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Geology Bites

Geology Bites

By: Oliver Strimpel
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Summary

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 astrophysicist and museum director asks leading Earth science researchers to divulge what they have discovered and how they did it. To learn more about the series, and see images that support the podcasts, go to geologybites.com. Instagram: @GeologyBites Bluesky: GeologyBites X: @geology_bites Email: geologybitespodcast@gmail.comOliver Strimpel Earth Sciences Science
Episodes
  • Alec Brenner on When Tectonic Plates First Moved
    Apr 30 2026

    A key development in the history of the early Earth is the formation of lithospheric plates that move independently of one another. In this episode, Brenner describes how he used paleomagnetic methods to detect relative motion between two ancient cratons, the East Pilbara and the Kaapvaal, 3.5 billion years ago. This is a full billion years earlier than any previous such detection, and it enables us to narrow down the kind of tectonics operating in the Paleoarchean. Of the candidate regimes, episodic subduction models fit his data best.

    Brenner is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Earth & Planetary Science at Yale University.

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    29 mins
  • Materials in Extreme Environments
    Apr 15 2026

    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 the Earth. Steve Jacobsen is a mineral physicist who studies how rocks and minerals behave under such alien conditions. In the podcast, we discuss his experiments and what we’ve learned about three extreme environments: the core-mantle boundary, the mantle transition zone, and the surface of the Moon.

    Jacobsen is a Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. The image shows him in his optical spectroscopy lab, where extreme conditions found throughout the solar system are re-created.

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    36 mins
  • Esther Sumner on Turbidity Currents
    Mar 26 2026

    Though turbidity currents are massive and frequent underwater events, we have rarely observed them directly. Esther Sumner is one of the few researchers who has. In the podcast, she describes what it's like to instrument an active submarine canyon, what these flows have revealed about the way sediment moves across the seafloor — and the day her team accidentally flew an underwater robot into a live turbidity current in the Mendocino canyon off the coast of California. She is an Associate Professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Southampton.

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    31 mins
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