Open University biogeochemist Matt Kent transports us to the peatlands of Indonesia, the land of the orang-utan, and a critical carbon-store. Matt studies tropical peatlands, investigating water-air greenhouse gas emissions and what dominates these processes. Listen to him cover everything from the joys of fieldwork, working with local field guides to deploy his “space hats”, to the fragility of peatland environments, which face the threat of devastating forest fires.

1. Peatlands in Indonesia | Matt Kent

Could you camp on the edge of an active volcano? Would you rather hike through the Himalaya, or paddle through the peatlands of Indonesia? Hear first-hand accounts from the field researchers who&#8217;ve been there, done that and much more, during their adventures to understand the world around us.

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Wires. Bronze Age tools. The Statue of Liberty. What do all of these have in common? Copper!  Ed Bunker is a PhD researcher at the University of Bristol where he studies the formation of porphyry copper deposits. In this episode he chats to old university pal Eleni about his fieldwork on an active mine in Chile. Listen along to find out what its like to work in one of the driest places in the world, and why being able to speak football can be as important as speaking the local language.

17. Copper deposits in Chile | Ed Bunker

Carley Schacter (one of Stacy’s buddies from their time in Newfoundland together) spent 4 field seasons during her PhD on a number of remote islands in the Aleutian Islands of the North Pacific. Her work involved tagging Auklets, a type of migratory seabird, to investigate what they get up to during the winter. She chats about the challenges of planning for and working on tectonically-active uninhabited rocks at the edge of the world, how to sleep whilst surrounded by screaming birds, and what to do when someone machetes through the radio communication wire…

16. Migratory seabirds in the Aleutian Islands | Carley Schacter

What would fieldwork on an asteroid be like? To answer this question Eleni headed to the University of Bristol to chat to cosmochemist and PhD researcher Tim Gregory. He investigates meteorites found on Earth in order to understand the early Solar System. Tim’s dream fieldwork would take him to an asteroid belt. While this is outside of the capabilities of human space travel (for now), unmanned missions to asteroids may be critical for our future survival as a human race! Tim talks to Eleni about the future of space travel and what do astronauts need to be made of… something he learnt from the legendary Chris Hadfield during his time on the BBC series ‘Astronauts: Do You Have What it Takes’.

15. How to do fieldwork on an asteroid | Tim Gregory

Francesco Giuntoli, currently at Sorbonne University, Paris, talks to us about his PhD research at the University of Bern, where he worked in the Italian Alps. We learn about how he uses the classical approach of geological mapping to underpin his lab work, in order to understand the complex jigsaw puzzle that is the formation of the Alps. Listen in to how Francesco literally walked in the footsteps of previous geologists, all the while contending with some interesting mountain wildlife, all to figure out how mountain ranges are constructed.

14. Metamorphism and deformation in the Alps | Francesco Giuntoli

Vincent Rennie from the Open University studies some of the world’s most incredible organisms; microbes that can survive the extremes of heat, salinity and pH, organisms fittingly called extremophiles. Studying them means travelling to some of the most extreme and seemingly inhospitable environments on the planet, including Dallol, Ethiopia, which holds the record for the highest average temperature for an inhabited location on earth. We talk to him about the problems of searching for life in this incredible area and how new technologies could revolutionise this work.

1. Peatlands in Indonesia | Matt Kent

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