Carbonatites are strange igneous rocks made up mostly of carbonates – common minerals like calcite, calcium carbonate. Igneous rocks that solidify from molten magma usually are high-temperature rocks containing lots of silicon which results in lots of quartz, feldspars, micas, and ferro-magnesian minerals in rocks like granite and basalt. Carbonatites crystallize from essentially molten calcite, and that’s really unusual. Most carbonatites are intrusive, meaning they solidified within the earth,...
Apr 30, 2018
As near as I can tell in the original daily series in 2014, I never addressed the topic of turbidity currents and their sedimentary product, turbidites. But they account for the distribution of vast quantities of sediment on continental shelves and slopes and elsewhere. You know what turbid water is: water with a lot of suspended sediment, usually fine mud particles. In natural submarine environments, unconsolidated sediment contains a lot of water, and when a slurry-like package of sediment liq...
Apr 17, 2018
This episode is about some of the interesting connections that arise in science. We’ll start with me and my first professional job as a mineralogist analyzing kidney stones. My mineralogy professor at Indiana University, Carl Beck, died unexpectedly, and his wife asked me as his only grad student to carry on his business performing analysis of kidney stones. Beck had pioneered the idea of crystallographic examination to determine mineralogy of these compounds because traditional chemical analysi...
Apr 10, 2018
Today we’re going back about 280 million years, to what is now Uruguay in South America. 280 million years ago puts us in the early part of the Permian Period. Gondwana, the huge southern continent, was in the process of colliding with North America and Eurasia to form the supercontinent of Pangaea. South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, and Australia had all been attached to each other in Gondwana for several hundred million years, and the extensive glaciers that occupied parts of all those ...
Apr 03, 2018
Today we’re going to the Mountains of the Moon – but not those on the moon itself. We’re going to central Africa. There isn’t really a mountain range specifically named the Mountains of the Moon. The ancients, from Egyptians to Greeks, imagined or heard rumor of a mountain range in east-central Africa that was the source of the river Nile. In the 18th and 19th centuries, explorations of the upper Nile found the sources of the Blue Nile, White Nile, and Victoria Nile and identified the Mountains ...
Mar 27, 2018
Today’s episode focuses on one of those wonderful jargon words geologists love to use: Ophiolites. It’s not a contrived term like cactolith nor some really obscure mineral like pararammelsbergite. Ophiolites are actually really important to our understanding of the concept of plate tectonics and how the earth works dynamically. The word goes back to 1813 in the Alps, where Alexandre Brongniart coined the word for some scaly, greenish rocks. Ophiolite is a combination of the Greek words for snake...
Mar 20, 2018
In today's episode we’re going to space. Specifically, Mars. You didn’t really think that earth science is really limited to the earth, did you? Our topic today will be the Valles Marineris. The Valles Marineris is a long series of canyons east of Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system. These canyons are about 4,000 km long, 200 km wide and up to 7 km (23,000 ft) deep. On terrestrial scales, the Valles Marineris is as long as the distance from New York to Los Angeles. That’s abou...
Mar 13, 2018
As the name implies, mud volcanoes are eruptions of mud – not molten rock as in igneous volcanoes. They’re found all around the world, amounting to about a thousand in total number known. The one thing they have in common is hot or at least warm water, so they occur in geothermal areas especially, but they also are found in the Arctic. They range in size from tiny, just a few meters across and high, to big things that can cover several square miles. In Azerbaijan some mud volcanoes reach 200 met...
Mar 06, 2018
Smilodon and dire wolves (drawing by Robert Horsfall, 1913) Running time, 1 hour. File size, 69 megabytes . This is an assembly of the episodes in the original series from 2014 that are about Cretaceous and Cenozoic vertebrates. I’ve left the references to specific dates in the podcast so that you can, if you want, go to the specific blog post that has links and illustrations for that episode. They are all indexed on the right-hand side of the blog. Thanks for your interest and support!...
Mar 04, 2018
Morganucodon, a possible early mammal from the Late Triassic. Length about four inches.Drawing by FunkMonk (Michael B. H.) used under Creative Commons license . Running time, 1 hour. File size, 68 megabytes. This is an assembly of the episodes in the original series from 2014 that are about Triassic and Jurassic vertebrates. As usual, I’ve left the references to specific dates in the podcast so that you can, if you want, go to the specific blog post that has links and illustrations for that epis...
Mar 04, 2018
Vanadium is a metal, and by far its greatest use is in steel alloys, where tiny amounts of vanadium improve steel’s hardness, toughness, and wear resistance, especially at extreme temperatures. As I reported in my book What Things Are Made Of, more than 650 tons of vanadium was alloyed with iron to make the steel in the Alaska Pipeline, and there’s no good substitute for vanadium in strong titanium alloys used in jet planes and other aerospace applications. Vanadium isn’t exactly one of the well...
Feb 27, 2018
You may have seen some of the spectacular images of the earth in southern Algeria, curves and colors like some Picasso in the opposite of his cubist period. If you haven’t, check out the one from NASA, below. The ovals and swirls, with their concentric bands, are immediately obvious to a geologist as patterns of folds, but not just linear folds like many anticlines and synclines form. These closed ovals represent domes and basins – imagine a large scale warping, both up and down, in a thick succ...
Feb 20, 2018
It isn’t true that all geologists drink beer. But many do, and I’m one of them. Today I’m going to talk about the intimate connection between geology and beer. Beer is mostly water, and water chemistry has everything to do with beer styles. And water chemistry itself depends mostly on the kinds of rocks through which the water flows. You know about hard and soft water – hard water has more dissolved chemicals like calcium and magnesium in it, and while salts of those chemicals can precipitate ou...
Feb 13, 2018
Ganoid fish from an old textbook (public domain) Running time, 1 hour. File size, 70 megabytes. This is an assembly of the 15 episodes in the original series from 2014 that are about Paleozoic vertebrates. I’ve left the references to specific dates in the podcast so that you can, if you want, go to the specific blog post that has links and illustrations for that episode. They are all indexed on the right-hand side of the blog. Thanks for your interest and support!...
Feb 11, 2018
