Best Quantified Body Podcasts (2024)

1
Evan Smith on Diamonds from the Deep Mantle 34:36

38m ago34:36

34:36

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 form at depths of about 650 km and make their way up to the base of the lithosphere, and then later to the surface via rare volcanic eruptions of kimberlite magma. In the podcast, Evan Smith talks about a…

1
Roberta Rudnick on the Continental Crustal Composition Paradox 27:53

13d ago27:53

27:53

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 measurements indicate that it does not. Continental crust contains significantly more silica and less magnesium and iron than the mantle. How can we be sure this discrepancy is real, and what do we th…

1
Alex Copley on Soft Continents 32:04

29d ago32:04

32:04

We tend to think of continental tectonic plates as rigid caps that float on the asthenospheric mantle, much like oceanic plates. But while some continental regions have the most rigid rocks on the planet, wide swathes of the continents are not rigid at all. In the podcast, Alex Copley explains how this differentiation comes about and points to evid…

1
Shanan Peters on Quantifying the Global Sedimentary Rock Record 27:14

1M ago27:14

27:14

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 record enables us to disentangle real changes in the long-term evolution of the Earth-life system from biases introduced by the unevenness and incompleteness of the sedimentary record. To this end, he a…

1
Paul Smith on the Cambrian Explosion 32:44

2M ago32:44

32:44

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 environment that prevailed in the early to middle Cambrian may well have arisen at earlier times in Earth history. So what exactly was the Cambrian explosion? And what made it happen when it did, between 5…

1
Scott Bolton on the Most Volcanically Active Body in the Solar System 24:45

3M ago24:45

24:45

Jupiter's innermost Galilean moon, Io, is peppered with volcanos that are erupting almost all the time. In this episode, Scott Bolton, Principal Investigator of NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter, describes what we're learning from this space probe. Since its arrival in 2017, its orbit around the giant planet has progressively shifted to take it close …

1
Bob White on How Magma Moves in the Crust 36:45

3M ago36:45

36:45

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 one or more magma chambers or partially melted mush zones for periods of up to a few millennia before erupting. But while we have seismic evidence and models and support this picture, we have not hitherto…

1
Richard Ernst on Large Igneous Provinces 31:56

4M ago31:56

31:56

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 provinces, which are called flood basalts when they occur on continents. As Richard Ernst explains in the podcast, the eruption of a large igneous province can initiate the rifting of continents, disrupt…

1
Damian Nance on What Drives the Supercontinent Cycle 35:58

6M ago35:58

35:58

Perhaps as many as five times over the course of Earth history, most of the continents gathered together to form a supercontinent. The supercontinents lasted on the order of a hundred million years before breaking apart and dispersing the continents. For decades, we theorized that this cycle of amalgamation and breakup was caused by near-surface te…

1
David Kohlstedt on Simulating the Mantle in the Lab 32:00

6M ago32:00

32:00

The Earth’s tectonic plates float on top of the ductile portion of the Earth’s mantle called the asthenosphere. The properties of the asthenosphere, in particular its viscosity, are thought to play a key role in determining how plates move, subduct, and how melt is produced and accumulates. We would like to know what the viscosity of the the asthen…

1
Claire Corkhill on Geological Radioactive Waste Disposal 31:07

7M ago31:07

31:07

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 emissions. This means that we will be producing a lot more radioactive waste, some of it with half-lives that approach geological timescales, which are orders of magnitude greater than timescales associated …

1
Mahesh Anand on What Human Return to the Moon Means for Lunar Geology 32:30

8M ago32:30

32:30

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 landings, and from samples returned to the Earth by Apollo and robot landings. But in 2025, when NASA plans to land humans on the Moon for the first time since 1972, a new phase of lunar exploration i…

1
Susan Brantley on Earth's Geological Thermostat 27:44

8M ago27:44

27:44

At the core of Earth’s geological thermostat is the dissolution of silicate minerals in the presence of atmospheric carbon dioxide and liquid water. But at large scales, the effectiveness and temperature sensitivity of this reaction depends on geomorphological, climatic, and tectonic factors that vary greatly from place to place. As described in th…

1
Clark Johnson on the Banded Iron Formations 28:42

9M ago28:42

28:42

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 been proposed to explain how the BIFs formed. While they all involve the precipitation of ferr…

1
Catherine Mottram on Dating Rock Deformation 36:05

10M ago36:05

36:05

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 by a mineral which crystallizes over that range. The mineral calcite is suitable for recording low-temperature proce…

1
Martin Van Kranendonk on the Earliest Life on Earth 33:28

11M ago33:28

33:28

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 largely undisturbed over billions of years of Earth history. Such rocks have been found in the Pilbara region of northwest Australia. As ex…

1
Rob Butler on the Origin of the Alps 30:46

12M ago30:46

30:46

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 years ago) when the events that led directly to Alpine mountain-building started. In the p…

1
John Wakabayashi on the Franciscan Complex 32:45

1y ago32:45

32:45

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 as John Wakabayashi. In the podcast, he describes this remarkable complex and explains the mechanisms that m…

1
Bruce Levell on Bias in the Sedimentary Record 33:56

1y ago33:56

33:56

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 all. As he explains in the podcast, Bruce Levell tackles this question by combining fieldwork with systematic analysis bas…

1
Sujoy Mukhopadhyay on Probing the Hadean World with Noble Gases 33:50

1+ y ago33:50

33:50

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 in the Earth’s nascent crust, casting light on when and how modern-day plate tectonics may hav…

1
Patrick Fulton on the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake 30:09

1+ y ago30:09

30:09

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 slip along the plate boundary fault between the subducting Pacific plate and the overriding North American plate. Patri…

1
Romain Jolivet on the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquakes 29:52

1+ y ago29:52

29:52

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 uses interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) images from radar satel…

1
Dan Rothman on Thresholds of Catastrophe in the Earth System 37:26

1+ y ago37:26

37:26

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 duration. As he explains in the podcast, this pattern is suggestive of a non-linear…

1
Nadja Drabon on a New Lens into the Hadean Eon 26:28

1+ y ago26:28

26:28

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 describes how she analyzed the new zircons she and her colleagues discovered and what they reveal about the Earth’s crust between about …

1
John Cottle on the Petrochronology Revolution 29:08

1+ y ago29:08

29:08

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 new techniques were needed before these methods could be scaled up to unravel regional tectoni…

1
Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 2 25:06

2y ago25:06

25:06

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 had on river systems. In this episode, we address the history of the rivers of Europe and the Americas, as well as the i…

1
Martin Gibling on Rivers in the Geological Record - Part 1 29:39

2y ago29:39

29:39

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 years ago. On the one hand, their courses may be determined by tectonic processes such as the formatio…

1
Anna Fleming on the Experience of Rock Climbing 18:28

2y ago18:28

18:28

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 climber’s very survival can depend on the properties of a rock encountered along a climbing route. This engenders a uniquely intense…

1
Brian Upton on the Unique Rift Zone of South Greenland 26:28

2y ago26:28

26:28

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 in what is now the south of Greenland. The dykes are extraordinarily thick, and the c…

1
Geoff Abers on Subduction Zones and the Geological Water Cycle 27:39

2y ago27:39

27:39

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 a kind of sandwich. In each of these layers is an ingredient that plays a key role in shaping the evolution of…

1
Maria McNamara on Seeing the Ancient World in Color 30:38

2y ago30:38

30:38

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? Or is there evidence in the fossil record that we can use to determine the actual color of plants an…

1
Phil Renforth on Carbon Sequestration 25:24

2y ago25:24

25:24

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. Therefore, more attention is now directed to mitigating climate change by enhancing the removal or…

1
Tony Watts on Seamounts and the Strength of the Lithosphere 28:33

2+ y ago28:33

28:33

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 accumulated suggesting that plates are not, in fact, totally rigid. In fact, we can see them flex in response to stresses t…

1
Neil Davies on the Greening of the Continents 33:43

2+ y ago33:43

33:43

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? Neil Davies describes how we can decipher the stratigraphic sedimentary record to address these questions. Perhaps surprisingly, …

1
Ben Weiss on the Mission to Psyche 30:03

2+ y ago30:03

30:03

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 rocky outer portion was blasted off during a major collision. To help determine which is most likely, NASA is sending …

1
Roger Bilham on Himalayan Earthquakes 34:33

2+ y ago34:33

34:33

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 the earthquakes occur, how do they occur, and what determines how much damage they inflict? R…

1
Susannah Porter on Tiny Vampires in Ancient Seas 34:21

2+ y ago34:21

34:21

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 later, around 750 million years ago. What enabled this evolutionary change has been a puzzle, but one idea i…

1
Ana Ferreira on Seeing Flows in the Mantle 22:42

2+ y ago22:42

22:42

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 spreading out of seismic waves according to their direction of polarization. This happens when the mantle through which the waves travel…

1
Phil Gibbard on the Anthropocene 27:49

2+ y ago27:49

27:49

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 or aspects of anthropogenic change should be used, and exactly where do we place the golden spike that will define the …

1
David Bercovici on How Plate Subduction Starts 30:03

2+ y ago30:03

30:03

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 become more and more resistant to bending and sinking down into the mantle. But recent work sugg…

1
Bob Hazen on the Evolution of Minerals 34:04

2+ y ago34:04

34:04

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 above subduction zones and when lower crustal rocks melt in mountain belts. But what a…

1
Matt Jackson on the Heterogeneity of the Mantle 35:17

2+ y ago35:17

35:17

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 describes the intriguing heterogeneity among the hot-spots of the so-called “hot-spot highway” in the weste…

1
Carmie Garzione on Reconstructing Land Elevation Over Geological Time 31:17

2+ y ago31:17

31:17

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 away or buried. Furthermore, most rock-forming processes are not directly affecte…

1
Chuck DeMets on High-Resolution Plate Motions 34:50

2+ y ago34:50

34:50

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 sea floor position. Chuck DeMets is Emeritus Professor of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin, Madison…

1
Mike Searle on Ophiolite 28:04

2+ y ago28:04

28:04

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 tectonic circumstances that emplace denser oceanic rocks on top of lighter continental ones? Mike …

1
Mackenzie Day on Dunes 24:36

2+ y ago24:36

24:36

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 she describes the dunes we see in the geological record on Earth, as well as on Mars and on a comet, and explains w…

1
Sue Smrekar on the VERITAS Mission to Venus 34:27

2+ y ago34:27

34:27

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 reflectivity, and gravity field, and the first ever global map of surface rock type. Sue Smrekar, the mission Principal Investigator…

1
Rick Carlson on Probing the Early Solar System 33:24

2+ y ago33:24

33:24

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 tiny dust grains contained within them have anomalous compositions that can only be understood by invoking a history…

1
Ed Marshall on Iceland's 2021 Eruption 27:28

3y ago27:28

27:28

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 several valleys and created a new 150-meter high mountain, a sort of mini-shield volcano. The eruption …

1
Richard Fortey on the Trilobite Chronometer 25:28

3y ago25:28

25:28

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 million years later, trilobite fossils served as some of the most useful of these key…

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