The Schist of It with 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).

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