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

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LAST EPISODE

Clark Johnson on the Banded...

11.12.2023

Banded Iron Formations (BIFs) are a visually striking group of sedimentary rocks that are iron rich and almost exclusively deposited in the Precambrian. Their existence points to a major marine iron cycle that does not operate today. Several theories have ...

Geology Bites episodes:

11.12.2023 Clark Johnson on the Banded Iron Formations Banded Iron Formations (BIFs) are a visually striking group of sedimentary rocks that are iron rich and almost exclusively deposited in the Precambrian. Their existence points to a major marine iron cycle that does not operate today. Several theories have ...
10.18.2023 Catherine Mottram on Dating Rock Deformation The geological history of most regions is shaped by a whole range of processes that occur at temperatures ranging from above 800°C to as low as 100°C. The timing of events occurring over a particular temperature range can be recorded ...
09.12.2023 Martin Van Kranendonk on the Earliest Life on Earth In this episode, Martin Van Kranendonk lays out a convincing case for life on Earth going back to at least 3.48 billion years ago. To find evidence for very ancient life, we need to look at rocks that have been ...
08.17.2023 Rob Butler on the Origin of the Alps The Alps are the most intensively studied of all mountain chains, being readily accessed from the geological research centers of Europe. But despite this, there remains considerable uncertainty as to how they formed, especially in the Eocene (about 40 million ...
07.03.2023 John Wakabayashi on the Franciscan Complex The Franciscan Complex is a large accretionary prism that has been accreted onto the western margin of the North American continent. Unlike most such prisms, which are submarine, it is exposed on land, making it a magnet for researchers such ...
06.20.2023 Bruce Levell on Bias in the Sedimentary Record How can we tell if the sedimentary record is good enough to make solid inferences about the geological past? After all, it can be difficult, or even impossible, to infer what is missing, or indeed whether anything is missing at ...
04.20.2023 Sujoy Mukhopadhyay on Probing the Hadean World with Noble Gases In a recent episode, Nadja Drabon spoke about newly discovered zircon crystals that formed during the late Hadean and early Archean, when the Earth was between 500 million and a billion years old. The zircons revealed information about processes occurring ...
03.23.2023 Patrick Fulton on the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake In 2011, a massive earthquake struck off the eastern coast of Japan. The destructive power of the earthquake was amplified by a giant tsunami that swept ashore, killing over 15,000 people. A major cause of the tsunami was the 50-m ...
03.02.2023 Romain Jolivet on the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquakes Romain Jolivet studies active faults and the relative motion of tectonic plates. His research focuses on the relationship between slow, aseismic slip that occurs “silently” between earthquakes and the rapid slip accompanying earthquakes. As he describes in the podcast, he ...
02.10.2023 Dan Rothman on Thresholds of Catastrophe in the Earth System The geological record shows that the Earth’s carbon cycle suffered over 30 major disruptions during the Phanerozoic. Some of the biggest ones were accompanied by mass extinctions. Dan Rothman analyzed these disruptions to find a pattern governing their magnitude and ...
01.02.2023 Nadja Drabon on a New Lens into the Hadean Eon Vanishingly few traces of the early Earth are known, so when a new source of zircon crystals of Hadean age is discovered, it makes a big difference to what we can infer about that eon. In the podcast, Nadja Drabon ...
12.03.2022 John Cottle on the Petrochronology Revolution Over the course of Earth history, many parts of the crust have undergone multiple episodes of metamorphism. Modern methods of dating and measuring trace-element abundances are now able to tease out the timing and conditions of the individual episodes. But ...
11.10.2022 Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 2 This episode is the second of two of my conversation with Martin Gibling. In the first episode, we discuss fluvial deposits in the geological record and we trace the effect that the break-up of Pangea around 200 million years ago ...
11.10.2022 Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 1 Rivers can seem very ephemeral, often changing course or drying up entirely. Yet some rivers have persisted for tens or even hundreds of millions of years, even testifying to the breakup of Pangea, the most recent supercontinent, about 200 million ...
10.10.2022 Anna Fleming on the Experience of Rock Climbing This episode is a bit of a departure from the objective approach to geology of past episodes in that here we address the subjective nature of various rocks as experienced by a rock climber with a literary bent. A rock ...
09.02.2022 Brian Upton on the Unique Rift Zone of South Greenland Between 1.3 and 1.1 billion years ago, magma from the Earth's mantle intruded into a continent during the assembly of the supercontinent called Nuna. Through good fortune, the dykes and central complexes that resulted have been preserved in near-pristine condition ...
08.10.2022 Geoff Abers on Subduction Zones and the Geological Water Cycle Subduction zones are places where a slab of oceanic lithosphere plunges into the mantle below. The slab consists of the sediments on top, crustal rocks in the middle, and the lithospheric mantle on the bottom, all plunging down together as ...
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 ...

Older episodes

Geology Bites

What's Geology Bites about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Geology Bites episodes:

Clark Johnson on the Banded Iron Formations

Catherine Mottram on Dating Rock Deformation

Martin Van Kranendonk on the Earliest Life on Earth

Rob Butler on the Origin of the Alps

John Wakabayashi on the Franciscan Complex

Bruce Levell on Bias in the Sedimentary Record

Sujoy Mukhopadhyay on Probing the Hadean World with Noble Gases

Patrick Fulton on the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake

Romain Jolivet on the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquakes

Dan Rothman on Thresholds of Catastrophe in the Earth System

Nadja Drabon on a New Lens into the Hadean Eon

John Cottle on the Petrochronology Revolution

Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 2

Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 1

Anna Fleming on the Experience of Rock Climbing

Brian Upton on the Unique Rift Zone of South Greenland

Geoff Abers on Subduction Zones and the Geological Water Cycle

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