Geology Bites

Jan 08 2025 101 ep. 29 mins 1.3k

Geology Bites Podcast artwork

What moves the continents, creates mountains, swallows up the sea floor, makes volcanoes erupt, triggers earthquakes, and imprints ancient climates into the rocks? Oliver Strimpel, a former astrophysicist and museum director asks leading researchers to divulge what they have discovered and how they did it. To learn more about the series, and see images that support the podcasts, go to geologybites.com. Instagram: @GeologyBites Bluesky: GeologyBites X: @geology_bites Email: [email protected]

Copy RSS

Subscribe on Podcast Addict

Richard Fortey on Deep Time

Jan 08 2025 29 mins

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. How can we begin to grasp what this vast period of time really means, given that it is so far beyond the time scale of a human life, indeed of human civilization? Richard Fortey has devoted his long and prolific research career at the Natural History Museum in London to the study of fossils, especially the long-extinct marine arthropods c

Mike Searle on the Mountain Ranges of Central Asia

Dec 20 2024 34 mins

The Himalaya are just one, albeit the longest and highest, of several mountain ranges between India and Central Asia. By world standards, these are massive ranges with some of the highest peaks on the planet. The Karakoram boasts four of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, and the Hindu Kush, the Pamir, the Kunlun Shan, and the Tien Shan each have many peaks above 7,000 meter

Rob Strachan on the Caledonian Orogeny

Dec 10 2024 39 mins

The Caledonian orogeny is one of the most recent extinct mountain-building events. It took place in several phases during the three-way collision of continental blocks called Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia during the early stages of the assembly of the supercontinent Pangea. In the process, Himalayan-scale mountains were formed. While these mountains have been worn down today, we

Joe MacGregor on Mapping the Geology of Greenland Below the Ice

Nov 13 2024 31 mins

With most of Greenland buried by kilometers of ice, obtaining direct information about its geology is challenging. But we can learn a lot from measurements of the island’s geophysical properties — seismic, gravity, magnetic from airborne and satellite surveys and from its topography, which we can see relatively well through the ice using radar. In the podcast, Joe MacGregor exp

Adam Simon on Battery Metals

Oct 23 2024 34 mins

As we wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and ramp up our reliance on alternatives, batteries become ever more important for two main reasons. First, we need grid-scale batteries to store excess electricity from time-varying sources such as wind and solar. Second, we use them to power electric vehicles, which we are now producing at the rate of about 15 million a year worldwide.

Rufus Catchings on Pinning Down California's Faults

Sep 20 2024 33 mins

Knowing exactly where faults are located is important both for scientific reasons and for assessing how much damage a fault could inflict if it ruptured and caused an earthquake. In the podcast, Rufus Catchings describes how we can use natural and artificial sources of seismic waves to create high-resolution images of fault profiles. He also explains how faults can act as seismic w

Sara Seager on Exoplanet Geology

Sep 01 2024 34 mins

During the past couple of decades, we have discovered that stars with planetary systems are not rare, exceptional cases, as we once assumed, but actually quite commonplace. However, because exoplanets are like fireflies next to blinding searchlights, they are incredibly difficult to study. Yet, as Sara Seager explains, we are making astonishing progress. Various ingenious methods a

Evan Smith on Diamonds from the Deep Mantle

Aug 14 2024 34 mins

We have only a tantalizingly small number of sources of information about the Earth’s deep mantle. One of these comes from the rare diamonds that form at depths of about 650 km and make their way up to the base of the lithosphere, and then later to the surface via rare volcanic eruptions of kimberlite magma. In the podcast, Evan Smith talks about a new class of large gem-quality

Roberta Rudnick on the Continental Crustal Composition Paradox

Jul 31 2024 27 mins

Continental crust is derived from magmas that come from the mantle. So, naively, one might expect it to mirror the composition of the mantle. But our measurements indicate that it does not. Continental crust contains significantly more silica and less magnesium and iron than the mantle. How can we be sure this discrepancy is real, and what do we think explains it? In the podcast, R

Alex Copley on Soft Continents

Jul 15 2024 32 mins

We tend to think of continental tectonic plates as rigid caps that float on the asthenospheric mantle, much like oceanic plates. But while some continental regions have the most rigid rocks on the planet, wide swathes of the continents are not rigid at all. In the podcast, Alex Copley explains how this differentiation comes about and points to evidence that the responsible processe