Tony Watts on the Mechanics of Tectonic Plates
By the end of the 1960s, plate tectonics had been widely accepted, but it rested on an untested assumption: that the plates are strong enoug...
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Science & Medicine
Geology Bites By Oliver Strimpel
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...
Episodes
20 of 129 episodes
Torgeir Andersen on Ultrahigh-Pressure Metamorphism
Continental crust is buoyant, which is why continents stand high above the ocean floor. Yet rocks in western Norway contain microscopic grai...
Brian Wernicke on Lithospheric Extension and the Basin and Range Province
Where tectonic plates collide, the result is clear: the edge of a plate crumples and throws up a mountain belt. But where a plate is stretch...
Bernhard Steinberger on Whether Hotspots Are Fixed
Volcanic island chains like Hawaii record the passage of a plate over a hotspot — a plume of hot rock rising from deep within the mantle. Fo...
Sonia Tikoo on the Moon's Magnetic Field
We have known for decades that the Moon once generated a strong magnetic field — comparable in strength to Earth's — throughout the period f...
Steve Brusatte on the Dinosaurs That Survived the Asteroid
Birds are the only dinosaurs that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago — but not all birds did. In this episode, Steve Brusatte...
Alec Brenner on When Tectonic Plates First Moved
A key development in the history of the early Earth is the formation of lithospheric plates that move independently of one another. In this...
Materials in Extreme Environments
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...
Esther Sumner on Turbidity Currents
Though turbidity currents are massive and frequent underwater events, we have rarely observed them directly. Esther Sumner is one of the few...
Hal Levison on the Mission to Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids
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...
Sara Pruss on the First Reef Builders
The first multicellular animals to build reefs lived in the Early Cambrian around the time of the Cambrian explosion. They were sponges call...
Michael Manga on Wet Eruptions
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...
Carina Hoorn on the Evolution of the Amazon Basin
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,...
Anat Shahar on What Makes a Planet Habitable
Over 6,000 exoplanets have now been found, and the number is constantly rising. This has galvanized research into whether one of them might...
Keith Klepeis on How Plutons Form
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...
Tom Herring on High-Precision Geodesy
There are three main types of geodetic measurement systems — satellite-based systems such as GPS, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI),...
Jiří Žák on the Orogenies that Shaped Central Europe
In this episode, Jiří Žák describes the two main orogenies whose remnants figure prominently in central European geology: the Cadomian oroge...
Claudio Faccenna on the Dynamics of Subduction Zones
Subduction zones can be very long-lived, persisting for tens of even hundreds of millions of years. During that time they rarely stay still,...
Cees Van Staal on the Origin of the Appalachians
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...
Andreas Fichtner on the Frontiers of Seismic Imaging
In previous episodes of Geology Bites , Barbara Romanowicz gave an introduction to seismic tomography and Ana Fereira talked about using sei...