Ologies with Alie Ward - Geology (ROCKS) Part 1 with Schmitty Thompson

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

What is a rock? How big is a boulder? Why are they pretty and heavy? It’s rock talk with a true enthusiast, the charming and beloved Geologist Schmitty Thompson. Schmitty walks us through different types of rocks, minerals, geological formations, roadside wonders, countertop crystals, stone skipping, and why you should stare lovingly into a pit of gravel. There were so many listener questions, we had to make this a two-parter people. So roll up a boulder, take a seat, and enjoy Schmitty’s Geology Corner. Also: losing my marbles. More links and sourcesSchmitty’s bioA donation went to Skype a ScientistThose cool squid stickersOther episodes you may enjoy: Teuthology (SQUIDS), Areology (MARS), Ludology (VIDEO GAMES), Volcanology (VOLCANOES), Gemology (GEMS & MINERALS), Astrobiology (ALIENS), Eschatology (THE APOCALYPSE)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the string on the spine of a string pea. What am I doing here? And why am I stronger than navy rope? Alleyboard. And finally, finally, you can stop looking to see if we have a geology episode because it's here. Rocks. Rocks. What are they? Where do they come from? And how do you become a person who suddenly has context for everything surrounding you so that you appreciate it? You talk to a geologist. So thisologist is beloved in the science community. And I was introduced to them via Sarah Mackendalty of the Tuthology Squid episodes. And Sarah runs Skype a Scientist. And thisologist helps write geology corner trivia for Skype a Scientist trivia nights. And while I'm here, it is Squid Timber. So enjoy the encore of the Squid episode. If you

haven't heard it, there's a link in the show notes. But thisologist, this geologist is on their way to a PhD in geology via Oregon State, having studied paleo climate and glacial geology with an undergrad degree in geology and mathematics at Northland College, which is in Ashland, Wisconsin. Hello, Wisconsin on the south shore of Lake Superior. And they're already listed as an author on published papers, such as a global database of marine isotope stage 5a and 5c marine terraces and paleo shoreline indicators. And you'll know exactly what all of those words mean in a second. Just kidding. No, you won't. You'll know why a rock is heavy, though. And that's what we're here for. Okay, but before we get into it, thank you to everyone

on Patreon who supports the show. You can join first of all those 25 cents an episode. And that lets you submit questions to theologist ahead of time. Thank you, patrons. Thanks to everyone who tweets and tick talks about the show and to everyone rating and leaving reviews and subscribing, which helps the show so much. And I read every single one and to prove it, here is a steamy, freshie from up way too early, who left the review. The information about the natural world is fascinating. And the unabashed enthusiasm of the guest is a real treat. Thank you. Thank you up way too early for that. And everyone who left reviews this week, I read them all. Okay, geology, geo, the earth, the study of the earth. So consider this like a 101 course of

what is this big rock that we live on made of? And how can we appreciate gravel, hard rocks, soft rocks, stone skipping, edible stones? How large is a small boulder? How old are diamonds? Where do geodes come from? Why are different rocks, different colors? Why you should stare at your countertop? What are the best rock puns? Why road trips can take forever? And just wonder at the natural world with part one of this two-parter with your new favorite geologist, Shmitty Thompson. My name is Shmitty Thompson, and I use they and them pronouns. And you are a geologist. I am a geologist. I am currently a geologist in training. So hopefully a going to be doctor geologist soon. If you're studying it, you are an

ologist. So you are a geologist. I am a geologist. Yes. Okay, I've wanted to do this episode for so, so long. Because rocks are something that I do not understand a thing about. I want you to know that I know nothing about rocks and you know so much. So I guess let's start with since ologists are people who study things, how long have you been a geologist because you've liked rocks for I'm going to guess more than one minute. Yes, I have I have liked rocks for a very long time. I do remember I met my first geologist. When I was going into eighth grade, I went on a canoe trip for a few days in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota. And the trip leader had just graduated with her undergraduate degree in geology. And she's telling us about what her what she was

studying. And she was showing us all these rocks. And I remember, we're packing up our food to go on our trip. And I just looked over at her and I said, I'm going to be a geologist someday. And so it's been sort of a meandering path ever since then. So it's been a real rocky road in that it's been full of beautiful wonders really, because rocks are cool. What was it about rocks that you thought I'll dedicate my life to that ology? That's a really good question. It's just they're so they're so beautiful. And they're so interesting because, you know, when you're walking in a grocery store parking lot, this is the example I always use, you can look down at the rocks in the weird medians there. And if you know how to talk to those, and you can read their stories,

you know, even seemingly the most mundane rocks ever have the most amazing stories, you can go into the middle of nowhere, like on a long trip or a long backpacking trip, and you can see these beautiful, magnificent outcrops and mountains and rivers and everything, you can go drive down the side of the highway. And I'm sure, you know, many people have been driving and seen a beautiful road cut, road cuts are great. If you see someone stopped inside the road, there's a good chance they're geologists looking at the road cut. So just they're so beautiful and getting to learn about the history of our planet and like understanding just how beautiful and like dynamic the earth is, because our planet has been around for 4.5 billion years. And that's an unimaginably

long stretch of time and just so much interesting stuff has happened since then. Just by the by, an outcrop is any visible exposed bedrock or like a naturally occurring geologic goodness, where you're like, whoa, what's that? And a road cut is when they cut a road and kind of like a piece of cake, you can just drool over the layers. And when you do, even if you can't look at the outcrop and say, I know exactly what's going on here, getting to sit there and think about like, what's the story here? How did these rocks get where they were today? Like, were they born deep into the earth? Like, were they born on a beach? Did a dinosaur walk in this rock? Just the stories that they can tell are amazing. And

I think there's also something there that I don't, I don't know if I can explain it. I just love rocks. I love this kind of love. Let's define a rock. Number one, what's the difference between a boulder, a pebble, a rock, like a geological formation? At what point is something sand and at what point is something a rock? Like, what is a fucking rock? Yeah, what is a rock? That's a really good question. So a rock is sort of a broad definition for an earth material that has come out of the earth that is made of minerals. And so that's a really common question is, what's the difference between a rock and a mineral? And so a mineral is essentially, they're like the ingredients that make up a rock. So a mineral is a chemical compound that has a

crystal structure that formed for the most part under natural circumstances. And so, for example, a mineral that a lot of people have heard of is quartz. Quartz is a really beautiful mineral. It's really common. And rocks are going to be made up of, sometimes you have a rock made up of just one mineral, like if you have a big chunk of rock salts. Salt is, its mineral name is halite. And then a lot of other rocks, for the most part, are made out of combinations of different minerals. So for example, if you've ever gone to someone's house or a nice bar and you've seen that they have a granite countertop, granite is a rock that forms deep under the earth. And the minerals, the ingredients or the components that make it up are, for example, quartz. You have quartz in

granite. You also can get a mineral called felt spar, which is this beautiful little pink mineral that has lots of shiny surfaces. It's made up of a mineral called mica, which has two forms, biotite and muscovite, which are like these beautiful flaky rocks that you can form. So a mineral is sort of, they're like the ingredients that make up rocks. And then rocks are just, they're materials that come out of the earth. So if you, for example, like a rock that you pick up, again, just off the ground is just going to be just as much of a rock as, you know, a cliff you see in a hilltop. Now, words like silt or sand or pebbler boulder can be technical terms to talk about how big the rock is. So for talking about the size of a rock, we can split it into categories.

We have the tiniest sizes of earth materials. But if we're thinking about the size of rocks, you can start all the way up to a boulder, which is a technical term. So rocks above a certain size are boulders. Okay, I looked this up, and it's a very technical term. A boulder has to be greater than 25.6 centimeters or 10.1 inches in diameter. That is the threshold of when a rock becomes a boulder. So in common usage, though, some people define a boulder as one that's too big for one person to move. That's how people classify it. But one time, my dad moved a giant person sized boulder out of the road so that other cars wouldn't hit it. And at the time, he was 70 years old and on chemo. So I think that metric of who can move what is pretty subjective.

There are many non boulders, I probably could not move. But yes, a boulder can be gigantic, but at its smallest, the smallest boulder is a little under a foot in diameter. So what's smaller than a boulder? You can go down a step to a cobble, which is just maybe the size of like a softball or a football. And then you can get down to a pebble, which is just kind of like what you expect like a pebble and a fish tank to be. And then you have sand, and there's all sorts of different sizes of sand. And then you get down to silt, and then you get down to the tiniest particles, which are clay. Wait, clay is a type of rock? Is it? What? Yeah, well, that's the hard thing is when you get down to these sand and silt and clay, they're all earth

materials. So they're all involved in the way that stuff moves through the earth system. Clay is really fun because clay particles are so tiny that you have to look with a microscope to look at the individual clay particles. And they just stick together with water? Is that how we mold clay? That's how we mold clay. Actually, this is a really fun tip. If you want to look like a geologist in front of your friends, is if you're like a riverbank, or you have some really fine silty clay material, if you want to figure out whether you're holding silt or clay, what you do is you take a little bit of that really fine powdery stuff, and if you're being really casual, you can spit in your hand, or if you're being fancy, you can take

some water from a water bottle and mix it with a little bit of like dusty material, and then try and leave us like, try and paint with it, see if it leaves a streak across your palm. So if it doesn't leave a streak, that means it's silt, which means that it's made out of slightly larger particles. And if it does leave a streak, then it's clay. Oh, I never knew that. I never knew that clay was a bunch of little rocks. That's so thrilling. What about like different types of rocks? You know how when you are an absolute newbie, and there have been several times I've picked up a rock and been like, this is probably a meteorite, and it absolutely has not been. But things between like sedimentary and igneous, and I know that there are fourth graders that

know a lot more about this than me, but what are the types of rock and some of their hallmarks, what do you say, for a total rock newbie who appreciates rocks? You are excited. That is a great, that's all you need to start learning about rocks is excitement. So the three main types of rocks that we have are we have igneous rocks, sedimentary rocks, and metamorphic rocks, and which kind of rock they are is all dependent on how they formed. And so igneous rocks formed as lava or magma cooled. And so you can sort of break igneous rocks into two categories. You have sort of the classic ones, which are volcanic igneous rocks. And so these are rocks that when you have, you know, for example, like Mount St. Helens or any of our other volcanoes,

you have a volcano erupting, you're getting lava and ash and all this really hot molten rock, lava being erupted out of the volcano. When that lava cools, it forms an igneous rock. Actually, these igneous rocks coming out of volcanoes are one of the most common types of rock we have on the planet, because if you go down all the way to the ocean floor and like underneath all of our oceans, it's just these huge plates of an igneous rock called basalt. And there's big giant plates. Would they each be one huge boulder? That's a really good question. And I think that's something that you need to go to a coffee shop on a Sunday morning and debate amongst yourselves.

Yeah. So igneous rocks form volcanic igneous rocks form on a volcano or some kind of lava moving up to the up from the middle of the earth onto the surface of the earth cools. You can also get what's called a plutonic igneous rock. And so essentially, if you go deep, deep under the surface of the earth, you have all of this really hot squishy rock moving around in what's called the mantle. So the mantle is sort of this really large layer between the center of the earth and a crust that's on the outside. And so when a blob of the mantle gets really hot and starts to move around, you can get these blobs of magma. So when you have really hot molten rock, the difference between it being called lava or magma is lava is when it's

on the surface of the earth. So it's come out from the inside of the earth and magma is when it's still inside of the earth. So sometimes you get these blobs of magma that slowly move up through the crust. And sometimes they'll erupt and become a volcano. And sometimes they don't quite make it to the surface. They just sit underneath the surface of the earth. And for like hundreds of thousands of millions of years, they cool. And as they're cooling all of that liquid rock has time to grow really large crystals. So again, you can go find a granite countertop and you can just put your hand on it and look at all those big crystals because granite is a plutonic igneous rock. And so any granite countertop that you're going to be looking at,

you can look at it and think about the fact that that formed deep, deep under the surface of the earth and cooled over millions of years, over hundreds of thousands of millions of years to form these big beautiful crystals. So igneous rock comes in two main flavors. There's extrusive, aka volcanic, and that is a fountain of lava or intrusive or plutonic. And that is an underground cooling blob that cools more slowly, which may be what your counters are made of. But your floor is definitely made of lava. The floor is lava. The floor is lava. You know what always gets me is in like home renovation when people like I'm over my quartz countertops or I'm over my granite countertops and then they just demo them and then they get a new

rock countertop. I'm always like, do we have enough rock for that? Yeah, that's a good question. So there's some kinds of rock that we do have a lot of, but I do think it is a waste to get rid of any good stone countertop. Like, you know, you went through the effort to get that out of the earth. Like, why would you demo it? Though I do in one of my undergraduate professors had a, when he was showing us different kinds of igneous rocks, he had a little board with different countertop samples on it. They're really nice, like clean cut samples of these rocks. So countertops are a great way to see some cool rocks because people like to take, you know, really hard, durable rocks can be good for countertops. So you can see lots of fun rocks there.

Okay, so to recap, rocks can be made of different minerals and minerals can be made of straight up elements or chemical compounds. But a mineral is, according to the US Geological Survey, something with an orderly internal structure in a crystal form. And minerals, you may know are quartz, feldspar, mica, olivine, and calcite, and amphibole, which when I read it, it looks like amphibole, which sounds like some kind of Italian frogman superhero. But to recap, a rock is a lump of minerals, sometimes just one mineral, sometimes a bunch of them. Also, not to confuse you, but a lot of quartz countertops aren't naturally occurring slabs. Most of them are about 90 to 95% ground up quartz or silicon dioxide, with about 10% of it being resin binders.

Did you know that? I didn't. So now when you're sitting at your countertop, you won't take it for granted unless it's marble, which is not igneous. But first, sedimentary, my dear Watson. When you're talking about igneous sedimentary, you can kind of go in a cycle because rocks and earth material on the planet is always cycling. Nothing is ever still or sedentary on the planet. And so when you get rocks that start to break down, for example, if you have a granite cliff, things like rain moving on it and wind blowing on it and just the weight of the rock face pulling it down is going to start to break up that granite into smaller particles. And so as rocks weather, they start to fall apart and you get the individual crystals in it. For example,

the quartz crystals in a granite, they fall apart and they become loose sediment. And so sediment is just any of these, it's just any material that's like a loose gathering of like smaller grains of rock that have weathered out of something else. I'm totally falling apart. And so all of you can go to the beach and you can pick up your, you know, really pretty sand that probably started as an igneous rock somewhere deep underneath the earth. And so as you get sediment like clay and silt and sand moving around the surface of the earth, it's in our oceans, it's in our rivers, it's in sand, it's sand dunes in the desert. Eventually, sometimes that stuff stays still for a long time or it gets buried. And over time, as water's moving through it and as

it's compressing together, loose sediment like sand, silt or clay is going to harden in a fun process called lithfying and it's going to become a new kind of rock. So that's a sedimentary rock, is a rock that formed out of sediments that have been weathered out of other rocks. Like sandstone is a really great sedimentary rock. And then you can also get sedimentary rocks that form out of lots of shells in the ocean. If you're in the ocean and you have big shells, you can have microscopic shells, when those shells settle to the bottom of the ocean, they will also squeeze together and form a rock called limestone. And so, you know, sedimentary rocks are just what happened when loose earth material on the surface of the earth or the oceans compacts together.

So is it kind of like if you were baking biscuits and there were a bunch of leftover pieces and then you made another biscuit out of that biscuit? Exactly. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. So it's sort of it's it's materially recycled through the earth system. And then what is cooking it though? Like I know that if I reformed that biscuit and I put it in the oven, I got a new biscuit, but that lithfying, what's hardening it into a whole other rock? Yeah, so that's going to be sometimes you have just pressure over time is going to melt those grains together. And then oftentimes rocks, if you like pick up a, again, you look at your ground at countertop or you look at a nice, for example, a marble countertop, sometimes you look at a rock and you're like,

there's no way water can get in that. But even if especially in sedimentary rocks, where you have lots of loose spaces between the grains, you can get water moving through it. And that's going to deposit little bits of essentially cement in between them. So that's going to hold that together. Oh, I don't even know what cement is, but I understand it's different from concrete. And I'm like, I need to do a whole masonology episode. Yeah, what is fun? Yeah. So this in this case, cement is just, you know, one of the ways that minerals can exist is you can have little bits of the components of minerals dissolved in water. And so sometimes as the water is moving through loose sediment, that's going to deposit little tiny bits of the mineral

in between the loose pieces of sediment, and that's going to weld them together. So it's kind of like glue, it's gluing the rock together. And then what about metamorphic? Yes, metamorphic rocks. This is where the really, this is where the fun stuff comes in. And so a lot of rocks, even if the weather they formed deep underneath the earth in a volcano or on surface of the earth, they can get buried again, and they can get pushed into the earth's crust. And so what happens sometimes is when you get a rock that formed either from a volcano or from loose sediment, i.e. take an igneous or a sedimentary rock, which you now know what those are, congrats. If it gets put under really intense heat and pressure, then everything in there will get kind

of squishy and stuff. It won't melt all the way, because if you melt the rock all the way, then it becomes an igneous rock again. But if it just gets really, if things get loose in there, then minerals can start to rearrange themselves into a new rock. One example of a metamorphic rock is I talked about limestones. Limestone forms the bottom of the ocean when tiny shells gather up in layers over time and stick together. If limestone gets buried deep underneath the surface of the earth, all of those little grains of calcium carbonate that make up the shells are going to kind of meld together and become more solid, and that's what forms marble. So if you've ever seen a marble countertop or like been in a really fancy, like a marble statue in a really fancy

building, that started off its life as shells or some kind of marine creature in the ocean, and they got buried and metamorphosed, and everything got squishy and rearranged itself, and so made it into your countertop. So some extrusive volcanic igneous rocks are basalt and pumice and obsidian, and then remember intrusive or plutonic rocks quite literally chill beneath the earth's surface, and thus they cool more slowly, which tend to let crystals form, and granite and doriite and pegamatite are intrusive igneous rocks. Also, did you know that you shouldn't throw rocks in a fire, especially wet ones? Rocks can straight up absorb water and then explode at your face, which is not the relaxing fire pit atmosphere that you were going for.

So don't make a fire pit with sandstone or river rocks or pumice because they can sponge up water, and then harder rocks like granite and marble and slate plus lava rocks are a better bet, but you should ask a fire pit person or the internet first and don't sue me. But some sedimentary rocks are sandstone, shale, limestone, even coal is a sedimentary rock, which I didn't know. It's an organic sedimentary rock because it's made of old dead plants. Coal is a rock. Chalk is a rock. Chalk is a rock. Yes, a sedimentary one made up of old shells. So this pot is just chock-a-block with cocktail party facts. Metamorphic rocks, once again, they get stronger under pressure or high temperatures, but not high enough so that they melt to magma. They just kind of get molded

and folded, and some metamorphic rocks are phylite, schist, quartzite, marble is a metamorphic rock, but marbles, those are not rocks. Those are glass, and glass is cooled, heated sand and silica and some other stuff, and it's not a mineral or a rock because glass doesn't have a crystalline structure, but I learned this on accident this week, so now you have to learn it. One time, marbles were embedded in highways and road signs for reflectivity, and they were called cataphone when they were used that way, and it was invented by a guy named Percy Shaw in 1937, who thought that marbles were pretty shiny in headlights like a cat's eye, and marbles and road signs were like, okay, these are pretty good until World War II, and then marbles and roadsides

or cataphone took off because back then military vehicle headlights had shutters on them like eyelids to cloak them from being visible from above, and in World War II, since the entire world was battlefield, shuttered headlights were standard on a lot of cars, meaning that reflector marbles on roadsides were discreet and helpful, so they were everywhere, and when I learned that, I lost my marbles, which is an idiom first coined in 1886 in a newspaper article which read, he has roamed the block all morning like a boy who has lost his marbles. Also, it was researching this aside that I realized that this episode needed to be a two-parter because I'm sorry, there's just a lot of cool shit to learn about rocks and rock-adjacent things, but all the glimmers

is not glass. What about things like diamonds and sapphires and rubies and quartz crystals? Those are igneous or those are metamorphic? A lot of them can be both. The situation which and big typically gemstone crystals grow is when you have either magma cooling over really long periods of time that lets those crystals grow. For example, if you are thinking about a tourmaline crystal, I've been to outcrops, you can see big beautiful tourmaline crystals that have grown in granites that have cooled over a really long period of time that allows those big crystals to grow. Then a lot of other gemstones form in metamorphic rocks where essentially you can get the right ingredients there, and if you put them under heat and pressure, it'll have time for those

ingredients to come together and grow into these new gemstones. Most gemstones for the most part are going to be either coming out of an igneous or a metamorphic rock. When we're looking out at rocks in the yard or gravel in the driveway or scattered around, this is maybe not a smart question, but is there a garden variety that we see probably more than anything? If we see a bug in our house, 90% chance it's a housefly or something, are there types of rock that you probably see this all the time, you don't realize what it is? Yeah, I'd say there's a rock called basalt. There's a lot of it around. It's formed in a lot of different conditions. It's a igneous rock, so it forms when lava comes out of the earth and cools really fast, so it's usually

gray and really fine grain, and basalt is what makes up the tectonic plates at the bottom of the ocean. This basalt forms at what's called mid-ocean ridges, where in the center of a lot of these tectonic plates at the bottom of the ocean, they're split in half, and they're spreading apart where magma is coming up underneath them in a plume, and you just get this long, skinny volcano splitting the plate, and the plate is moving out slowly from that center line where that basalt is being produced. There's a lot of basalt out there, and so you can take a look around in a lot of gravel pits, and if you see a fine grained, sometimes really smooth rock, that's probably basalt. It is very common, which is not to say that it's not so beautiful in its

own way, but there's probably a good garden variety. What about colors of rock? Because I texted you before this to tell you that I sometimes will pick up a gravel in a driveway, and then I'll arrange it in a beautiful ombre color, and for some reason I find it very soothing. I mean, it's the cheapest and most low-stakes hobby a person can have, and when Jared and I were staying at my sister's helping out with my dad, I'd sometimes go outside for a minute, and just grab a few rocks, and then arrange them in color order, and then sigh, and just toss them back and return to the house. I even started drilling holes in a few with a dremel to make driveway rock necklaces, but I just found out researching this that there are naturally occurring

rocks that have a whole straight room, maybe from a mollusk track as they formed, and those are called hag rocks, and to drill a hole in a rock and say it's a natural hag rock is to invite a curse on you. But I promise I just wanted to put a few driveway rocks on a string. It was a time. It was a hard time. It was a good time. It was a time. Anyway, but why are some rocks white, some are yellowish, some are gray, some are brown? What's going on in there? Yeah, so you can trace that all back to the chemistry and the physical structure of the rock. So again, all rocks are going to be made out of minerals, and then all of those minerals are just based on various combinations of chemical elements arranged in different structures. And so sometimes a rock's color will be based on

just the plain structure of the mineral in it. And then sometimes within minerals, you'll get little teeny tiny trace elements. So just like a little bit of dye into the crystal structure. And so that's going to give it its color. So a lot of rock color is going to be based on its chemistry. Though a fun thing I learned a while back was that if you're looking at a rock like a granite, and you see little kind of clearish gray crystals, a lot of the times those are going to be quartz crystals. And the reason that they look gray is not because they're colored that it's because a lot of the times quartz will form clear. And the reason in a rock it looks like dark colored or gray is because there's no light in there. Oh, it's so dark in here.

So it's clear looking into a lightless interior of a rock. So for people who collect crystals or rocks, your purple amethysts have some iron in them to give it that lavender color. Rose quartz has traces of titanium or manganese or iron. And smokey quartz gets that kind of tinted window look via some natural irradiation affecting the aluminum in it. Milk quartz, that's just quartz with some liquid or gas trapped inside, which can be really helpful for people with bowel issues. Just kidding. I think it's just fun to think of milk quartz doing little farts. Your citrine in nature has colloidal ferric hydroxide impurities. But if you have an ombre amber crystal that was sold to you as citrine,

it's more than likely it's an amethyst baked at 900 degrees, which turns the purple parts golden yellow with the tips. But hey, if it's a citrine in your heart and mind, then you can think of it as a citrine all you want. Because as far as crystals having powers, if it makes you happy, then it makes you happy. And I said this in the gemology episode, but our brains are just a jiggly mess of nerves and wires and memories and shit we don't fully understand. And one of those things is the placebo effect. So if you think a stone is going to de-stress you, it might de-stress you from a behavioral standpoint. If a gem or a rock reminds you to take actionable steps toward like keeping your heart open for love or being kinder to yourself or managing your money more

wisely, then that stone is working by way of reminding you to change your behaviors, which affect your life. But the placebo effect is not medicine. And there are people, sadly, literally banking on your fears and your hopes. And those people are sometimes doing a lot of dangerous mining using child labor in some countries, which is never good vibes, people. My point is that some rocks get all the attention, they're sold for a lot of money, but really all rocks are special, like dogs. What about as someone who probably has to haul around rock samples and things like that, why are they heavy? Yeah, why are they heavy? So that's all about just the density of the minerals when a mineral or a rock is forming. How many atoms can they pack in there? So a lot of them,

because they're in these really rigid crystal structures, they can pack in a lot of elements that are pretty heavy. So again, a lot of the rocks that form, for example, the plates at the bottom of the ocean are really heavy in things like magnesium and iron. It's all going to come back to the crystal structure of the rock and its chemistry. So there's a lot of stuff packed in there. I'm so rude. I just realized that we're whatever however many minutes in, and I didn't even ask about your job or your work. I just was like, what the fuck is a rock? Your work deals with ice age rocks, right? How many rock samples do you have to collect? How big are the samples? What are you analyzing? What's happening? Yeah, so that's actually a really interesting thing is I love

talking about rocks, but the work I do for my research, actually, I don't look at rocks that much. I'm so sorry. Because I feel like that's, that's one of the things about geology is geology is a really broad field, and it's not just about studying rocks. It's about studying sort of the systems of our planet. And so it's a really interdisciplinary field. And so the kind of work that I do is I actually, I sit at my laptop all day, because there's a lot of geology that actually involves a lot of mathematics. And so when it comes to trying to sort of figure out or simulate how a volcano erupts, or how an ice sheet moves around, or how the ocean responds to various things moving around on it, a lot of the times we really understand the math behind it.

And so what we can do is I can tell a computer, I can write some code until my computer program, hey, you know, do this math and figure out, for example, in my research, like, you know, if we took an ice sheet and we grew it all the way from Canada down towards Oregon, like, what's going to happen to the ocean? What's going to happen to the land surface? If I grew the ice sheet closer and closer to where I am in Oregon. So their thesis involves working on problems of sea level during glacial cycles. And another paper they've been an author on is titled, 3D mantle viscosity structure in glacial isostatic adjustment models resolves discrepancies in marine isotope stage mis 5a and 5c global mean sea level predictions.

In case you're wondering. So there's, there's a lot of geology that just doesn't involve going out into the field and looking at rocks. Like I said, a lot of the work that I do involves computer programs and math. And then there's also a lot of really amazing geology, really important geology going on that involves a lot of chemistry. So there's going to be a lot of people who are taking rock samples that have been collected, and they're going into labs, and they're breaking them down into really into their component parts and doing a lot of chemistry on them to look at what exactly are these rocks made out of? Like what stories are in this rock chemistry that can tell it about how long ago did it form? What kind of conditions did it form? And so

I think that's a big misconception about geology is it's just a lot of, you know, people in tan hats in a field collecting rocks, but it's just it's really this beautifully big, very field with there's all sorts of ways to approach it. Do movies or TV ever get geology really wrong? Has there ever been a pop culture rock that you're really a fan of or one that incenses you? Feel free to vent here. Absolutely. So I'll tell you my favorite and my least favorite geology and movies. So one thing that a lot of movies get wrong is volcanoes. And so volcanoes are really beautiful because a lot of them can be these massive explosive, very dramatic eruptions. But oftentimes in movies, when they're showing a volcano erupting, it'll be a kind of volcanic

eruption that's really explosive to have a lot of ash and steam coming out of it. A lot of really harmful gases. And oftentimes with these big explosive volcanoes erupt, for example, like Mount St. Helens, the really dangerous thing about them is going to be when all of that hot ash that's literally boiling rushes down the mountain. The technical term for that is pyroclastic flow. And oftentimes in movies, these really dramatic scenes where there's all these people in cars trying to drive away or trying to run on their feet away from this ash flow. And these ash flows go really fast. They go tens of miles per hour fast. I look this up. And yes, pyroclastic flow is a whole ass. Average speed, 60 miles an hour or 100 kilometers an hour, going up to over

400 miles an hour of pyroclastic flow. That's 700 kilometers an hour if you're not an American. The example I'd use is this second Jurassic World movie when Chris Pratt is out running a pyroclastic flow on this island. He should not have survived that. I can't watch that movie. He can't outrun a pyroclastic flow on foot. And so that's always something you can think about when you see a volcano in a movie is like, okay, what are the hazards are they portraying this movie from this volcano? And how well do they actually line up with what's dangerous? Chris Pratt would have to run a one minute mile for several miles to escape even the slowest, most sluggish pyroclastic flow. And I watched the YouTube of this movie clip. And the comments section, it's delicious. It's

like a cocktail party of both jocks and nerds, each in respective corners having conversations. Some are like, bitch, an explosion. And some are like, and I'm going to quote, I feel like Owen would have grabbed onto one of the running dinos for a ride. They're faster than him, thus more likely to outpace that pyroclastic flow. Plus, it would have looked cool seeing him charging downhill on a stego or an angliosaur, which is a good point. Now, when it comes to scientists and fiction, can a movie ever pass the realism vibe check? But the movie that I will say I think got a lot of the geology right is actually a Norwegian movie called The Wave. It tells a really interesting story about in areas that have had a lot of

glaciers in them, you can sometimes get this valley called a fjord. And so fjord is where you had a glacier carve away the super tall deep valley from a continent and it fills with water. And The Wave tells the story of a small town in a fjord that had really unstable rocks on these huge cliffs next to it. And sometimes if you can get, you know, a really loose pile of rock attached to a cliff base that falls into this valley, into the water that's coming the bottom, it can cause a huge wave that moves through the fjord and just destroys anything that's packed. And so I think if anyone wants to get a good idea of what natural hazards can look like and what natural hazards geology can look like, I'd recommend the Norwegian movie, The Wave.

What about the myth or maybe just something that is overlooked? If you are out on a hike and you see a pretty rock and you go, oh, so lovely. Can you put that in your pocket or are you degrading that environment? Like how much rock collecting is too much rock collecting? That's a good question. And I think the important thing with that is the important thing is that you're asking yourself that question. A lot of the circumstances are going to depend. And so before you go anywhere, and if you're thinking like, man, I'd really like to collect some rocks, you can look up whose land it is. Is it private land? Is it public land? Sometimes if it's private land, for example, I know there are some places here in Oregon where

private landowners have allowed rock collecting under land sometimes for a small fee. And then if it's public land, like the Bureau of Land Management or the National Park Service or State Parks will have a rock collecting policy on their website. If you go into certain public lands, you can collect regular rocks and you can collect invertebrate fossils, but you might not be allowed to collect vertebrate fossils. For example, if you're going on a hike and you're interested in collecting some rocks, I'd recommend looking up the regulations on rock collecting because oftentimes different land management agencies will have guidelines for you. P.S., I tried this. And yes, if you Google a state park or BLM, the Bureau of Land Management,

plus your state, you can usually find a PDF with guidelines for rock hounding, like no more than 25 pounds a day and 250 pounds of rock a year, which is a shitload more rocks than I was expecting. I was talking like, oh, this pebble is kind of greenish. Like maybe I'll keep it in my pocket like a treasure because I'm sad. But no matter what the limits are, Schmiddi says. I think in terms of the sort of the ethics of it and in terms of your personal relationship, in terms of what rock you're collecting, you can think like, if I'm taking this rock away, am I removing something that other people would get to enjoy? So for example, when I was in the Wind River Canyon many years ago and there's this beautiful granite cliff face with these huge

tourmaline crystals, and that is something that we would never take away because if we took those tourmaline crystals away, then other people passing by on the road, other people stopping for fun, other geologists wouldn't get to enjoy them. Good point. So I think when you're taking a rock, you can ask yourself like, am I removing something that future generations won't get to enjoy if I take it? And then also you can ask yourself, you know, why am I taking it? For example, if you're picking up a rock and you're saying like, you know, I can bring this back to a community group where I can bring this back to my classroom to help teach people about the earth, that can be a really great reason to take a rock out of the field. Like for example, I have some rocks I

brought with me today. I took them off road cuts and I bring them with me so that way I can teach people about rocks. So I think the important thing when you're collecting a rock is be aware of the regulations around you and just make sure you check in with yourself. Like why am I picking this up? And you know, if I take this rock out of the environment, am I going to be removing something from the community of rock clubbers in the area? And this is morbid, but I'm just going to say, if you do rockhound as a verb, maybe have a plan for your collection when you die. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to bring it up, but do you want your rocks scattered back to where you got them? Do you want them donated to a place that could use them for education? Maybe your friends have

a gem and mineral rummage sale slash feral. Because think of how many rockhounders die and all these pretty rocks just get dumped into a landfill by people who don't appreciate them. And I'm sorry that's depressing, but something has to happen to all the stuff that we own one day. Some of it is billions of years old that we took home to look at for a decade and then they get buried in a pit of diapers and rotting banana peels because people don't understand how cool they are. Okay, let's change the subject. What about licking rocks? Can you talk to me about licking rocks? I didn't know that licking rocks or fossils was even a thing until very recently. Who licks what for why? I'm a big fan of licking rocks. I've licked a lot of rocks in my lifetime

and there's definitely some valuable information you can get. So one of the classic rocks that everyone has licked at some point is salt. Table salt is formed of the mineral halite and so if you're in the field and you're in an area where you know halite salt forms and you're like, wow, this is a really cool rock. I wonder if it's halite. You can lick it. I think that's a fine way to do it. A lot of times if you're taking a geology class and you have samples going around, sometimes they might encourage you like, hey, if you think this is halite, this is going to be the best way to do for sure determine it is you lick it. Actually, there are other rocks that if you lick it, they'll have a distinct taste. For example, so halite table salt is made out of sodium chloride

and there's another mineral called sylvite, which is potassium chloride. And if you lick sylvite, it's going to taste like bitter salts. So sometimes tasting like the taste of a rock can be a really diagnostic tool. So out in the wild, sylvite can be an orangey, goldish, chunky rock, kind of like a pink Himalayan salt lamp, but with a rusty ochre hue. And did you know that you can buy tiny potassium chloride or sylvite rocks in the supermarket? You can. They come in a shaker. It's called Morton's salt substitute and it's sodium free. It's just made with potassium chloride and a quarter of a teaspoon of it has 150% of the potassium of a banana. That's 610 mgs, baby. I just looked it up. It's also easier to pack on hiking trips

and it can help balance your water retention if you get bloated from eating too much ramen. But check with the doctor first because I'm not one and too much potassium can be a problem for people with certain medical conditions like cardiac issues. But yeah, it tastes just like a dash of zingy salt. I've had it. I also know there are some other geologists. If you're someone who studies sediment a lot, I do know people who will lick or chew a little bit of sediment because that's one way to get an idea of about how big the grains are. For example, if you lick silk, which is going to feel like mud versus sand, that's one way to tell how big your grains are. When it comes to licking fossils, fossilized bone, it's not necessarily going to have a distinct

taste. But oftentimes, if you're licking the right part of a fossilized bone, that interior sort of airy structure of the bone can be preserved. And so if you touch it to your tongue, it's going to stick. So that can be a really good way to tell whether or not you're licking bone. And so I think licking can be a very important diagnostic tool, though there are definitely rocks that you do not want to lick. So at least try and have some kind of an idea of what you're licking before you lick it. That's good advice. What don't you want to lick? Like is there, is plutanium, like a uranium rocks out there? Are there radium rocks? Yeah. Well, there's one rock. It's called Galena. And Galena has two elements in it, lead and sulfur.

So probably don't want to lick that much lead. Or the sulfur. Sounds like a big poisonous fart, pretty much. Not. Yes. The chemical formula is PBS. So I knew someone in college who, the way they memorized that the formula for Galena was PBS, it's not for kids. What about roundness of rocks? I guess because I've been sitting in a gravel driveway for several months sorting rocks. So I'm like summer round, summer jagged. Is that the age of the rock where it hasn't been worn away? Or is that the density of the rock? Yeah, that's a really good question. And so that's going to tell you about the history of the rock. So part of that is going to be how round a rock is, is going to be reflective of how resistant is it. So like a piece of quartz,

that's going to be more resistant because it's a really durable, it's really hard rock. So it's going to take a lot of effort to try and round that off. Whereas talc, there's the mineral talc, that's going to be really soft and it doesn't take a lot of work to round it off. So how round a rock is in part reflects sort of the chemistry and the structure of the rock, how resistant is it. But for the most part, how round a rock is, is going to tell you a bit about the history of it. So usually when an igneous or a metamorphic rock, you know, is fresh formed, those are going to be really big angular crystals. Once rocks break apart and their component parts start to move through the rivers and the oceans and, you know, they're getting carried around by

glaciers, that's going to start to wear away the edges of the rock. And so oftentimes, if you see, for example, if you go to a river and you pick up a really smooth, beautiful river stone, that tells you that that stone has been carried around through water for a long time, because all the other particles that are being carried around in that river and the water is working to smooth out the edges. Okay, I squeezed down a very deep dark rabbit hole, crevasse, googling stone skipping. But what you need to know is that those perfect silver dollars, smooth, flat stones for skipping rocks have been lapped upon by waters for so, so, so many years. And competitive stone skippers like to find patches of rounded shale flakes or even better slate discs for stone skipping. Shale,

side note, is a sedimentary rock that turns into the metamorphic rock slate. And yes, I did say competitive stone skippers, which I learned about from a 2009 CBS piece titled Stone Skipping Professionals. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, a stone that skipped and just kept on skipping and skipping 51 times. Oh my gosh. Which led me down the Warren to the 2016 documentary Skips Stones for Fudge, which details this rivalry between the two top athletes in the sport. There is Russ Rockbottom-Briars and Kurt Mountain Man Steiner. Now Russ chucks things into the water, but Kurt reads physics papers about stone skipping and searches for hours on the shore for the perfect rock. And Kurt, science-minded, was the record holder. And then in one competition,

he let Russ use one of his rocks. And Russ got 51 skips on one stone, broke Kurt's record, devastating him. And Russ held the world record for six years until he was beaten by a man who skipped a rock on a lake surface 88 times. That man was Kurt, who reclaimed his title, and then Russ passed away in 2017. And Kurt remains the title holder. Now if you wish to unseat him, prepare to dedicate your life to the sport, which is not lucrative. And maybe start by reading the 2002 American Journal of Physics paper, The Physics of Stone Skipping, which taught the world that around a 20 degree angle to the water plus a really high spin rate to stabilize the stone give the highest number of bounces on the water. And then as it slows down toward the end

and the skips become more frequent, like beep beep beep beep, that's called a pity pad. And stone skipping competitions use high speed video analyses to confirm the number of skips. If you have no idea what this whole aside is about, I apologize for that, because regional vocabularies may vary. But skipping stones on a surface of water is also called skimming, stone skipping, ducks and drakes. It's called lobster cutting, musikiri, or water cutting. Some people call it throwing a sandwich or letting the frogs out. So let he who cast the first skipping stone though prepare by reading some physics papers. You too can overthink next time you're on a lake shore trying to meditate to the sound of lapping waves. One of my favorite things to do ever actually. I really like sand.

I think sand is really beautiful and something that I recommend everybody do is I know actually if you have a loop or a hand lens, hand lenses are really, really useful for geology. And so you can get a magnifying glass or like a macro camera or a hand lens, and you go to any beach, you do pick up sand and look at it under a lens. I was literally looking at sand. I was at the beach this morning. I was looking at a bunch of sand today thinking about its history. You can get an idea about how long sand has been hanging around the environment by how round it is. Because if you're looking at sand grains and they're really rough and angular, that means they came out of their parent rock pretty recently. But if you look at sand grains that are, you know, kind of clear

and they're really round, that means those grains have been hanging around the surface of the earth for, you know, millions of hundreds of millions of years. And you are living outside of Portland, right? I'm in Corvallis. I'm an hour from the beach. But I'm there all the time. Well, you know what? When you live in LA, like I live in Los Angeles and I'm like an hour and a half from the beach because everything, getting to Santa Monica, it's a nightmare. Don't recommend it. Well, we are two hours from the beach. Well, foreign traffic. And Schmini was born in Utah, which has beautiful sedimentary rocks that have been shaped by water over eons. But they say they did a lot of the growing up in Minnesota, which is full of old rocks that escaped ice sheets. We're going to get

to more of that in a second. But first, a quick break because each week we donate to a cause of the eologous choosing. And this week, Schmini is tossing cash to Skype a Scientist, which has a database of thousands of scientists and helps them connect with classrooms and families, libraries, scout troops and more all over the globe, giving students the opportunity to get to know a real scientist and get the answers to their questions straight from the source. And Skype a Scientist was founded by Dr. Sarah McAnulty, a Squid Scientist and your toothology episode friend. And September happens to be Squid Timber. So you can celebrate by donating to Skype a Scientist or you can buy some cool new Squid Stickers that Sarah just launched with a Philadelphia-based

artist. And they are very cool. I ordered several of them to give as gifts. And Sarah handships them out herself. And there are links to those Squid Stickers in the show notes along with link to Skype a Scientist. That donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Next week, Schmini answers so many pressing Patreon questions about geodes and crystals and favorite rocks, best rock ponds, petrified wood, ice and more. But this week, let's get back to their favorite geology. The rocks that were really formative for me were the rocks of the Northwoods of Minnesota and Wisconsin. And I spent a lot of time on Lake Superior. Lake Superior is very near and near my heart. And so when you get up to sort of the upper Midwest, you get to

part of the continent called the Canadian Shield. So a lot of continents have what's called a Craton, which is continental material that was formed deep underneath the surface of the earth. And it's been floating around the surface of the earth for billions of years. And so that's very hard, resistant rock. And so the areas that I spent a lot of time in summers canoeing when I was a kid, and then the area around where I went to college was just these old, beautiful rocks that have been around for hundreds of millions, if not billions of years. And so they carry a lot of history. So for one of my college classes, we were driving along the side of a country highway and we just pulled off on the side and stepped out and we looked at this tiny little road cut and we're

able to you're able to put your hand on that rock and say that rock is two billion years old. That rock is older than bones. What? I didn't know any of this, but animals with skeletons didn't exist until about 550 million years ago. And paleontologists now think that the chemistry in the oceans changed and fish could grab and store more calcium and phosphorus in these things called osteocytes. And then they think the original purpose of these bone cells was to act as batteries for long journeys. So you might be driving past outcrops and road cuts of rocks older than bones, older than bones. Are you a bit of a slowpoke when it comes to road trips? Do you have to factor in double the

amount of time to go on a road trip? Yes, I do love stopping on road trips. The thing with me, they really have to factor in triple if not quadruple time is hiking. So hiking or walking on a beach, I'm always stopping like just on the beach yesterday, you know, we're at this beautiful Pacific beach, huge ocean stretching off before us. And just this little 20 foot tall sandy cliff, there was me looking at the cliff. I was just ignoring the ocean behind me. So I really like I factor in a lot of time when I'm hiking because there's a boulder on the side of the road or even exposed cliff face. Like, even if I can't look at it and immediately understand like, oh, this is what happened. It's really fun to sit there and like, you know, interact with it,

like, feel what's this rock made out of? Look, are there any fossils in this rock? Like, try and piece together just standing there, moving your hands around, thinking about like, how did this get to where it is today? Because, you know, every now and then I'll be in a parking lot. I'm like, we just got to look at that rock. What about rock tumblers? Do you have a rock tumbler? I don't have a rock tumbler, but some people I love very much are really into rock tumbling. And so I think tumble rocks are really, really cool. I personally, all the rocks that I have, I prefer to not tumble them because a lot of the times the natural structure of a rock can tell you a lot about it. I think if you're, you're collecting well sourced rocks, I think tumbling

can be a great thing to do. There's a lot of really cool textures that you can only see through rock tumbling. So I think that's a great activity as long as you have something sound proof to put it. I bet that it's very loud. A rock tumbler, quick aside, is a hollow drum. It looks kind of like a coffee can that you put in raw rocks, some water, and some polishing grit, which is usually silicon carbide, which is a nine to 9.5 in the hardness scale compared to a 10 of a diamond. Pretty hard. And the rocks churn in that and the water for a few weeks and they come out smooth and shiny, but it's not easy on the ears. And fun fact, not that fun, but because of ethical issues sourcing diamonds, a lot of people these

days are choosing a stone called a moissanite for engagement rings. And moissanite is a type of silicon carbide. It's really pretty. It's really hard. Silicon carbide is also used in rocket engines and as semiconductors and LED lights and for bulletproof vests. So it's a stone so tough, it provides safety and love and war, I suppose. What about myths? What is a piece of flimflam that you need to bust about rocks? Oh gosh, not necessarily a rock piece of flimflam, but something that's very personal to me for about my research is this is a very large piece of flimflam, but anthropogenic climate change is real. And part of I can't not take the opportunity to say that, but you know, part of my research for the rocks that I study, I use a lot of math and computer

models, and I also use all of these ancient shorelines around North America to study how our climate has changed in the past. And that's one myth I really want to bust is that a lot of people will say like, Oh, our climate, you know, climate has changed in the past, like temperatures have fluctuated, you know, we've warmed and we've cooled in the past. So, you know, what that means are warming today is not a problem. But if you look at compare the amount and rate of warming that's happened naturally in the Earth's history, a lot of the stuff that's really natural is very slow and gradual, you know, it'll take thousands of years to warm up a couple of degrees. And so what we're seeing today is absolutely not natural. And we have had some times in Earth's history where

the climate has changed really rapidly. And that's always been a bad thing. That's never been good. That makes plenty of sense. I can't not take this opportunity to talk about climate change. I wonder, speaking of like Sunday morning coffee and philosophy, there must be people who are like, well, we grew here, and we're, we're destroying it. And that's all part of nature. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think, I think they're right, though, humans are natural, we're part of our environment, we grew out of our environment. But in terms of our impact on our environment, one really important thing to think about is our responsibility to the planet around us. Like we are, we are part of all of these communities, the community of people, community of animals,

community of plants, like we're in community with the rocks around us. And we have a responsibility to take care of the planet. And decidedly, the carbon emissions that we're putting to the atmosphere are not taking care of the planet. And so, you know, we have responsibility to ourselves, to the world around us, and to our children, to the people that are going to be here ahead of us, to take care of our planet, because we live here, like, you know, you're not going to never vacuum your house, you're not going to never dust, you better do your dishes. And so we need to be responsible citizens of this earth. And we have, you know, we, we take care of other humans and we need to take care of the planet we're living on. It's a beautiful way to look at it. I love

the idea of people who are proudly like rolling coal. It's just like proudly filthy. Like no one would be like, look at how dirty my toilet is. Yeah, exactly. It's a weird, it's a weird comparison. And it's a weird flex. And for more on this, see the frequently cited 2010 paper, climate change, human rights and moral thresholds. If you ask yourself, would I stab a million strangers? And the answer is no. Then all of us joining forces to combat global warming trends is within our scope of morality. Now, are we smart enough to save ourselves as a species? Well, I dug around looking at the Drake equation, which calculates how many trillions of planets might be sustaining millions of intelligent civilizations, and found that Frank Drake just passed away like last week,

September 2nd, 2022. So we have a little less intelligent life on this planet. But then there's the Fermi paradox, which is the great question of, if there are so many potential aliens, and one hypothesis is called the great filter, which basically says, once a civilization gets too advanced, it meets a barrier of some sort, which makes its detectability very rare. Essentially, our big brains snuff ourselves out. And we did a whole episode, the Astrobiology episode touches on this, but there's also an article on NASA's Astrobiology page casually titled, Do intelligent civilizations across the galaxies self-destruct? For better and worse, wear the test case. And it's about this great filter idea, and it mentions the work of

David Grinspoon, a planetary scientist and the former Astrobiology chair at the Library of Congress, who sees humans as, quote, the planet's most powerful and consequential force of nature. But marveling at our surroundings and appreciating them may be the key to saving it all. That's one of the beautiful things I think about studying geology is, you know, when you can pick up this rock and be like, well, this rock is two billion years old, I'm 25 years old, like learning something on that time scale and really understanding just how, in terms of the history of our planet, how small we are, it can be at times deeply eerie, but for the most part, very reassuring to feel like we are a small step in a long story that's

been ongoing for 4.5 billion years. I'm sure that that gives you so much perspective about just in terms of like the cut banks, texture crush, like this thing has been around for billions of years. We've got maybe 70, 80, you know, might as well just do your thing, but can I ask you questions from listeners? So ask rock people hard questions, and then go stare at the driveway, because the world is a tough but a glimmering place, like a rock. And Schmitty Thompson is not on social media because they are smarter than me, but they will be back next week for part two, answering your rock questions, their bios in the show notes. And if you attend a Skype a scientist after hours trivia for adults

on Thursdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, you will see them there a lot. Link on my website for that, plus so much else that we talked about at alleyward.com slash oligies slash geology. I'm at alleyward on Instagram and Twitter, oligies is on both at oligies. Smologies are shortened, G rated episodes, suitable for kids in all ages. Those are up at alleyward.com slash Smologies, linked in the show notes. Oligies merch has hats and totes and sweatshirts, all kinds of goodness. Thank you, Susan Hale, for managing that and so much more. Noel Dilworth does our scheduling. Erin Talbert admins the oligies podcast Facebook group with assists from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltes of the Comedy Podcast. You are that. Emily White, The Wordery makes professional

transcripts, Caleb Patton bleeps episodes, and those are up for free on our website at alleyward.com slash oligies slash extras. Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas and Mercedes Maitland of Mindjam Media. Edit Smologies. Kelliard Dwyer helps with the website. She can design yours and her links in the show notes. Nick Thorburn made the theme music, and the lead editor is the mystical man, Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media as well. If you stay long enough, you'll hear a secret, and this week's is that Gremmy got a molar extracted yesterday, and without me even having to ask, the vet gave it to me in a small glass tube, and I was so thrilled. It's in three chunks with these long roots. Do I make earrings? Do I make a necklace? Do I fabricate some kind of magic

dog wand that manifests cheese? I don't know, but her tooth is like a pegasus feather to me, and I will forever treasure it. Okay, go stare at a rock. Bye-bye. It's pure 100% rocks and pebbles. The hearty old fashioned flavor the whole family will enjoy.