Lamont since 2004.