Geology Bites

By Oliver Strimpel

What's Geology Bites about?

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: @oliverstrimpel
Twitter: @geology_bites
Email: [email protected]

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LAST EPISODE

Maria McNamara on Seeing th...

06.17.2022

Popular reconstructions of ancient environments, whether they be in natural history museum dioramas, in movies, or in books, present a world of color. But are those colors just fanciful renderings, perhaps based on the colors we see around us today? ...

Geology Bites episodes:

06.17.2022 Maria McNamara on Seeing the Ancient World in Color Popular reconstructions of ancient environments, whether they be in natural history museum dioramas, in movies, or in books, present a world of color. But are those colors just fanciful renderings, perhaps based on the colors we see around us today? ...
06.01.2022 Phil Renforth on Carbon Sequestration For many years, efforts to limit climate change have focused on curtailing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. But it is increasingly clear that such curtailment will not, on its own, be able to prevent the damaging effects of global warming. ...
05.12.2022 Tony Watts on Seamounts and the Strength of the Lithosphere When plate tectonics was adopted in the 1960s and early '70s, researchers quickly mapped out plate movements. It seemed that plates moved as rigid caps about a pole on the Earth's surface. But since then, a lot of evidence has ...
04.24.2022 Neil Davies on the Greening of the Continents Life only emerged from water in the Ordovician. By that time, life had been thriving in oceans and lakes for billions of years. What did the colonization of the land look like, and how did it reshape the Earth’s surface? ...
04.12.2022 Ben Weiss on the Mission to Psyche The asteroid Psyche is probably the most metal-rich body we have discovered. There are two, quite different, theories as to how it may have formed: Either it formed that way, or it originally had a more typical composition, but its ...
03.22.2022 Roger Bilham on Himalayan Earthquakes We hear about earthquakes in the Himalaya, especially when they claim lives and cause damage. And we understand that, broadly speaking, it is the continued northward movement of India ploughing into Tibet that causes these earthquakes. But where exactly do ...
03.01.2022 Susannah Porter on Tiny Vampires in Ancient Seas The fossil record of complex life goes back far beyond the Cambrian explosion, to as far back as 1,600 million years ago in the late Paleoproterozoic with the first appearance of eukaryotes. But these creatures only started to diversify much ...
02.21.2022 Ana Ferreira on Seeing Flows in the Mantle Does the pull of a subducting slab drive plate motions? Or is it the upwellings of convection cells in the mantle? We now have a new way to shed light on this question. It's called seismic anisotropy, which is the ...
02.12.2022 Phil Gibbard on the Anthropocene There’s a lot of debate about the idea that the global changes brought about by humans define a new geological epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene. Should such an epoch be added to the official geological time scale? If so, what aspect ...
02.05.2022 David Bercovici on How Plate Subduction Starts Subduction zones are a fundamental aspect of plate tectonics, yet we still don't really understand how subduction initiates. It's a tough problem because as oceanic plates move away from a mid-ocean spreading center and cool, they get stiffer and should ...
01.25.2022 Bob Hazen on the Evolution of Minerals New rock types emerge during the history of the Earth. For example, the silica-rich felsic rocks such as granite that characterize continental crust, accumulated during the course of Earth history. Granite only forms in certain specific tectonic settings, such as ...
01.08.2022 Matt Jackson on the Heterogeneity of the Mantle Matt Jackson is a Professor of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He probes the chemical composition of the mantle by analyzing trace elements and isotopes in hot-spot lavas from around the world. In the podcast, he ...
01.01.2022 Carmie Garzione on Reconstructing Land Elevation Over Geological Time Throughout geological history, various points on the Earth’s surface have been lifted up to great elevations and worn down into low, flat-lying regions. Determining surface elevation histories is difficult because rocks that were once on the surface are usually eroded ...
12.25.2021 Chuck DeMets on High-Resolution Plate Motions The magnetic stripes frozen into the sea floor as it forms at mid-ocean ridges record the Earth’s magnetic field at the time of formation. Reversals in the Earth’s magnetic field define the edges of these stripes, in effect time-stamping the ...
12.18.2021 Mike Searle on Ophiolite As the name implies, oceanic lithosphere underlies the oceans of the world. Except when they are ophiolites, when oceanic lithosphere is thrust on top of a continental margin. Are ophiolites a special kind of oceanic lithosphere? Or are there peculiar ...
12.11.2021 Mackenzie Day on Dunes Some of the most extensive sandstone deposits in the world were deposited by wind. How do such aeolian rocks differ from water or ice-deposited rocks? And what do they reveal about the environments in which they formed? In the podcast ...
12.04.2021 Sue Smrekar on the VERITAS Mission to Venus The best maps we have of Venus were made by Magellan, a space probe that flew in the 1990s. In the summer of 2021, NASA approved a new mapping mission that will produce radically improved maps of the topography, radar ...
11.28.2021 Rick Carlson on Probing the Early Solar System Almost all the evidence about the nascent solar system has been erased by processes accompanying the formation of the Sun and the bodies that formed out of the circumsolar disk about 4.6 billion years ago. But some meteorites and the ...
11.13.2021 Ed Marshall on Iceland's 2021 Eruption After months of high earthquake activity, a fissure opened up near the southwestern tip of Iceland on March 19, 2021. Over a period of about seven months, several other fissures opened up, generating lava flows several kilometers long that filled ...
11.07.2021 Richard Fortey on the Trilobite Chronometer Long before radiometric dating appeared on the scene, the geological time scale was defined by the sedimentary record, and particularly by key fossils preserved within them. Throughout the Cambrian, and to a lesser extent until the end-Permian extinction about 300 ...
11.01.2021 Paul Hoffman on the Snowball Earth Hypothesis We’re all familiar with the idea of ice ages during which the polar ice caps advance to cover significant portions of their respective hemispheres, and then, after a period of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, retreat back to ...
10.23.2021 Peter Cawood on When Plate Tectonics Started The heat liberated during the formation of our planet created an ocean of magma. As it began to cool, the Earth differentiated into a dense metallic core surrounded by a less dense rocky mantle. At some point, we know that ...
10.16.2021 Becky Flowers on Deciphering the Thermal History of Rocks Many processes in geology affect the temperature of rocks. Erosion is one example — as a surface is eroded, the rocks below get closer to the surface, cooling as they go. So if we know the temperature history of a ...
10.09.2021 Ulf Linnemann on the Assembly of Central Europe in the Paleozoic The geological history of Central Europe is quite complicated. The region is composed of several continental blocks having quite distinct origins that came together over 300 million years ago in the Paleozoic Era. Then, in the Mesozoic, many of the ...
09.18.2021 Douwe van Hinsbergen on What Drives the Motions of Tectonic Plates Ever since Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912, we have been aware that blocks of the Earth’s lithosphere are moving with respect to each other. With the advent of plate tectonics in the 1960s, these moving ...
08.19.2021 Mathilde Cannat on Mid-Ocean Ridges Oceanic plates are continually manufactured at mid-ocean spreading ridges. But exactly what processes go on at these ridges? It turns out that it depends on what type of ridge it is—fast-spreading or slow-spreading. And that our traditional view of vanishingly ...
08.09.2021 Kathryn Goodenough on the Sources of Lithium for a Post-Carbon Society The lithium-ion battery was invented about 40 years ago, and is now commonplace in a range of products, from smartphones to electric cars. But if we are to meet the carbon emission goals that governments are setting, electrification, and with ...
07.28.2021 Steve D'Hondt on Reviving a 100-Million-Year-Old Bacterial Colony The fossil record goes back through the Phanerozoic eon, about 540 million years, and even earlier, into the Ediacaran period. But while the fossils provide incontrovertible evidence of ancient life, the fossils themselves are certainly not alive. In fossils, the ...
06.12.2021 Harriet Lau on the Motions of the Earth on Timescales from Hours to Millennia The subfield of geology called geodynamics most commonly refers to the motions associated with convection in the mantle. These are slow by human standards and lead to phenomena such as plate motions, seafloor spreading, mountain building, and volcanos. But the ...
06.03.2021 Craig Jones on the Iconic Landscapes of the American Westerns Many hundreds of films have been shot on location in the American West. The rugged, inhospitable landscapes are an integral part of what gives so many American Westerns their distinctive character. Although the region is vast, stretching from the Rockies ...
05.26.2021 Claude Jaupart on Whether the Earth is Cooling Down We know the Earth was born as a baking inferno. So the presence of a relatively cool surface today suggests that the Earth has cooled a lot since it formed. But the very thin crust on which we subsist is ...
05.13.2021 Peter Molnar on Why the Tibetan Plateau is So High How can we tell what is happening at the bottom of the lithosphere, especially in one of the most remote places on the planet? Peter Molnar describes how many diverse lines of evidence, from the fossil record to normal faulting ...
05.08.2021 Katie Stack on Mapping the Geology of Mars with the Perseverance Rover Katie Stack is Deputy Project Scientist for the NASA Perseverance rover that landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February 2021. A geologist by training and an expert on the Martian sedimentary rock record, she has been mapping the geology ...
05.03.2021 Jan Smit on Resolving a Single Hour of the Cataclysm That Ended the Cretaceous 66 Million Years Ago Jan Smit is a paleontologist who specializes in abrupt changes in the geological record. After the discovery of an end-Cretaceous surge deposit in North Dakota, he was part of the team that pieced together the striking evidence it contained, particularly ...
04.30.2021 Marie Edmonds on Volcanic Gas Marie Edmonds is Professor of Volcanology and Petrology at Cambridge University. She studies the cycling of volatile elements such as carbon between the atmosphere and the mantle and the role that volatiles play in melting, magma transport, and the style ...
04.26.2021 Gillian Foulger on Explaining Intra-Plate Volcanism Without Mantle Plumes Gillian Foulger is a leading proponent of the plate hypothesis of volcanism, which posits that volcanism away from plate boundaries can be explained by extensional deformation of the lithosphere with melting of the upper mantle. The plate hypothesis uses plate ...
04.20.2021 Sarah Stewart on a New Scenario For How the Moon Formed Sarah Stewart uses computer-based dynamical simulations and lab experiments to create scenarios for the collision of a massive body with the Earth that can reproduce the composition, orbits, and spins of the Earth and Moon today. Sarah Stewart is a ...
04.05.2021 Dietmar Müller on Reconstructing Plate Motions Over a Billion Years of Earth History Dietmar Müller and his team have built interactive software to combine hundreds of diverse geological research studies into a single self-consistent picture of the plate-tectonic motions over deep time. He explains how this astonishing feat was accomplished and points out ...
03.28.2021 Bob Anderson on How Geology Affects Landscape Bob Anderson is chair of the department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a geomorphologist who has studied many diverse aspects of the landscape, focusing recently on Alpine and Arctic landscapes in which ice plays ...
03.24.2021 David Evans on Supercontinents Many of us have heard about the most recent supercontinent, which is called Pangea. But there is strong evidence for others with the earliest one now speculated to have formed in the Neoarchaean era about 2.7 billion years ago. So ...
03.14.2021 Mike Howe on the UK National Geological Repository Many countries have national geological museums that house collections of rocks, minerals, and fossils. But the UK has two collections – the one at the Geological Museum in London, and, in addition, the National Geological Repository located near Nottingham, which ...
03.07.2021 Lee Groat on How Gemstones Form Gemstones have value not only because they are beautiful, but also because there are rare. So what exactly is a gemstone, and what make them so rare? Lee Groat is a Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric ...
02.28.2021 Allen McNamara on the Deep Mantle Structure of the Earth The lower reaches of the Earth’s mantle extend all the way down to the boundary with the metallic core, which lies about 2,900 kilometers below the surface. We knew almost nothing about this highly inaccessible region until good seismic measurements ...
02.11.2021 Tomo Usui on the Mission to the Martian Moon Phobos The rocky planets of the solar system have only three moons among them: our own Moon, and the two much smaller moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos. There have been no successful missions to either of the Martian moons, ...
01.31.2021 Rachel Wood on the Emergence of Complex Life in the Precambrian The Eon in which we live is called the Phanerozoic, which comes from the ancient Greek word for visible life. The eon starts with the Cambrian, which began 541 million years ago. But in recent decades it has become increasingly ...
01.19.2021 Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni on Dynamic Topography Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni views plate tectonics and the Earth's topography as an expression of the interior processes of the Earth, and in particular of the horizontal and vertical motions of the mantle. Here she explains why we think that up to ...
01.09.2021 Cathy Constable on Mapping the Earth's Magnetic Field in Time and Space Cathy Constable reconstructs global maps of the Earth’s magnetic field over timescales from millennia to millions of years using the remnant magnetism “frozen” into human artifacts and rocks. This has revealed surprising patterns of variation that in turn cast light ...
12.17.2020 Bärbel Hönisch on Reconstructing Climate in the Distant Past Bärbel Hönisch uses the skeletal remains of foraminifera as her raw material in reconstructing ocean and atmospheric conditions that prevailed in past geological periods. Trace chemical constituents in these creatures can record the temperature of the ocean and carbon dioxide ...
12.03.2020 David Rothery on Volcanism in the Solar System David Rothery investigates volcanism on Earth and elsewhere in the Solar System using remote-sensing Earth-orbiting satellites and space probes. Mercury is his present focus, and he is lead co-investigator for geology on the X-ray spectrometer aboard BepiColombo, an ESA mission ...
11.28.2020 Harold C. Connolly Jr. on Bringing an Asteroid Sample Back to Earth There are some things we just cannot learn about other bodies in the solar system without actually having our hands on a sample of the body and analyzing it on Earth using the battery of techniques that have been refined ...

Older episodes

Geology Bites

What's Geology Bites about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Geology Bites episodes:

Maria McNamara on Seeing the Ancient World in Color

Phil Renforth on Carbon Sequestration

Tony Watts on Seamounts and the Strength of the Lithosphere

Neil Davies on the Greening of the Continents

Ben Weiss on the Mission to Psyche

Roger Bilham on Himalayan Earthquakes

Susannah Porter on Tiny Vampires in Ancient Seas

Ana Ferreira on Seeing Flows in the Mantle

Phil Gibbard on the Anthropocene

David Bercovici on How Plate Subduction Starts

Bob Hazen on the Evolution of Minerals

Matt Jackson on the Heterogeneity of the Mantle

Carmie Garzione on Reconstructing Land Elevation Over Geological Time

Chuck DeMets on High-Resolution Plate Motions

Mike Searle on Ophiolite

Mackenzie Day on Dunes

Sue Smrekar on the VERITAS Mission to Venus

Rick Carlson on Probing the Early Solar System

Ed Marshall on Iceland's 2021 Eruption

Richard Fortey on the Trilobite Chronometer

Paul Hoffman on the Snowball Earth Hypothesis

Peter Cawood on When Plate Tectonics Started

Becky Flowers on Deciphering the Thermal History of Rocks

Ulf Linnemann on the Assembly of Central Europe in the Paleozoic

Douwe van Hinsbergen on What Drives the Motions of Tectonic Plates

Mathilde Cannat on Mid-Ocean Ridges

Kathryn Goodenough on the Sources of Lithium for a Post-Carbon Society

Steve D'Hondt on Reviving a 100-Million-Year-Old Bacterial Colony

Harriet Lau on the Motions of the Earth on Timescales from Hours to Millennia

Craig Jones on the Iconic Landscapes of the American Westerns

Claude Jaupart on Whether the Earth is Cooling Down

Peter Molnar on Why the Tibetan Plateau is So High

Katie Stack on Mapping the Geology of Mars with the Perseverance Rover

Jan Smit on Resolving a Single Hour of the Cataclysm That Ended the Cretaceous 66 Million Years Ago

Marie Edmonds on Volcanic Gas

Gillian Foulger on Explaining Intra-Plate Volcanism Without Mantle Plumes

Sarah Stewart on a New Scenario For How the Moon Formed

Dietmar Müller on Reconstructing Plate Motions Over a Billion Years of Earth History

Bob Anderson on How Geology Affects Landscape

David Evans on Supercontinents

Mike Howe on the UK National Geological Repository

Lee Groat on How Gemstones Form

Allen McNamara on the Deep Mantle Structure of the Earth

Tomo Usui on the Mission to the Martian Moon Phobos

Rachel Wood on the Emergence of Complex Life in the Precambrian

Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni on Dynamic Topography

Cathy Constable on Mapping the Earth's Magnetic Field in Time and Space

Bärbel Hönisch on Reconstructing Climate in the Distant Past

David Rothery on Volcanism in the Solar System

Harold C. Connolly Jr. on Bringing an Asteroid Sample Back to Earth