Geology Bites
Episodes
Materials in Extreme Environments
15 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Most of the material in the Earth and other planets exists under extremes of pressure and temperature quite unlike those we inhabit on the surface of ...
Esther Sumner on Turbidity Currents
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Though turbidity currents are massive and frequent underwater events, we have rarely observed them directly. Esther Sumner is one of the few researche...
Hal Levison on the Mission to Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A key question about the early history of the Solar System is whether the giant planets formed roughly at the distances from the Sun they presently oc...
Sara Pruss on the First Reef Builders
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The first multicellular animals to build reefs lived in the Early Cambrian around the time of the Cambrian explosion. They were sponges called archaeo...
Michael Manga on Wet Eruptions
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Water can have a dramatic effect on the style of an eruption. In the podcast, Michael Manga explains how the most powerful eruptions, such as the 2022...
Carina Hoorn on the Evolution of the Amazon Basin
24 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Amazon Basin is the most biodiverse region on Earth, being the home of one in five of all bird species, one in five of all fish species, and over ...
Anat Shahar on What Makes a Planet Habitable
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over 6,000 exoplanets have now been found, and the number is constantly rising. This has galvanized research into whether one of them might host lif...
Keith Klepeis on How Plutons Form
12 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Plutons are bodies of igneous rock that crystallize from magma at depth below the Earth’s surface. But even though this magma never makes it to th...
Tom Herring on High-Precision Geodesy
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There are three main types of geodetic measurement systems — satellite-based systems such as GPS, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), and inte...
Jiří Žák on the Orogenies that Shaped Central Europe
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Jiří Žák describes the two main orogenies whose remnants figure prominently in central European geology: the Cadomian orogeny tha...
Claudio Faccenna on the Dynamics of Subduction Zones
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Subduction zones can be very long-lived, persisting for tens of even hundreds of millions of years. During that time they rarely stay still, but inste...
Cees Van Staal on the Origin of the Appalachians
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the podcast, Cees Van Staal tells us about the Paleozoic tectonic events that led to the formation of the Appalachians. The events are closely rela...
Andreas Fichtner on the Frontiers of Seismic Imaging
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In previous episodes of Geology Bites, Barbara Romanowicz gave an introduction to seismic tomography and Ana Fereira talked about using seismic anisot...
Renée Tamblyn on the Origin of Continents
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When the Earth formed, it was covered by a hot magma ocean. So when and how did thick, silica-rich continental lithosphere form? Were the first, ancie...
Folarin Kolawole on Continental Rifting
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From East Africa to southwest USA, many regions of the Earth’s continental lithosphere are rifting. We see evidence of past rifting along the passiv...
Mike Hudec on Salt Tectonics
11 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most of Earth’s salt is dissolved in the oceans. But there is also a significant amount of solid salt among continental rocks. And because of th...
Vic Baker on Megafloods
13 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Megafloods are cataclysmic floods that are qualitatively different from weather-related floods. In the podcast, Vic Baker explains our ideas as to wha...
Lindy Elkins-Tanton on the Origin of Earth's Water
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The planets formed out of a cloud of gas and dust around the nascent Sun. Within the so-called snow line, it was too hot for liquid water to exist. Si...
Joeri Witteveen on Golden Spikes
16 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Golden spikes are not golden, nor are they generally spikes. So what are they, and, more importantly, what exactly do they represent? In the podcast, ...
Isabel Montañez on Using the Late Paleozoic Ice Age as an Analog for Present Day Climate
08 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The late Paleozoic ice age began in the Late Devonian and ended in the Late Permian, occurring from 360 to 255 million years ago. It was similar to th...
Ruth Siddall on Urban Geology
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At first sight, urban geology sounds like an oxymoron. How can you do geology with no rocky outcrops anywhere in sight within the built-up environme...
Richard Fortey on Deep Time
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 tim...
Mike Searle on the Mountain Ranges of Central Asia
20 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Himalaya are just one, albeit the longest and highest, of several mountain ranges between India and Central Asia. By world standards, these are ma...
Rob Strachan on the Caledonian Orogeny
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 c...
Joe MacGregor on Mapping the Geology of Greenland Below the Ice
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With most of Greenland buried by kilometers of ice, obtaining direct information about its geology is challenging. But we can learn a lot from measure...
Adam Simon on Battery Metals
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Rufus Catchings on Pinning Down California's Faults
20 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Knowing exactly where faults are located is important both for scientific reasons and for assessing how much damage a fault could inflict if it ruptur...
Sara Seager on Exoplanet Geology
01 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During the past couple of decades, we have discovered that stars with planetary systems are not rare, exceptional cases, as we once assumed, but actua...
Evan Smith on Diamonds from the Deep Mantle
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 fo...
Roberta Rudnick on the Continental Crustal Composition Paradox
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Alex Copley on Soft Continents
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to think of continental tectonic plates as rigid caps that float on the asthenospheric mantle, much like oceanic plates. But while some contin...
Shanan Peters on Quantifying the Global Sedimentary Rock Record
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Shanan Peters believes we need to assemble a global record of sedimentary rock coverage over geological time. As he explains in the podcast, such a re...
Paul Smith on the Cambrian Explosion
08 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Complex life did not start in the Cambrian - it was there in the Ediacaran, the period that preceded the Cambrian. And the physical and chemical envir...
Scott Bolton on the Most Volcanically Active Body in the Solar System
25 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jupiter's innermost Galilean moon, Io, is peppered with volcanos that are erupting almost all the time. In this episode, Scott Bolton, Principal I...
Bob White on How Magma Moves in the Crust
06 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We know that most magma originates in the Earth’s mantle. As it pushes up through the many kilometers of lithosphere to the surface, it pauses in on...
Richard Ernst on Large Igneous Provinces
10 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At roughly 15-25-million-year intervals since the Archean, huge volumes of lava have spewed onto the Earth’s surface. These form the large igneous p...
Damian Nance on What Drives the Supercontinent Cycle
24 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Perhaps as many as five times over the course of Earth history, most of the continents gathered together to form a supercontinent. The supercontinents...
David Kohlstedt on Simulating the Mantle in the Lab
09 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Earth’s tectonic plates float on top of the ductile portion of the Earth’s mantle called the asthenosphere. The properties of the asthenospher...
Claire Corkhill on Geological Radioactive Waste Disposal
07 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In many countries, nuclear power is a significant part of the energy mix being planned as part of the drive to achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissio...
Mahesh Anand on What Human Return to the Moon Means for Lunar Geology
22 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We have learned a great deal about the geology of the Moon from remote sensing instruments aboard lunar orbiters, from robot landers, from the Apollo ...
Susan Brantley on Earth's Geological Thermostat
10 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
At the core of Earth’s geological thermostat is the dissolution of silicate minerals in the presence of atmospheric carbon dioxide and liquid water....
Clark Johnson on the Banded Iron Formations
12 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Banded Iron Formations (BIFs) are a visually striking group of sedimentary rocks that are iron rich and almost exclusively deposited in the Precambria...
Catherine Mottram on Dating Rock Deformation
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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°...
Martin Van Kranendonk on the Earliest Life on Earth
12 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 f...
Rob Butler on the Origin of the Alps
17 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Alps are the most intensively studied of all mountain chains, being readily accessed from the geological research centers of Europe. But despite t...
John Wakabayashi on the Franciscan Complex
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Franciscan Complex is a large accretionary prism that has been accreted onto the western margin of the North American continent. Unlike most such ...
Bruce Levell on Bias in the Sedimentary Record
20 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Sujoy Mukhopadhyay on Probing the Hadean World with Noble Gases
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In a recent episode, Nadja Drabon spoke about newly discovered zircon crystals that formed during the late Hadean and early Archean, when the Earth wa...
Patrick Fulton on the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 swe...
Romain Jolivet on the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquakes
02 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Romain Jolivet studies active faults and the relative motion of tectonic plates. His research focuses on the relationship between slow, aseismic...
Dan Rothman on Thresholds of Catastrophe in the Earth System
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The geological record shows that the Earth’s carbon cycle suffered over 30 major disruptions during the Phanerozoic. Some of the biggest ones ...
Nadja Drabon on a New Lens into the Hadean Eon
02 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
John Cottle on the Petrochronology Revolution
03 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the course of Earth history, many parts of the crust have undergone multiple episodes of metamorphism. Modern methods of dating and measuri...
Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 2
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is the second of two of my conversation with Martin Gibling. In the first episode, we discuss fluvial deposits in the geological re...
Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 1
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rivers can seem very ephemeral, often changing course or drying up entirely. Yet some rivers have persisted for tens or even hundreds of million...
Anna Fleming on the Experience of Rock Climbing
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Brian Upton on the Unique Rift Zone of South Greenland
02 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
Geoff Abers on Subduction Zones and the Geological Water Cycle
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Subduction zones are places where a slab of oceanic lithosphere plunges into the mantle below. The slab consists of the sediments on top, crusta...
Maria McNamara on Seeing the Ancient World in Color
17 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Popular reconstructions of ancient environments, whether they be in natural history museum dioramas, in movies, or in books, present a world of color....
Phil Renforth on Carbon Sequestration
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For many years, efforts to limit climate change have focused on curtailing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. But it is increasingly c...
Tony Watts on Seamounts and the Strength of the Lithosphere
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When plate tectonics was adopted in the 1960s and early '70s, researchers quickly mapped out plate movements. It seemed that plates moved as rig...
Neil Davies on the Greening of the Continents
24 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Ben Weiss on the Mission to Psyche
12 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 form...
Roger Bilham on Himalayan Earthquakes
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We hear about earthquakes in the Himalaya, especially when they claim lives and cause damage. And we understand that, broadly speaking, it is the cont...
Susannah Porter on Tiny Vampires in Ancient Seas
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Ana Ferreira on Seeing Flows in the Mantle
21 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Phil Gibbard on the Anthropocene
12 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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. Shoul...
David Bercovici on How Plate Subduction Starts
05 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Subduction zones are a fundamental aspect of plate tectonics, yet we still don't really understand how subduction initiates. It's a tough proble...
Bob Hazen on the Evolution of Minerals
25 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
New rock types emerge during the history of the Earth. For example, the silica-rich felsic rocks such as granite that characterize continental c...
Matt Jackson on the Heterogeneity of the Mantle
08 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Matt Jackson is a Professor of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He probes the chemical composition of the mantle by ana...
Carmie Garzione on Reconstructing Land Elevation Over Geological Time
01 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout geological history, various points on the Earth’s surface have been lifted up to great elevations and worn down into low, flat-lying regi...
Chuck DeMets on High-Resolution Plate Motions
25 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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. Rev...
Mike Searle on Ophiolite
18 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the name implies, oceanic lithosphere underlies the oceans of the world. Except when they are ophiolites, when oceanic lithosphere is thrust ...
Mackenzie Day on Dunes
11 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Sue Smrekar on the VERITAS Mission to Venus
04 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 m...
Rick Carlson on Probing the Early Solar System
28 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
Ed Marshall on Iceland's 2021 Eruption
13 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 mon...
Richard Fortey on the Trilobite Chronometer
07 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Long before radiometric dating appeared on the scene, the geological time scale was defined by the sedimentary record, and particularly by key fossils...
Paul Hoffman on the Snowball Earth Hypothesis
01 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Peter Cawood on When Plate Tectonics Started
23 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 meta...
Becky Flowers on Deciphering the Thermal History of Rocks
16 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Ulf Linnemann on the Assembly of Central Europe in the Paleozoic
09 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The geological history of Central Europe is quite complicated. The region is composed of several continental blocks having quite distinct origin...
Douwe van Hinsbergen on What Drives the Motions of Tectonic Plates
18 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 wit...
Mathilde Cannat on Mid-Ocean Ridges
19 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Oceanic plates are continually manufactured at mid-ocean spreading ridges. But exactly what processes go on at these ridges? It turns out that it ...
Kathryn Goodenough on the Sources of Lithium for a Post-Carbon Society
09 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
Steve D'Hondt on Reviving a 100-Million-Year-Old Bacterial Colony
28 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The fossil record goes back through the Phanerozoic eon, about 540 million years, and even earlier, into the Ediacaran period. But while the fos...
Harriet Lau on the Motions of the Earth on Timescales from Hours to Millennia
12 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The subfield of geology called geodynamics most commonly refers to the motions associated with convection in the mantle. These are slow by...
Craig Jones on the Iconic Landscapes of the American Westerns
03 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many hundreds of films have been shot on location in the American West. The rugged, inhospitable landscapes are an integral part of what gives s...
Claude Jaupart on Whether the Earth is Cooling Down
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 f...
Peter Molnar on Why the Tibetan Plateau is So High
13 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 desc...
Katie Stack on Mapping the Geology of Mars with the Perseverance Rover
08 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Katie Stack is Deputy Project Scientist for the NASA Perseverance rover that landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February 2021. A geologist by tr...
Jan Smit on Resolving a Single Hour of the Cataclysm That Ended the Cretaceous 66 Million Years Ago
03 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jan Smit is a paleontologist who specializes in abrupt changes in the geological record. After the discovery of an end-Cretaceous surge deposit ...
Marie Edmonds on Volcanic Gas
30 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Marie Edmonds is Professor of Volcanology and Petrology at Cambridge University. She studies the cycling of volatile elements such as carbon bet...
Gillian Foulger on Explaining Intra-Plate Volcanism Without Mantle Plumes
26 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gillian Foulger is a leading proponent of the plate hypothesis of volcanism, which posits that volcanism away from plate boundaries can be explained b...
Sarah Stewart on a New Scenario For How the Moon Formed
20 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Stewart uses computer-based dynamical simulations and lab experiments to create scenarios for the collision of a massive body with the Earth tha...
Dietmar Müller on Reconstructing Plate Motions Over a Billion Years of Earth History
05 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dietmar Müller and his team have built interactive software to combine hundreds of diverse geological research studies into a single self-consistent ...
Bob Anderson on How Geology Affects Landscape
28 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bob Anderson is chair of the department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a geomorphologist who has studied ma...
David Evans on Supercontinents
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Mike Howe on the UK National Geological Repository
14 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many countries have national geological museums that house collections of rocks, minerals, and fossils. But the UK has two collections – the one at ...
Lee Groat on How Gemstones Form
07 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...