Show Notes
Join us on a rockin' journey as we explore the fascinating tale of Potomac Marble and its role in rebuilding the US Capitol after the War of 1812. From the emotional experience of visiting ancient quarry sites to the intricate details of fanglomerates and alluvial fans, we uncover the geology behind this historically significant stone. Whether you're a rock enthusiast or just love a good story, this episode has something for you. Don't miss out on learning how Leesburg Fanglomerate shaped Ame...
More from PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
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...
Ask a room full of intro geology students whether a snowflake is a mineral and almost every hand says no. Ask why, and someone will tell you it's because no two snowflakes are alike. Chris Bolhuis has been asking that question for 25 years — he asked it of a young Jesse Reimink sitting in his high school classroom — and the answer is the whole point of this lesson. It's been a while since we've released an episode on the Planet Geo feed, and there's more coming (plus a few projects we can't w...