The Caledonian orogeny is one of the most recent extinct mountain-building events. It took place in several phases during the three-way collision of continental blocks called Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia during the early stages of the assembly of the supercontinent Pangea. In the process, Himalayan-scale mountains were formed. While these mountains have been worn down today, we still see plenty of evidence for their existence in locations straddling the Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea. In the podcast, Rob Strachan describes the tectonic movements that led to the orogen and explains how we can reconstruct the sequence of events that occurred and what we can learn about today’s mountain-forming processes by studying the exhumed rocks of ancient orogens.

Strachan has studied the rocks of the Caledonian orogen for over 40 years, focusing on unraveling the history of the orogen in what is Scotland today. He is Emeritus Professor of Geology at the University of Portsmouth.

With most of Greenland buried by kilometers of ice, obtaining direct information about its geology is challenging. But we can learn a lot from measurements of the island’s geophysical properties — seismic, gravity, magnetic from airborne and satellite surveys and from its topography, which we can see relatively well through the ice using radar. In the podcast, Joe MacGregor explains how he created a new map of Greenland’s geology and speculates on what we can learn from it.

MacGregor is a Research Physical Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

As we wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and ramp up our reliance on alternatives, batteries become ever more important for two main reasons. First, we need grid-scale batteries to store excess electricity from time-varying sources such as wind and solar. Second, we use them to power electric vehicles, which we are now producing at the rate of about 15 million a year worldwide.

So far, the battery of choice is the lithium-ion battery. In addition to lithium, these rely on four metals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. In the podcast, Adam Simon explains the role these metals play in a battery. He then describes the geological context and origin of the economically viable deposits from which we extract these metals.

Simon is a professor of economic geology at the University of Michigan.

Knowing exactly where faults are located is important both for scientific reasons and for assessing how much damage a fault could inflict if it ruptured and caused an earthquake. In the podcast, Rufus Catchings describes how we can use natural and artificial sources of seismic waves to create high-resolution images of fault profiles. He also explains how faults can act as seismic waveguides, an effect that enables us to determine whether faults are connected to each other. In Napa, a famous wine-growing area near San Francisco, he used guided waves to determine that an active fault is actually ten times longer than previously thought. Rufus Catchings is a Research Geophysicist at the US Geological Survey (USGS). Over the past 40 years, he has studied many dozens of faults in California and elsewhere to pin down their precise locations and help assess the risks they pose.

During the past couple of decades, we have discovered that stars with planetary systems are not rare, exceptional cases, as we once assumed, but actually quite commonplace. However, because exoplanets are like fireflies next to blinding searchlights, they are incredibly difficult to study. Yet, as Sara Seager explains, we are making astonishing progress. Various ingenious methods and the use of powerful space telescopes enable us to learn about exoplanet atmospheres and even, in some cases, what their surfaces consist of.

Sara Seager’s research concentrates on the detection and analysis of exoplanet atmospheres, and she has just won the prestigious Kavli Prize for this work. She has had leadership roles in space missions designed to discover new exoplanets and find Earth analogs orbiting a sun-like star. She is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor of Planetary Science, and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We have only a tantalizingly small number of sources of information about the Earth’s deep mantle. One of these comes from the rare diamonds that form at depths of about 650 km and make their way up to the base of the lithosphere, and then later to the surface via rare volcanic eruptions of kimberlite magma. In the podcast, Evan Smith talks about a new class of large gem-quality deep-mantle diamonds that he and his coworkers discovered in 2016. Inclusions within these diamonds serve as messenger capsules from the deep mantle. They show an unmistakable genetic link to subducted oceanic slabs, and thus give us clues as to what happens to subducted slabs as the pass through the lower mantle transition zone.

Evan Smith is a Senior Research Scientist at the Gemological Institute of America, New York.

Continental crust is derived from magmas that come from the mantle. So, naively, one might expect it to mirror the composition of the mantle. But our measurements indicate that it does not. Continental crust contains significantly more silica and less magnesium and iron than the mantle. How can we be sure this discrepancy is real, and what do we think explains it? In the podcast, Roberta Rudnick presents our current thinking about these questions. Surprisingly, more than 30 years after she and others first identified the so-called continental crustal composition paradox, there is still no consensus among geologists as to which of the many proposed hypotheses most convincingly solves the paradox.

Rudnick is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California Santa Barbara.

We tend to think of continental tectonic plates as rigid caps that float on the asthenospheric mantle, much like oceanic plates. But while some continental regions have the most rigid rocks on the planet, wide swathes of the continents are not rigid at all. In the podcast, Alex Copley explains how this differentiation comes about and points to evidence that the responsible processes have been operating since the Archean.

Copley is Professor of Tectonics in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge.