Geology Bites: An Earth and Planetary Science Podcast

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Torgeir Andersen on Ultrahigh-Pressure Metamorphism

Continental crust is buoyant, which is why continents stand high above the ocean floor. Yet rocks in western Norway contain microscopic grains of coesite, a form of quartz that forms only under pressures found about 100 km down. A slab of continent was dragged deep into the mantle, and then came back up. In this episode, Torgeir Andersen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oslo, explains how the rocks of Norway's Western Gneiss Region made that round trip some 400 million years ago, and why a few isolated diamond-bearing pods may record local overpressure rather than even greater depth. Illustrations and full transcript: https://geologybites.com/torgeir-andersen

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  Tony Watts on the Mechanics of Tectonic Plates

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  Brian Wernicke on Lithospheric Extension and the Basin and Range Province

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  Bernhard Steinberger on Whether Hotspots Are Fixed

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  Sonia Tikoo on the Moon's Magnetic Field

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  Steve Brusatte on the Dinosaurs That Survived the Asteroid

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  Alec Brenner on When Tectonic Plates First Moved

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  Steve Jacobsen on Materials in Extreme Environments

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  Esther Sumner on Turbidity Currents

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  Hal Levison on the Mission to Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids

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  Sara Pruss on the First Reef Builders

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  Michael Manga on Wet Eruptions

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  Carina Hoorn on the Evolution of the Amazon Basin

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  Anat Shahar on What Makes a Planet Habitable

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  Keith Klepeis on How Plutons Form

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  Tom Herring on High-Precision Geodesy