The Schist of It with Cate Larsen Cate Larsen

I sat down with Denise Hills, who I met at IMAGE23, and talked about her work to inform the public about CCUS (carbon capture, utilization, and storage).

I met with geophysicist Njahi Mwangala while at IMAGE23 in Houston, TX to learn about her work with Geoscientists Without Borders, a non-profit that provides funding for humanitarian projects all around the world. Her project revolves around Lake Tanganyika, a massive body of water that runs along the East African Rift system, and its long standing sediment pollution problem that's drastically impacting the fish population and the fishing industry its surrounding countries rely on.

Read about this project:

https://seg.org/gwb_projects/zambia/

Learn more about GWB:

https://seg.org/programs/geoscientists-without-borders/

Just like how we can infer the UV index on a public beach by counting the empty bottles of sunblock in the trash, we can do the same with the largest mass extinction of all time. By analyzing levels of UV-B absorbing compounds in 250 million year old fossilized pollen, researchers have uncovered a link between intense solar radiation, ozone layer depletion, and volcanic outgassing during the End Permian Mass Extinction.

Source material: Feng Liu et al. Dying in the Sun: Direct evidence for elevated UV-B radiation at the end-Permian mass extinction. Science Advances, 2023 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo6102

This episode is sponsored by Earthjustice, because the Earth needs a good lawyer. To learn more, visit http://bit.ly/3IKDmsf

[Earthjustice Partner, science, research, biodiversity]

You know that crystals form out of molten rock, right? Well it isn't as simple as Bowen's Reaction Series always told us it is! As it turns out, the depth of the magma has an effect on what crystals are able to form in certain parts of a body. Researcher Maddie Lewis, PhD studied various minerals in the Sierra Nevada Batholith and developed a model of fractional crystallization that takes the polybaric (changing depth) factor into effect.



Learn more about Maddie's work at https://madelinejlewis.com/

And read her paper at https://madelinejlewiscom.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/lewis_et_al-2021-contributions_to_mineralogy_and_petrology.pdf

I met with Yale postdoctoral fellow Lewis Alcott to discuss the possibility of using video games to teach geology. His latest publication, currently in review and available as pre-print, suggests 3-D games like Pokémon Legends: Arceus provide a new way to explore real geologic features around the world without leaving your home or classroom.

Read the pre-print via EGU:
https://gc.copernicus.org/preprints/gc-2022-10/gc-2022-10.pdf

Learn more about Lewis' work:
https://lewisalcott.wordpress.com/

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a huge weak spot in Earth's magnetic field and there's been plenty of speculation (and panic) about the possibility of a pole reversal, which some believe could spell disaster for humanity. Scientists already thought a magnetic doomsday wasn't all that likely, but now we have even more proof there's nothing to worry about thanks to a new model built with data from volcanics, sediments, and ancient clay pottery. This model gives us a look at the magnetic field over the past 9,000 years and sheds some light on what its future may hold. Spoiler alert: we're good.



Source Material:

Andreas Nilsson, Neil Suttie, Joseph S. Stoner, Raimund Muscheler. Recurrent ancient geomagnetic field anomalies shed light on future evolution of the South Atlantic Anomaly. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (24)

Read it for yourself, it's free! https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2200749119