Geology Bites – Details, episodes & analysis

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Geology Bites

Oliver Strimpel

Science

Frequency: 1 episode/18d. Total Eps: 127

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.com

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Data updated on 28/08/2026

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🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
09/09/2026
#79
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
08/09/2026
#94
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
30/08/2026
#97
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
29/08/2026
#76
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
28/08/2026
#74
🇨🇦 Canada - Science
24/08/2026
#94
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
11/08/2026
#94
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
09/08/2026
#79
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
08/08/2026
#87
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Science
07/08/2026
#97

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https://www.geologybites.com/
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https://www.geologybites.com
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https://geologybites.com/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_jhIv5mRP8
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Score global : 48%

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Brian Wernicke on Lithospheric Extension and the Basin and Range Province

Season 1 · Episode 127

Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 34:07

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 stretched rather than squeezed, the evidence is usually lost, because the thinned lithosphere subsides and the basins that form fill with sediment.

The Basin and Range Province of the western United States and northwestern Mexico is the great exception. Between the Colorado Plateau and the Sierra Nevada, dozens of mountain ranges march north in near-parallel array, in a crust that has been pulled out to about twice its original width — and it is still stretching today.

In this episode we look at how we know that: from GPS antennas bolted into bedrock that measure the province widening in real time, to the record of ancient earthquakes, to the dismembered thrust sheets that let the whole region be reassembled as it was 20 million years ago. We also discuss the low-angle detachment faults that have brought rock from fifteen kilometres down up to the surface and why a stretched province still stands a mile high.

Brian Wernicke is an Emeritus Professor in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech.

For photos, figures, and further reading, see https://www.geologybites.com.

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Bernhard Steinberger on Whether Hotspots Are Fixed

Season 1 · Episode 126

Thursday, July 16, 2026 • Duration 28:56

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. For decades, hotspots were assumed to be fixed, providing a stationary frame of reference against which to measure the absolute motions of the plates. But are they? Bernhard Steinberger has spent his career modeling how mantle flow carries plume conduits sideways as they rise, setting each hotspot drifting on its own course. In the podcast, he explains how paleomagnetism, the ages of volcanoes along hotspot tracks, and relative plate motions can be combined to disentangle plate motion, hotspot drift, and true polar wander — and how, even in motion, hotspots can still anchor the plates to the deep Earth.

Steinberger is a geophysicist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam.

Go to geologybites.com to see illustrations supporting this episode.

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Sonia Tikoo on the Moon's Magnetic Field

Season 1 · Episode 125

Saturday, June 27, 2026 • Duration 32:35

We have known for decades that the Moon once generated a strong magnetic field — comparable in strength to Earth's — throughout the period from about 4.25 to 3.5 billion years ago. Only in the past few years have we learned that the field didn't simply switch off then: it weakened dramatically but lingered on, faintly, until as recently as 1.5 billion years ago, before disappearing entirely. As Sonia Tikoo explains in the podcast, we don't really understand either how the early field grew so strong or how any field could last so long — and no single mechanism seems able to account for both the intense early epoch and the long, weak tail that followed.

Sonia Tikoo studies the history of magnetic fields on the Moon and other small solar system bodies using paleomagnetism and fundamental rock magnetism. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University.

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Steve Brusatte on the Dinosaurs That Survived the Asteroid

Season 1 · Episode 124

Thursday, May 28, 2026 • Duration 32:41

Birds are the only dinosaurs that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago — but not all birds did. In this episode, Steve Brusatte draws on the fossil record to explain which birds came through the extinction, and what set the survivors apart from the many that perished alongside the rest of the dinosaurs. He traces the evolutionary transition from ground-living theropods to modern birds, drawing on the spectacular feathered fossils unearthed over the past three decades in northeastern China.

Brusatte is Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Story of Birds, published this year.

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Alec Brenner on When Tectonic Plates First Moved

Season 1 · Episode 123

Thursday, April 30, 2026 • Duration 28:55

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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Materials in Extreme Environments

Season 1 · Episode 122

Wednesday, April 15, 2026 • Duration 35:41

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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Esther Sumner on Turbidity Currents

Season 1 · Episode 120

Thursday, March 26, 2026 • Duration 31:00

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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Hal Levison on the Mission to Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids

Season 1 · Episode 120

Friday, March 6, 2026 • Duration 37:27

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 presently occupy, or, as some theories predict, much closer to the Sun. The discovery of other solar systems with radically different configurations of planets has made this question more pressing, since it appears that the configuration of the Solar System might be atypical.

In the podcast, Hal Levison explains why the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter offer us the best opportunity to discriminate between the various models of Solar System evolution. And that is why a spacecraft called Lucy is now well on its way to a rendezvous with these asteroids.

Hal Levison is the Principal Investigator of the Lucy mission. He studies the dynamics of astronomical objects and, in particular, the formation and long-term behavior of solar system bodies. He is one of the original proponents of the Nice model (named after the city where it was conceived), a scenario that proposes the migration of the giant planets from an initial compact configuration closer to the Sun to their present positions. He is Chief Scientist in the Department of Space Sciences at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

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Sara Pruss on the First Reef Builders

Season 1 · Episode 119

Wednesday, February 11, 2026 • Duration 23:21

The first multicellular animals to build reefs lived in the Early Cambrian around the time of the Cambrian explosion. They were sponges called archaeocyaths. In the podcast, Sara Pruss suggests that the rise of the archaeocyaths fostered an increase in animal diversity. But they were relatively short-lived, and when they died out in the Middle Cambrian, the diversity declined. Over geological time, reef-building organisms appear and disappear again and again until the corals we have today appeared in the Middle Triassic, about 240 million years ago.

Pruss is currently trying to understand why reefs are such a persistent feature of the geological record, despite the environmental stresses imposed on them. She is a Professor of Geosciences at Smith College.

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Michael Manga on Wet Eruptions

Season 1 · Episode 118

Tuesday, January 20, 2026 • Duration 40:29

Water can have a dramatic effect on the style of an eruption. In the podcast, Michael Manga explains how the most powerful eruptions, such as the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption, occur when hot magma comes into contact with water and suddenly generates vast quantities of steam. Water dissolved in magma as it rises to the surface and depressurizes can also drive destructive volcanic eruptions. Manga also talks about water-driven volcanism on Mars and on the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Manga is a Professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department of the University of California, Berkeley.

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Geology Bites – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

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Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

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Geology Bites – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other4

Youtube1

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other4

Youtube1

Apple Podcasts

Spotify