Wonder

Where Anthony sees crystals and Holly sees a rock, Dr Eric Vandenberg sees atoms, and specifically, Eric counts the neutrons. Eric is a postdoc at the Adelaide University and part of the ARC Training Centre for Critical Resources for the Future, and he shrinks the solid Earth down to the subatomic scale to answer some of geology's biggest questions: how the first continents formed, how plate tecto...

Volcanologist Dr Hayden Dalton (University of Melbourne) joins Holly & Anthony with the science he's bringing to a fascinating human question: exactly how many hominin species were alive at the same time, in the same place, and were they really competing for the same resources? Or... has the apparent overlap in existing timelines been an artifact of imprecise dating? Hayden reveals that sc...

Pushing the frontiers of knowledge about our planet has never been so much fun! We've explored less of the ocean floor than we have the surface of Mars, so Dr Ron Hackney , director of ANZIC (the Australian New Zealand International Scientific Drilling Consortium), brought the ocean floor to us. Across three remarkable objects: a core from the fault that ruptured the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake; a...

We've directly observed less than 0.001% of the seafloor — so what's really going on down there? In this episode, Dr Stefan Löhr (ARC Future Fellow at the Adelaide University, and researcher with the Centre for Critical Resources for the Future) makes the case that the ocean floor is anything but a passive dumping ground for eroded continents. This will reshape the way you view the ocean -...

Critical Chromium: From Field Samples to Space Technology: How Do We Secure Supply? Exploring for critical chromium, from the ground up (to space!) Aerospace alloys, industrial protective coatings, stainless steel - chromium is literally everywhere in critical technology and in our kitchens, yet global supplies are stretched. So how do you hunt for chromium deposits? In this episode we journey thr...

💎 Carbonatites: To REE or Not to REE? Earth's strangest magma is carbonate-rich, comes from the mantle, and there's only ONE erupting on the planet right now. It's called a carbonatite, a rare igneous rock that hosts the world's largest rare earth element resources. But here's the plot twist: only about 10% of the ~600 carbonatites that have been found are actually rich in rar...

✨ The Weirdest Critical Metal You've Never Heard Of: Indium, Mine Waste & the Hunt for Hidden SuppliesYou've touched it hundreds of times. It's in your phone screen, your laptop, your solar panels, your TV. But unless you're a obsessed with periodic table trivia, you probably have no idea what it is. Meet indium. Its a critical metal so rare, yet so essential. But here's t...

Electric vehicles are the future. But here's the problem: India's lithium demand is skyrocketing, but the local supply is nearly zero. Enter pegmatites: fancy, crystal-studded rocks hiding in the Rajasthan desert that might just hold the key to India's battery revolution. Today we're back with Dr Louise Schoneveld and Dr Mario Iglesias-Martinez from CSIRO to tell the complete story...

When you connect wirelessly to anything, you have CSIRO to thank - they are the ones who invented Wi-Fi. But beyond the banknotes and wireless tech, Australia's national science agency is working on something equally important: methods to find the critical minerals that will power the future. Funded by the Australian Government, the India-Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership ran fr...

Australia's largest platinum deposit was hiding 70km from Perth CBD, and nobody had thought to look. In 2020, Chalice Mining drilled the very first hole at a site on the western edge of the Yilgarn Craton, ancient geology everyone had ignored because the exciting stuff was supposed to be much further away from the city.... That hole hit platinum, palladium, nickel, and copper. It was Australia's l...

The Earth bobs up and down like a yo-yo over geological time, and it's drawn a treasure map of the world's metals... What if the ground beneath your feet has been silently rising and falling for millions of years, driven not by earthquakes but by something churning deep in the mantle? And what if that same invisible process explains where the world's great copper, zinc, and nickel depo...

On today's episode of Wonder, Holly & Anthony are joined online by Dr Jacqueline Halpin from the University of Tasmania for an armchair geological tour of one of Australia's most spectacular and surprising places. If you've hiked the Overland Trail, wandered Salamanca, or stared up at kunanyi/Mt Wellington from the Hobart warf, this one is for you. Tasmania's geology is in-your-face, world-cla...

Did you know that humans are a type of lobe-finned fish!? Turns out our story begins 400 million years ago, when some very special fishies began making the move from sea to land, and we want to talk about it!! Dr Alice Clement heads up the Early Vertebrate Evolution Lab at Flinders University and has dedicated her career to understanding this history of life on Earth ... how the evolution of fish...

What does it take to discover a continent? Apparently four months in the Madagascan wilderness with no phone, some crunchy crickets to snack on, and a whole lot of time bouncing around on terrible roads in a beat-up Peugeot while thinking some very big thoughts. Professor Alan Collins from Adelaide University joins Holly and Anthony for a conversation that spans the formation of Gondwana, the nami...

The Rocky Mountains - lands of towering peaks glacier carved valleys, huge faults and unique geological heritage. In this episode of Wonder, we lace up our boots and head into the heart of the Rockies with the endlessly enthusiastic Nick Zentner, professor of geology at Central Washington University . Nick is a great storyteller, and together we unravel the colossal forces that built this iconic m...

We adored our time with writer, illustrator, educator, and 'not-geologist(!!!)', Vojta Hybl (aka @vojta.illustrates ). Look, we don't have better words to summarise these ideas than those Vojta gifted us throughout this conversation.... so, please, go listen & enjoy 💗 What a joy. Here you can Vojta's gorgeous new book, Rocks, A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell . Make su...

We start todays episode at the end of the world with Professor of Earth System Evolution, Ben Mills. Soon we're looking at his incredible grid cell model of the Earth and watching 537 million years of evolution play out in pixels: continents drifting, plants evolving, ice sheets growing, CO2 falling, climates flipping. Ben then really shows us something cool: a simulation wherein we build, or rath...

Todays show is something super special for you guys... Professor Ben Mills joins us in studio (all the way from the UK!) to walk us through what is genuinely one of the most interesting scientific ideas about our planet: the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia hypothesis posits that life doesn't just passively inhabit habitable conditions on the Earth ... rather, life itself regulates the atmosphere, oceans...

Today we continue our electrifying conversation with the hilarious Dr Chris Voisey about his impressive experiments and what they tell us about the mysterious ways of gold nugget formation. Find Chris and friends Nature Geoscience paper here . Thanks to the  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Geological Society of Australia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  for making this episode of Wonder possible! Make sure you're following Wonder wherever y...

Gold is one of the most chemically inert elements on the periodic table, and the fluids that carry it through the crust contain barely any of it… so how on Earth do we end up with enormous gold nuggets? Dr Chris Voisey, research fellow at Monash University, joins Wonder to talk about the geology of gold deposits, the mystery of how gold nuggets actually form, and the weird property of quartz cryst...

Fifty million years ago, two colliding tectonic plates began building the biggest mountain range on Earth today. Structural geologist Dr Melanie Finch from the University of Melbourne joins Wonder to explain exactly how these mountains are rising: deep in the crust, where it's too hot for rocks to snap, thin layers of rock flow like honey, slowly pushing everything above them skyward. These ar...

Thanks to the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Geological Society of Australia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for making this episode of Wonder possible! Find us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.thegeoco.com.au⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thegeoco⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Got questions? Get in touch- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠hello@thegeoco.com.au⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ GeoCo connects to you from the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. We pay our respects to their Elder...

It's the lightest metal on the periodic table and a crucial component in our modern technologies... but lithium also presents a fascinating cosmological problem. Professor Brian Fields joins WONDER podcast from the University of Illinois and shares with us the mysteries of primordial lithium formation in the universe - a story that takes us from interstellar dust to the big bang itself. Turns...

Professor Carl Spandler joins WONDER podcast to walk us through the lightest metal of all - lithium! We dive head first into Carl's world of critical minerals, from crystals the size of cars to manipulated markets and the 'science fights' behind the genesis of lithium ore deposits. Enjoy with us these explorations of the geological cycle of metal on Earth... soon enough these stories w...

On todays episode of WONDER, Holly & Anthony cross live to Washington State for a chat with Nick Zentner! Nick is a professor at Central Washington University and he chats to us live from Ellensberg (not Seattle; close but no cigar for Holly, can't tell you why that brain fade happened!!)... Here we cover the ancient kinship between Australian and North American geology, and also, we explore the s...