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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...
A key development in the history of the early Earth is the formation of lithospheric plates that move independently of one another. In this...
Most of the material in the Earth and other planets exists under extremes of pressure and temperature quite unlike those we inhabit on the s...
Though turbidity currents are massive and frequent underwater events, we have rarely observed them directly. Esther Sumner is one of the few...
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 pr...
The first multicellular animals to build reefs lived in the Early Cambrian around the time of the Cambrian explosion. They were sponges call...
Water can have a dramatic effect on the style of an eruption. In the podcast, Michael Manga explains how the most powerful eruptions, such a...
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,...
Over 6,000 exoplanets have now been found, and the number is constantly rising. This has galvanized research into whether one of them might...
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...
There are three main types of geodetic measurement systems — satellite-based systems such as GPS, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI),...
In this episode, Jiří Žák describes the two main orogenies whose remnants figure prominently in central European geology: the Cadomian oroge...
Subduction zones can be very long-lived, persisting for tens of even hundreds of millions of years. During that time they rarely stay still,...
In the podcast, Cees Van Staal tells us about the Paleozoic tectonic events that led to the formation of the Appalachians. The events are cl...
In previous episodes of Geology Bites , Barbara Romanowicz gave an introduction to seismic tomography and Ana Fereira talked about using sei...
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 fi...
From East Africa to southwest USA, many regions of the Earth’s continental lithosphere are rifting. We see evidence of past rifting along th...
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 o...
Megafloods are cataclysmic floods that are qualitatively different from weather-related floods. In the podcast, Vic Baker explains our ideas...
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...
Golden spikes are not golden, nor are they generally spikes. So what are they, and, more importantly, what exactly do they represent? In the...
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 sim...
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 e...
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 beyo...
The Himalaya are just one, albeit the longest and highest, of several mountain ranges between India and Central Asia. By world standards, th...
The Caledonian orogeny is one of the most recent extinct mountain-building events. It took place in several phases during the three-way coll...
With most of Greenland buried by kilometers of ice, obtaining direct information about its geology is challenging. But we can learn a lot fr...
As we wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and ramp up our reliance on alternatives, batteries become ever more important for two main reas...
Knowing exactly where faults are located is important both for scientific reasons and for assessing how much damage a fault could inflict if...
During the past couple of decades, we have discovered that stars with planetary systems are not rare, exceptional cases, as we once assumed,...
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...
Continental crust is derived from magmas that come from the mantle. So, naively, one might expect it to mirror the composition of the mantle...
We tend to think of continental tectonic plates as rigid caps that float on the asthenospheric mantle, much like oceanic plates. But while s...
Shanan Peters believes we need to assemble a global record of sedimentary rock coverage over geological time. As he explains in the podcast,...
Complex life did not start in the Cambrian - it was there in the Ediacaran, the period that preceded the Cambrian. And the physical and chem...
Jupiter's innermost Galilean moon, Io, is peppered with volcanos that are erupting almost all the time. In this episode, Scott Bolton, Princ...
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 paus...
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 i...
Perhaps as many as five times over the course of Earth history, most of the continents gathered together to form a supercontinent. The super...
The Earth’s tectonic plates float on top of the ductile portion of the Earth’s mantle called the asthenosphere. The properties of the asthen...
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-g...
We have learned a great deal about the geology of the Moon from remote sensing instruments aboard lunar orbiters, from robot landers, from t...
At the core of Earth’s geological thermostat is the dissolution of silicate minerals in the presence of atmospheric carbon dioxide and liqui...
Banded Iron Formations (BIFs) are a visually striking group of sedimentary rocks that are iron rich and almost exclusively deposited in the...
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...
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 e...
The Alps are the most intensively studied of all mountain chains, being readily accessed from the geological research centers of Europe. But...
The Franciscan Complex is a large accretionary prism that has been accreted onto the western margin of the North American continent. Unlike...
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,...
In a recent episode, Nadja Drabon spoke about newly discovered zircon crystals that formed during the late Hadean and early Archean, when th...
In 2011, a massive earthquake struck off the eastern coast of Japan. The destructive power of the earthquake was amplified by a giant tsunam...