Show Notes
What if you could tell whether a rock exists on a planet 50 light-years away — without ever leaving Earth? This week Chris and Jesse welcome back friend-of-the-show Dr. Jackie Faherty (American Museum of Natural History) for her fourth appearance to talk about one of the wildest results in exoplanet science yet. The crew digs into a new Nature Astronomy paper on a rocky planet about 30% larger than Earth, orbiting a tiny star, whipping around fast with a scorching ~1,000 Kelvin surface and — ...
More from PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
First, some news. The Roadside Geology of Colorado is now an audiobook on the Camp Geo mobile app, produced in partnership with the Geological Society of America. If you've ever driven across the country with a stack of Roadside Geology books riding shotgun (Chris and Jesse have, many times), this is that experience in your ears, with the images that go with it. It's the first title in what we hope becomes a whole series, so try it out, tell your friends, and let us know which state you'd lik...
Big Announcement: Roadside Geology Comes to Audio — Plus an Introduction to Sedimentary Rocks The glove-compartment classic is now in your headphones. In this episode, we announce a partnership between Camp Courses (the team behind the CampGeo app) and the Geological Society of America to produce audio-visual editions of Roadside Geology of Colorado and Colorado Rocks! — available right now in the CampGeo mobile app. These aren’t ordinary audiobooks. Geology books live and die by their maps, ...
Chris's college mineralogy lab final was 20 specimens, and one of them was a quartz crystal his professor had dipped in graphite. The luster was off, the color was off, and Chris got it wrong even though every other property said quartz. That one exam question shows why mineral ID is hard and why you need a system. This episode lays out that system. We finish the minerals chapter of the Camp Geo audio textbook with polymorphs, which are minerals with the same chemical composition but differen...
There are roughly 7,000 known minerals on Earth. You need to know about ten of them. In the third installment of the Camp Geo Intro to Minerals series, Chris and Jesse finish the minerals chapter by working through the rock-forming minerals — the short list that makes up the overwhelming majority of the rocks in Earth's crust — and by explaining where minerals actually come from in the first place. Before the top-ten list, they step outside the silicates. Just as the silica tetrahedron define...
Ask an intro geology class what the most abundant element in the crust is and, year after year, the answer comes back "carbon." It doesn't make the top eight. That gap between what feels right and what the planet is actually made of is where this lesson lives. Chapter 2 of the Camp Geo audio textbook starts with the layered Earth — crust, mantle, and core — and why Chris's peanut M&M (with a caramel injection for the liquid outer core) beats Jesse's apple. Then the chemistry of each layer...