April 14, 2025 • 37 mins
Michael and Ryan welcome Cate Larsen, the "Groovy Geologist," for a lively convo on everything from Martian geology and James Hutton to conspiracy theories and the sparkle of geodes. They dig into the crossover of science and wellness culture, touching on jade eggs, nanodiamonds in medicine, and even a trip to Antarctica. Plus: a peek into the wild world of paleontology rivalries.
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Connect with Us: Michael Judson Berry | Ryan Wilder
Theme: “Happy Dance” by Mr. Smith is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License. “Running Fanfare” by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh my god, this is great.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Ryan.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
We don't even have to compete. I've already Kate wins
and easy, Easy, Kate.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
Your word next week is Hello. Hello, Welcome back to
White Noise.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Ryan, who is our fabulous guest judge.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Today we have Kate Larson with us, who is a
real in person geologist.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Also known as the Groovy Geologist, which I love. Hello.
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hi, thank you guys for having me and for waiting
a half hour while I was asleep.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You are You are one thousand and seventy five.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I can't even claim it's a time zone difference. We're
in the same time zone. I just had a really
late night.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
What were you up to? Anything? Fun?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
We were watching Severance and then my boyfriend and I
decided to like go on our whiteboard that we have
like mouted to our wall and just like list stuff.
We were just having like a Converse station and it
was like listing stuff and he's like, all right, we
got to put this up here and this up here.
And I was so tired, but we had a fun time.
We like making.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
LISTSA what were you listing?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah? I want to know that that's a personal question.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
That's fair, that's fair.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Wipe.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
What happens on a person's wipeboard is their own business.
Ran you had a late night too, so you both
you're working at the same level right now because Ryan,
you had a fun one.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I went to Kylie Minogue last night with every other
gay in New York City and it was fabulous. It
was a great show. And then we hopped in the
car and I drove two hours to get where I
am now. I'm Actually I was going to ask you, Kate,
where are you are you where I'm in because I'm
gambling New York based upon some of your socials. But
I'm in Woodstock.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I'm in Albany. No, we had to down the street,
down the street, up, up the street.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Up the street. I'm from Syracuse and I have family
in Albany, upstate New York.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
All the way, I think Syracuse is more Western tier. Yes, yes,
but if you're from New York City, then it's okay.
If you don't know any of the region names, and
then we laugh about that a little bit.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yes, well, that's why I'm in New York City now.
And it's just like everyone I talked to from here,
they're like, oh my god, Like Squarsdale is upstate. They're
like anything north of the Bridge you're going upstate. And
it's just.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Like, yeah, I'm from I'm from More Island, and I
thought that everything north of the city was upstate. I'd
be going to Vermont. Oh, I'm going upstate. You know.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
It gives me a giggle. Yeah, they considered Catskills the
upstate upstate.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
You have to leave, you have to leave Poughkeepsie. I
think to be considered upstate. I think that's my that
might be my that's fair my line.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I was gonna say, I think you got to get
to what is the I don't know wh I'm blanking
the lake that's just north of here, the big lake
that everyone goes to.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
My first thought was Lake George. But that's nowhere. Yeah,
like George right, oh, north of north of me George.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I feel like, but that's like upstate, Like that's like
I feel like you've really worked on that up part
by the time you get.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
To yeah, that's true, like you've committed.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
That's a rich person in Canada area.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
I was gonna say, yeah, you're just to skip away
from Canada at that point, so you are wait, Kate,
tell me about your podcast real quick, because we were
just chatting and you have a podcast.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
So I have a podcast called The Shist of It.
And that's a pun because there's a metamorphic rock called shist,
and I don't have one within arms reach. I should
probably put one of every wrap with an arms reach.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Doesn't have lots of mica in it.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It does have lots of mica in it. You find
lots of it. If you're New York City guys, then
the rocks that you walk on in Central Park is shist.
Oh it's Manhattan shist. It's got garnets in it, lots
of mica. If you ever see little little tiny holes
in the rock when you're sitting on it, that's people
who plucked out the garnets thinking that they were worth something.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Oh, and they're not worth anything.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
That's cool.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
But the podcast is about breaking down new publications like
the really complex, difficultly you know, difficult terminology and pros
of these scientific papers that is notoriously hard to read,
especially if you are not a geoscientist. Even for us,
(04:14):
it's hard for us to understand. So I perfected the
way to read these and the way to break them down,
and so I like to. I like to imagine that
I could do this every week. I definitely can't. I
used to, but it was a lot of fun to
talk about new things and kind of jump on it
before a bunch of like ifl science Facebook page misinterprets it,
(04:39):
and that a bunch of people get a bunch of
wrong information. It happens, happens so often.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
So you're kind of like the groovy John Playfair.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Oh I don't know who that is.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
He's the guy so I'm going to talk about him
in a minute. But he's the guy that rewrote all
of James Hutton stuff so that people could understand it.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Oh, okay, See, I know about James Hutton and I
have I have not read anything that's specifically his.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
I don't know who James Hutton is. Here are you're
gonna have to tell me?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Oh, James Sutton is the father of of of geology. Oh,
one of the there's there's many fathers of things. They're
the father of cytigraphy, that steno. Hutton was. I think
he was friends with Darwin. I believe Charles Darwin.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Just stopping right, keep talking, keep talking, nothing to talk about.
Welcome to my world. Ryan. You go into your ten
minutes with two minutes of information that sounds like proper
work and like an important thing that you're actually talking about.
Probably you're like, here's really cool, dense information. Let me
(05:46):
translate him for you.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, this is this is still an important topic topic too,
don't worry.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Thank you. Also, I do really enjoy your Instagram page,
by the way, groovy geologist friends to check it out. Oh,
how we study geology on Mars? You shared like presentation?
I think about that.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, that's like my favorite talk to give. I travel
the country, even in Canada, giving that, giving that talk
and museums and parks and stuff. I love it.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Oh wait is it?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
So I've defined this talk then because I find Mars fascinating.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Mars is my specialty. So I'm going to grad school
in the fall officially starting that studying Martian sedimentary rocks.
So Mars has been something that fascinated me my whole life,
and I really wanted to talk about how much I
love it and all the cool ways that you know,
Mars and geology come together. And so I made this
(06:37):
talk and I give that to all ages audiences. It's
my most popular, like most requested talk that I'm asked
to give. I've given it at national parks, museums, schools.
My local library is fun too. They do, they do
love those all the you know, there's like four kids
and like ten old people. Oh, they all have really
(07:01):
perfect mix adjacent questions.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Yeah, I think that in this post you're at the
bad Lands, which seems like a very.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, that was I ought to give that talk there
two years in a row because the Badlands National Park
has such similar geology to Mars, and so it's a
really good place to teach that and to get people
who are there to be like, oh my god, oh
I'm gonna go hike this tomorrow and have new thoughts
about it.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
There's actually a fairly famous well, I don't know if
it's famous, but there was a photo released by NASA
that they said was a photo of Mars, and when
you look at it very closely, there's a rodent that's
present in the lower right hand side of it that's
from the bad Lands, and it turns out it's just
(07:46):
a photo from the bad Lands.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Was it an April Fool's Day joke?
Speaker 3 (07:49):
No, it was this is actually falls into some sort
of like it falls into conspiracy theory because they did
publish it as if it was real and then ultimately
debunked because somebody's like, there's a what do you call it?
Rodent right there and you zoom in and it's very clearly.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Why does it feel like an intern somewhere screwed up?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
I think an intern somewhere screwed up.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
And then NASA was like, ugh, maybe they won't notice
because it looks really similar.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
That's the kind of stuff I wind up dealing with
those people who have like conspiracies. Oh, it's the worst
part of my job as a conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Do you have a favorite?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I have or like the wildest one.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
The wildest one is people who think that a rock
that is shaped like a thing is that thing preserved
in rock. So there are people who think that there
were once giants that roamed the earth and then the
Great Flood happened and then those giant Scotts turned to stone.
(08:52):
So they see a rock that looks kind of like
a face and they're like, that was a giant undisputable. Oh,
and I think that it's really sad because it just
throws away the fact that it's really cool that there
were so many circumstances to lead to this rock looking
that way. Why can't you just think that, Wow, that's
(09:14):
a beautiful sign. If you're religious, you can see it
as a beautiful, you know, sign from your God or whatever.
That a rock wound up looking like a face. That's
kind of cool. I have rocks that have smoonny faces,
and then I think it's meat. But to go so
far as to say that the governments and scientists of
the world are hiding covering something up.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I didn't know that there was a theory that there
were giants. That's really fine.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
It's called the mud fossil theory. If you wanted to
go look at it. There are Facebook groups and they
are absolutely out of their minds.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Are wonder if they're friends with the flat earthers. It
feels like a similar world where they're like, the world
is flat and it used to be inhabited by giant people. Well,
(10:09):
should we should we actually try this?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Ryan?
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I think we should so. I mean, I think it's
pretty clear. The word is geology. Kate. We're gonna talk.
We're gonna just spew b s for a solid ten
minutes apiece, and then you know, for whatever reason you
see fit, you pick the winner.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
So hey, and feel free to chime in because like
it's it's not so much what do you call them, Ryan,
it's not a ted talk. It's it's a bob talk.
It's a bob talk.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
We like it when it's particularly mean too.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
No, actually, Dawn, I cried last time. There were a
lot of tears after the last one.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
From the from the the archaeologist brought you to tears.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I mean, listen, little did he know that that was
a real trigger for Ryan.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
I have so many But.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
All right, so who who shall who go first? Now
that you now that you know us so well, let's
to put.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Ryan on the spot and go first. And I'm not
gonna get worked up thinking about last week.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
I'll try not to cry.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Great. I love when Ryan goes first because he usually
has great information that I can then piggyback off of. Okay, Ryan,
are you ready? I think so your time starts now?
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Cool. So I thought i'd start by going through a
little bit of history, and that's actually how I learned
a good bit about James Hutton and his boy toy,
John Playfair. Geology has been present since about or at
least in terms of what we've been able to record
from humans since the Greeks and fourth century BC, where
Aristotle observed or wrote down observations around geology. And it
(11:42):
actually seems like geology in terms of history was very
observational all the way up until about the seventeenth century,
so eleventh century, the shin Cow I'm probably not saying
that right, China observational geology. Ar Santa from Persia same
time period also also observational geology, and then our good
(12:06):
friend Leonardo da Vinci, also in the Renaissance period had
commentary on mountains and other significant geological formations. But it's
not so we get into the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
and you mentioned Steno a little bit earlier. Did I
get this right? Is he the one that penned No,
he's not the one that penned dinosaurs. Oh, he was
Danish and he acknowledges rock layering, and this is where
(12:29):
we start to get into the more like physical engagement.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah, that's what stratigraphy is. Rock layering essentially, stratigraphy well,
the study of the rocks and sequence like that.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
I feel like, I've got to find a way to
drop statigraphy into a conversation in this coming week.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
You got to go to somebody's somebody's party, if they
have a seven layer bean dip, you got to make
a comment on you know, wow, they strigraphic layers about
bean dip look spectacular.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
I feel like if it works, I'll be like, I
feel like this this strategy has some real stratigraphy to it,
maybe like a stretch Lord. But we get into eighteenth
century and we get to mister James Hutton, who is
(13:14):
a farm boy who is apparently acknowledging and starting to
look at like how the environment starts to shape the land,
and he creates uh uniformed uniformitarianism, uniform uniform uniformitarianism, which is,
(13:35):
in principle, the idea that the geology around us is
constantly changing as a result of how things operate around it,
whereas before it was castrophe catastrophianism, which is the idea
which is like big events take place that create the
world that we see today. Whereas he's like, no, this
(13:55):
is a very long standing, ongoing process that's common instantly
changing morphing.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
You can see how the change was from the church
idea to the science idea.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yes, and he was heckled like openly and constantly because
of this, and he was kind of fighting in the
face of fighting in the face of the Church. And
this is actually a little bit that we bridge into
Charles Lyle and Darwin. So Charles Lyle nineteenth century more
like Golden Age of geology, expanded on a lot of
(14:31):
James Hutton's work, and he and Charles and Darwin were
absolutely besties, which I'm going to talk a little bit about.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yes, that's what I was confused about.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Yeah, So Charles very much influenced Darwin. So I think
it's the idea of uniformitarianism is an idea of evolution,
which heavily influenced obviously Darwin's ideas around what we are
or what living species and the fact that if the
living world or the geological world is evolving, were very
(15:05):
likely evolving alongside of it to continue to adapt to
its changes. Also very long periods of time, right that
take place to make this happen. Oddly enough, Charles Lyle,
while Bessie's with Darwin, was super hesitant to endorse Darwin's
theories of evolution. He was like, eh, and he was
so yeah. So Charles Law was also quite a fastidious
(15:29):
gentleman who operated amongst the upper echelons of society, and
as a result was also kind of close at that time.
You know a lot of church leaders and church people
also quite prestigious, and his embracing of evolution would have
likely not downgraded but challenged his status amongst his peers.
(15:50):
So he danced around it. And it's kind of said
that he was actually extremely appreciative of Darwin's Darwin's work,
but didn't tell much later on start to really embrace it,
and even then was a little bit tepid in terms
of how he embraced it. Said that when Darwin wrote
on the Origin of Species that his biggest concern was
(16:11):
disappointing Lyle. Oh yeah, and actually I did go read
a little bit like there's no documented love affair there.
But Darwin did call him master and guide and actively
named various geological large hard geological formations after Lyle.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Weirdly, though, if there was a romance, it would have
been a love triangle. Because Lyell's wife Mary, studied sea
shells and she was interested in the evolution of snails
and was giving shells to Darwin. So she was collecting
shells giving them to Darwin for his studies, and she
(16:55):
was more accepting of the theory of evolution.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Than Charles was not.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Her name is Shelly, No.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It's Mary Horner.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
No, I'm just joking. Shelley sells seashells on the sea shot.
I was going to say, it actually kind of turns
out to your to your point, Kse, like a lot
of these folks were all in and related, they all
knew each other, they all kind of ran in the
same circles, and we're in reality, I think, very very
supportive of each other. But this is where I was
(17:24):
going to bridge into and kind of go off on
a in a different area, just because it came to
my mind and I needed a way to get there.
How much time do I have left, Michael, I got
to figure.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Out how two and a half minutes.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Oh, this is perfect. So the next thing that kind
of came to mind was geodes, and like the whole
culture around geodes, and just a preface like there's quite
obviously no known physical effect of geodes on humans that
I actually liked the way the research I did kind
(17:58):
of laid it out, which is there's no peer reviewed
science that says that there's an effect. Now that being said,
geodes fairy much likely have a placebo effect. So in
other words, because you believe it is, your mind allows
it to be. They are clearly a meditational tool because
they provide a point of focus. They are a form
of retail therapy. So if you enjoy them and you
(18:19):
look forward to purchasing them, it is an outlet for
stress relief. But I think the reality here is that
the power of a geode is that it's really kind
of a primordial a capsule of primorial soup that tells
a bit of history. Now, unfortunately, we actually have some
(18:40):
we have one kind of famous scandal in this space
and it revolves around a jade vaginal egg.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I've heard about this.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Our favorite gal, Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Gwyneth Paltrow on her group website sold the jade vaginal
egg that was intended to improve hormonal balance, enhance sexual energy,
strengthened pelvic floor. Now, actually, I think that's the one
thing that it may have actually contributed to, like the
ability to hold it up in there. That was the
that was the one thing.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
A could do the stone egg inside of you in there.
That sounds so uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
My favorite is to clear feminine energy blockages. She sold
this thing on her website and like obgyns went crazy
and they're like, okay, so jade is fairly porous, which
means it's collecting bacteria every time you use it, and
you're returning that bacteria. Oh no, back like bacteria you
(19:45):
probably don't want back there. So like the way one
obgo input, it is like, this is a clear class
action uti waiting to happen. And basically California find her
one hundred and forty f thousand dollars and forced her
to return the cost to to them. But as I
(20:08):
understand it, Gwyneth wishes them well so which I don't know.
That's the quote from from that skiing case where she
walked out and she's like, I wish you well anyway.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
The greatest, the greatest court case. We were saying she
deserves an oscar for that entire court case. Oh yeah, yeah,
well that was time, Ryan. I did not know that
that was the scandal. I just figure goop to me
is just irritating. So like her and her company, I was.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Like Gwyneth is just irritating. She's made it a brand
but entertaining. Yeah, Kate, are you ready for more?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Yes? Please?
Speaker 3 (20:53):
All right?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Ryan?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Ready set go?
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Oh gosh, okay, Hi Kate. I'm glad you're hydrating, and
let me start this up with I really like your
T shirt. It has a big flower on it and
it's happy.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I slept in it last night and wore it all
day yesterday.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Good free. You're living your best life. And I really
appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
I work from home.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Ugh, I have a very long commute in subways that
are in tunnels surrounded by rocks. Manhattan shist, Manhattan shist,
so much schist, which actually I can't wait to now,
like work that in conversation, look around for shift.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Belvider Castle is made of that rock, by the way,
just anyways gone gone, ooh, I'm.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Going to go hunting for garnets. I know that's my
mom's birthstone. I think. Okay, So when I think of geology,
I think of Broadway legend Carol Channing. She is a
fun YouTube rabbit hole someday. She was a really wacky
Broadway star from like the nineteen forties through to like
the nineteen nineties early two thousand. If you know the
(21:55):
show Hello Dolly, if you've ever heard of that, she
was the original Dolly. That was like her biggest thing.
I'm going to get to how I end up at
Carol Channing. Why I do that is because of a geologist.
So right before lockdown, or a couple years before lockdown,
I went to Antarctica with my family. This is really
cool through this company called Quark, and it's like one
(22:16):
of those smaller like expedition style trips, not like a
you know, Princess CRUs And so we get down there
on the day one we sort of split up into
little groups, and the way they design the trip is
there's all these different guides from around the world and
they all specialize in something different. And one of the
guides was this German geologist who's a professor in Germany
(22:37):
but like loves Antarctica. So he comes and works for
this company for like two months out of the year
during his break and just like is one of the guides.
So and it's sort of like you never know who
you're going to get depending on the day and where
you're going. So we just happen to end up in
his little boat, his little rubber boat with like the
six other people, and so everybody's kind of going off
(22:59):
with their different guides, and he was like, oh, you're lucky,
O it's me. I'm going to take you to aavonderful place.
None of the ota guides know about this, So we're
going to go and downta. It's a big secret. And
you're like, okay, it's a secret to like everybody who's
gone on this trip before you. Okay, great, So so
Vig and he's he's going. He's like, so I'm so
and so I'm a German Geolgic. I don't remember his name.
(23:20):
We're gonna come likeon so anyway, he that's not a
German name. So he takes us around. So all the
other what are those called, those little rubber boats with
little motors, dinghy dingy dinghy's I guess we'll come digg
as the dinghy's all dingy is gone. One direction our's
goals and theata direction. And so a little bit of
(23:41):
me was like, is this guy gonna murder us? But
we'll see. So we go around this big band, this
big you know, it's it's an articus, you know, iicy glacier,
you know, gorgeousness, and we come around and the water
is so dark. It's like this deep, like black navy
blue color. I don't know if you've if you've been there,
you're not.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Have you been to?
Speaker 1 (24:00):
An arch looks like, oh what's gorey?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I did?
Speaker 3 (24:04):
I didn't. I went.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
I was like, wow, I've never seen water like this.
And so we're sitting in this bay and he turns
off the motor and we're just sort of floating quietly
and there's a huge glacier in front of us, and
he was like, just give it a suck and give
it von minute Vi said all you would be an awe.
And a couple of minutes later, this mist comes over
the glacier and it's just absolutely beautiful. And then the
(24:25):
sun pops out and the whole bay just lights up.
And it turns it was full of black ice, and
which you can't it's like pure ice that's coming off
of the glacier. So for people who don't know black ice,
it's like ice, but it's completely it almost looks like
diamonds because it's just completely clear, so you can't really
see it. Turns out the bay was full of it,
but you didn't see it until the light hit it
(24:45):
just the right way, and then the whole bay just
sparkled like it was just full of these big, beautiful
diamonds and it was stunning. So it made me think
of diamonds, and well, he's a geologist, and so now
I associate him with diamonds and diamonds. I associate with
Carol Channing because she did the original Broadway version of
the show called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which they turned into
(25:05):
a movie with Maril Monroe, and that's where the song
Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend comes from. Oh, she
was the first one to sing it before, and she's
got this weird, raspy voice. It's very different from Marilyn
and she's like, damn mean, yeah. Lots of drag queens
play Carol Channing because she had this like wacky, deep,
raspy voice, and she was tall, and she had the
white hair, and she's sort of like, imagine IF's like
(25:28):
a box of tissues was on a spring and he
chopped like a muppet. That was Carol Channing and anyone
listening has seeing her, I am right, And she always
had diamonds and so but now this is where I'm
really So that's how Carol Channing and a German geologist
are forever fused in my brain. And so for the
(25:50):
rest of the trip. By the way, in Nautiga, he
was brilliant. I always wanted to be with him because
anytime we went her he would point out these really
cool rock formations and you know, just sort of go
up on these wonderful tangents, and he have some great
presentations on the trip. But so anyway, so my brain
went to Carol Channing though on diamonds, and so it's
curious to learn more about Also, a Carol Channing was
the first person to perform at the Super Bowl, the
(26:11):
first halftime performance, Wow, which is also amazing. How we
went from like Carol Channing singing diamonds or a girl's
best friend to like Beyonce and like just interpret and
doing these epic shows. So maybe what I end up
going down was trying to just sort of learn more
about diamonds. But then a friend right before I started
(26:33):
this told me that's not geology, that's gemology.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, I mean gemology of people who are really into
like the formation and the context of how minerals form,
that's mineralogy. That's geology, petrology. I mean there are minerals,
so like everything's connect connected, right, and geology encompasses like
(27:02):
the looking at stuff and making interpretations about how it
formed and what happened there. You'd have to understand mineralogy.
You have to understand petrology to make an interpretation about that.
So if I was going to find diamonds in a rock,
I'm like, oh, this was really deep rocky. There must
(27:23):
have been caimber light pipes somewhere coming up to bring
this deep, deep diamond to a much less deep rock area.
So you'd have to have some kind of understanding there.
But gemology is less of a science than mineralogy is
in terms of like the natural world. Gemology focuses on
(27:45):
like the optical natural, not like the the pretty properties
the things that we want out of gems and minerals
make jewelry and precious stuff out of Like that's that's gemology.
Those kinds of people understand the like the optical properties,
the ways that you cut it and polish it to
(28:06):
make it look the best. Study a lot of the
chemistry stuff without a lot of the deeper science. So
people who were genmologists are like a very hyper specific
kind of mineralogist. That makes sense.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yes, find a bunch of them on thirty seventh Street
in Midtown.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
But yeah, it was It was interesting though because I knew,
I know about how diamonds, you know, being the hardest
you know thing, but I didn't know that they came
from like the reason that they are is because they
come from so deep like when you said that something
so deep down. It was just interesting to be like
this to learn because I don't know much about them
to think that they what they're they developed in the mantle.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
I could not say for sure. I don't think it's
the mantle. I think it's like upper mantle. I can't
say for sure because I don't know enough about that.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Stuff is like, but then that it's brought up from
like like Lava, I saw this. There was this one
really interesting woman I think she's right, who had this
YouTube video that I watched all about it, and you know, I'm, oh,
what's the good. I'm still in German accent world Russian.
So she's like, we welcome to youtel page and I
have you know, diamonds. They started in the Manto and
(29:15):
then they brought up by the lava to higher up
and I was like, that's insane that diamonds could like
that's how they came up was through like volcans essentially
volcanoes from way back god knows when, but so cool
that you could use them to trace like this must
be if it surrounded by something. This must have come
from somewhere very deep and where that Actually, how much
time do I.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Left from you? I feel like every forty five seconds?
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Oh wait, but no, that got me into nano diamonds,
which is what I was excited about. So I didn't
know about nano diamonds until I read about this. That
there are diamonds the size of like two strands of
DNA that they think originated from when a meteor hit
Earth and hit diamonds that had been brought up during
that age. And so now we have nano diamonds which
they're using in science, Like I watched a very complicated
(30:02):
presentation on how they're using nanodiamonds to try and treat
prostate cancer because nanodiamonds can carry medication and it can
bring it. Can they can pass through the brain blood barrier,
And I think I said that right, and so now
it's like the next stage in medical research is using
nanodiamonds to carry medication through our body.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Oh my god, and you made it just in the
forty five I just did.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
And sorry, that was actually the real crux. I was
just having too much fun doing accents and talking about
Carol Channing. But where I yeah, that's actually where I
was going. Where I's like I and I didn't get
to do a really deep dive because like you were
saying about how you translate papers. Sorry, I'm just going
over time now, how you translate papers into things. The
problem I had in researching this was I didn't understand
(30:46):
any of it because it was I think it's at
a stage where like nobody's done that yet, or if
they have, I didn't find it. I really I watched
I because I was trying to read it, and it
was very it was beyond what I could understand because
I don't speak you know, medical, So I tried to
watch presentations on nano diamonds and their uses in the
medical field, and even still I was like, this is fascinating,
(31:09):
but I still don't fully get it. But using it
was like the diamonds and specifically the mineral around it.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
That they're using anyway, is it is it kim Was
it kimberlyight?
Speaker 1 (31:20):
I think so? That sounds right?
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, because you find them in that can you find
diamonds and kimberlight pipes that are like extending up from deeper.
Bring it up there. I'm very loosely educated about that
specific thing. I do not study tetrology or mineralogy. It's
(31:42):
a miracle that I passed those classes in college.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Well you have the hard part now, well maybe not
that hard, but I mean I.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Think it's easy ase to who our winner is today.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Well you had you had an amazing accents. I do
love a good impression, and that is that is so
so funny. I'd love to hear more about this German geologist.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
He was great. I wish I remembered him just like that.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
We were literally just like that.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, he was a fun, wacky dude. He gave really
solid like Miss Frizzle vibes if Miss Frizzle was a
German geology.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Yes, yes, Oh my gosh. I think I'm gonna go
with Ryan though, because I liked that you went with
You took like a history dive, and that's exactly what
I do. Every time I go to write a lesson
or research something or write a podcast episode, I wind
up doing deep dives into who knows who, how did
(32:38):
they do this? How are these people connect connected? And
how is this connected? I did that in college, and
I got like extra credit. I got like a like
a bonus point on my page because I wrote like
a whole second page about how these people knew.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Each all knew each other.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
And my professor was just like, you don't have to
do all that, and I was like, I know, it
was fun. I didn't find out like, yeah, it was
like an extra point. I didn't have like one hundred
and one. It was nothing less than one hundred, because
it was you know, it was college and I wasn't
great at this stuff yet.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
But I honestly I thought I had lost on the
on the on the impressions, because your impressions are so good,
pretty cool and funny.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Oh it's so good.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
But Kate, thank you very very much. I was like you, Kate,
you were like laughing at the impressions, and I was like, wow,
this is a right.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
I love impressions, but I also really love the I
love deep dives. I love seeing how I like to
see you guys realize just how connected not just all
of geoscience is, but how all of these people are connected.
And they all learned from each other, and they all
(33:47):
work together and collaborated, and we're still doing that. That's
something that is very normal in this field. And it's
it's funny when you compare to something like palaeontology, which
they're constantly beefing with each other over nothing bones bone wars. Oh,
that's your next week topic, bone wars, bone wars. Yeah,
(34:11):
you guys are going to talk about the bone wars
and I can recommend you a paleontologist if you wanted
to learn about yes it please.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Okay, So I actually think I read about this, this
came up in my research for this, and like they're
nasty to each other. To each other, Yeah, they're like
really like they're mean to each other.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Why has Ryan Murphy not gotten on this? This sounds
like a great Like few series like forget Hollywood starts
throwing paleontologists.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
It's a fun thing to like slowly be learning about
here and there, and just I'm meeting more paleontologists like
through my work because there's a lot of overlap, and
so I meet paleontologists who have been in the field,
you know, for decades, and they've all got beef with
each each other. They've all got stories to tell. I've
heard stories from like srit different paleontologists about this one
(35:06):
person who I've never met. I don't remember what their
name is, but they're like the worst person ever and
everyone hates them. And I'm like, this is insane if
you guys are beefing over this and they're all like
and they're all in like the same like research groups
in the city and in the West, I guess. But
the Bone Wars is like a really interesting one because
that is like and I'm going to the place. I'm
(35:29):
going to Canyon City in Colorado in a few weeks,
and that is like where the first dinosaur stuff was
found by one of the people in the Bone Wars stuff.
So that was a pretty cool That's I'm excited to
go there and just be learning about that and then
go nuts talking about it.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Please well and please post about it.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Everyone can find you at Groovy Geologist and if they
want to, like, see you speak, do you do? Do
you post what where you're speaking? Engagements are or like
what you'll do to.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I usually about that on my Instagram. I'm giving a
talk at the main gem In Mineral Museum in a
couple of weeks. Yeah, they April twenty six, I think
is the day that we're going to I'm giving the talk.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Well, thank you so much, Kate. You can finally go.
We have coffee. Do what you need to do start
your day. But thank you for starting actually starting your
day with us. Yeah, bus, I really appreciate you.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Now, this is the perfect thing to wake up and do.
This is actually just perfect. Every morning I wake up
and I want to talk about rocks and yeah, not
everyone around me wants to do that first thing in
the morning. Ryan, my bourther's name is Ryan. Oh.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
I was like. I was like, but I was like,
I know this is I just did you guys, see,
you're gonna make me cry. I told you.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Oh, there he goes again. Wait, what we'll tell Ryan that,
you know he needs to step it up in his
rock chat first thing in the morning.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Then here we go.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I will see you next week for Bone Wars.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
The name La
Oh my god, this is great.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Ryan.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
We don't even have to compete. I've already Kate wins
and easy, Easy, Kate.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
Your word next week is Hello. Hello, Welcome back to
White Noise.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Ryan, who is our fabulous guest judge.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Today we have Kate Larson with us, who is a
real in person geologist.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Also known as the Groovy Geologist, which I love. Hello.
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hi, thank you guys for having me and for waiting
a half hour while I was asleep.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You are You are one thousand and seventy five.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I can't even claim it's a time zone difference. We're
in the same time zone. I just had a really
late night.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
What were you up to? Anything? Fun?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
We were watching Severance and then my boyfriend and I
decided to like go on our whiteboard that we have
like mouted to our wall and just like list stuff.
We were just having like a Converse station and it
was like listing stuff and he's like, all right, we
got to put this up here and this up here.
And I was so tired, but we had a fun time.
We like making.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
LISTSA what were you listing?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah? I want to know that that's a personal question.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
That's fair, that's fair.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Wipe.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
What happens on a person's wipeboard is their own business.
Ran you had a late night too, so you both
you're working at the same level right now because Ryan,
you had a fun one.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I went to Kylie Minogue last night with every other
gay in New York City and it was fabulous. It
was a great show. And then we hopped in the
car and I drove two hours to get where I
am now. I'm Actually I was going to ask you, Kate,
where are you are you where I'm in because I'm
gambling New York based upon some of your socials. But
I'm in Woodstock.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I'm in Albany. No, we had to down the street,
down the street, up, up the street.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Up the street. I'm from Syracuse and I have family
in Albany, upstate New York.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
All the way, I think Syracuse is more Western tier. Yes, yes,
but if you're from New York City, then it's okay.
If you don't know any of the region names, and
then we laugh about that a little bit.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yes, well, that's why I'm in New York City now.
And it's just like everyone I talked to from here,
they're like, oh my god, Like Squarsdale is upstate. They're
like anything north of the Bridge you're going upstate. And
it's just.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Like, yeah, I'm from I'm from More Island, and I
thought that everything north of the city was upstate. I'd
be going to Vermont. Oh, I'm going upstate. You know.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
It gives me a giggle. Yeah, they considered Catskills the
upstate upstate.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
You have to leave, you have to leave Poughkeepsie. I
think to be considered upstate. I think that's my that
might be my that's fair my line.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I was gonna say, I think you got to get
to what is the I don't know wh I'm blanking
the lake that's just north of here, the big lake
that everyone goes to.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
My first thought was Lake George. But that's nowhere. Yeah,
like George right, oh, north of north of me George.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I feel like, but that's like upstate, Like that's like
I feel like you've really worked on that up part
by the time you get.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
To yeah, that's true, like you've committed.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
That's a rich person in Canada area.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
I was gonna say, yeah, you're just to skip away
from Canada at that point, so you are wait, Kate,
tell me about your podcast real quick, because we were
just chatting and you have a podcast.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
So I have a podcast called The Shist of It.
And that's a pun because there's a metamorphic rock called shist,
and I don't have one within arms reach. I should
probably put one of every wrap with an arms reach.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Doesn't have lots of mica in it.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It does have lots of mica in it. You find
lots of it. If you're New York City guys, then
the rocks that you walk on in Central Park is shist.
Oh it's Manhattan shist. It's got garnets in it, lots
of mica. If you ever see little little tiny holes
in the rock when you're sitting on it, that's people
who plucked out the garnets thinking that they were worth something.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Oh, and they're not worth anything.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
That's cool.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
But the podcast is about breaking down new publications like
the really complex, difficultly you know, difficult terminology and pros
of these scientific papers that is notoriously hard to read,
especially if you are not a geoscientist. Even for us,
(04:14):
it's hard for us to understand. So I perfected the
way to read these and the way to break them down,
and so I like to. I like to imagine that
I could do this every week. I definitely can't. I
used to, but it was a lot of fun to
talk about new things and kind of jump on it
before a bunch of like ifl science Facebook page misinterprets it,
(04:39):
and that a bunch of people get a bunch of
wrong information. It happens, happens so often.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
So you're kind of like the groovy John Playfair.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Oh I don't know who that is.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
He's the guy so I'm going to talk about him
in a minute. But he's the guy that rewrote all
of James Hutton stuff so that people could understand it.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Oh, okay, See, I know about James Hutton and I
have I have not read anything that's specifically his.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
I don't know who James Hutton is. Here are you're
gonna have to tell me?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Oh, James Sutton is the father of of of geology. Oh,
one of the there's there's many fathers of things. They're
the father of cytigraphy, that steno. Hutton was. I think
he was friends with Darwin. I believe Charles Darwin.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Just stopping right, keep talking, keep talking, nothing to talk about.
Welcome to my world. Ryan. You go into your ten
minutes with two minutes of information that sounds like proper
work and like an important thing that you're actually talking about.
Probably you're like, here's really cool, dense information. Let me
(05:46):
translate him for you.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, this is this is still an important topic topic too,
don't worry.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Thank you. Also, I do really enjoy your Instagram page,
by the way, groovy geologist friends to check it out. Oh,
how we study geology on Mars? You shared like presentation?
I think about that.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, that's like my favorite talk to give. I travel
the country, even in Canada, giving that, giving that talk
and museums and parks and stuff. I love it.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Oh wait is it?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
So I've defined this talk then because I find Mars fascinating.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Mars is my specialty. So I'm going to grad school
in the fall officially starting that studying Martian sedimentary rocks.
So Mars has been something that fascinated me my whole life,
and I really wanted to talk about how much I
love it and all the cool ways that you know,
Mars and geology come together. And so I made this
(06:37):
talk and I give that to all ages audiences. It's
my most popular, like most requested talk that I'm asked
to give. I've given it at national parks, museums, schools.
My local library is fun too. They do, they do
love those all the you know, there's like four kids
and like ten old people. Oh, they all have really
(07:01):
perfect mix adjacent questions.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Yeah, I think that in this post you're at the
bad Lands, which seems like a very.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, that was I ought to give that talk there
two years in a row because the Badlands National Park
has such similar geology to Mars, and so it's a
really good place to teach that and to get people
who are there to be like, oh my god, oh
I'm gonna go hike this tomorrow and have new thoughts
about it.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
There's actually a fairly famous well, I don't know if
it's famous, but there was a photo released by NASA
that they said was a photo of Mars, and when
you look at it very closely, there's a rodent that's
present in the lower right hand side of it that's
from the bad Lands, and it turns out it's just
(07:46):
a photo from the bad Lands.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Was it an April Fool's Day joke?
Speaker 3 (07:49):
No, it was this is actually falls into some sort
of like it falls into conspiracy theory because they did
publish it as if it was real and then ultimately
debunked because somebody's like, there's a what do you call it?
Rodent right there and you zoom in and it's very clearly.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Why does it feel like an intern somewhere screwed up?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
I think an intern somewhere screwed up.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
And then NASA was like, ugh, maybe they won't notice
because it looks really similar.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
That's the kind of stuff I wind up dealing with
those people who have like conspiracies. Oh, it's the worst
part of my job as a conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Do you have a favorite?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I have or like the wildest one.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
The wildest one is people who think that a rock
that is shaped like a thing is that thing preserved
in rock. So there are people who think that there
were once giants that roamed the earth and then the
Great Flood happened and then those giant Scotts turned to stone.
(08:52):
So they see a rock that looks kind of like
a face and they're like, that was a giant undisputable. Oh,
and I think that it's really sad because it just
throws away the fact that it's really cool that there
were so many circumstances to lead to this rock looking
that way. Why can't you just think that, Wow, that's
(09:14):
a beautiful sign. If you're religious, you can see it
as a beautiful, you know, sign from your God or whatever.
That a rock wound up looking like a face. That's
kind of cool. I have rocks that have smoonny faces,
and then I think it's meat. But to go so
far as to say that the governments and scientists of
the world are hiding covering something up.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I didn't know that there was a theory that there
were giants. That's really fine.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
It's called the mud fossil theory. If you wanted to
go look at it. There are Facebook groups and they
are absolutely out of their minds.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Are wonder if they're friends with the flat earthers. It
feels like a similar world where they're like, the world
is flat and it used to be inhabited by giant people. Well,
(10:09):
should we should we actually try this?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Ryan?
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I think we should so. I mean, I think it's
pretty clear. The word is geology. Kate. We're gonna talk.
We're gonna just spew b s for a solid ten
minutes apiece, and then you know, for whatever reason you
see fit, you pick the winner.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
So hey, and feel free to chime in because like
it's it's not so much what do you call them, Ryan,
it's not a ted talk. It's it's a bob talk.
It's a bob talk.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
We like it when it's particularly mean too.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
No, actually, Dawn, I cried last time. There were a
lot of tears after the last one.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
From the from the the archaeologist brought you to tears.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I mean, listen, little did he know that that was
a real trigger for Ryan.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
I have so many But.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
All right, so who who shall who go first? Now
that you now that you know us so well, let's
to put.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Ryan on the spot and go first. And I'm not
gonna get worked up thinking about last week.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
I'll try not to cry.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Great. I love when Ryan goes first because he usually
has great information that I can then piggyback off of. Okay, Ryan,
are you ready? I think so your time starts now?
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Cool. So I thought i'd start by going through a
little bit of history, and that's actually how I learned
a good bit about James Hutton and his boy toy,
John Playfair. Geology has been present since about or at
least in terms of what we've been able to record
from humans since the Greeks and fourth century BC, where
Aristotle observed or wrote down observations around geology. And it
(11:42):
actually seems like geology in terms of history was very
observational all the way up until about the seventeenth century,
so eleventh century, the shin Cow I'm probably not saying
that right, China observational geology. Ar Santa from Persia same
time period also also observational geology, and then our good
(12:06):
friend Leonardo da Vinci, also in the Renaissance period had
commentary on mountains and other significant geological formations. But it's
not so we get into the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
and you mentioned Steno a little bit earlier. Did I
get this right? Is he the one that penned No,
he's not the one that penned dinosaurs. Oh, he was
Danish and he acknowledges rock layering, and this is where
(12:29):
we start to get into the more like physical engagement.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah, that's what stratigraphy is. Rock layering essentially, stratigraphy well,
the study of the rocks and sequence like that.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
I feel like, I've got to find a way to
drop statigraphy into a conversation in this coming week.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
You got to go to somebody's somebody's party, if they
have a seven layer bean dip, you got to make
a comment on you know, wow, they strigraphic layers about
bean dip look spectacular.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
I feel like if it works, I'll be like, I
feel like this this strategy has some real stratigraphy to it,
maybe like a stretch Lord. But we get into eighteenth
century and we get to mister James Hutton, who is
(13:14):
a farm boy who is apparently acknowledging and starting to
look at like how the environment starts to shape the land,
and he creates uh uniformed uniformitarianism, uniform uniform uniformitarianism, which is,
(13:35):
in principle, the idea that the geology around us is
constantly changing as a result of how things operate around it,
whereas before it was castrophe catastrophianism, which is the idea
which is like big events take place that create the
world that we see today. Whereas he's like, no, this
(13:55):
is a very long standing, ongoing process that's common instantly
changing morphing.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
You can see how the change was from the church
idea to the science idea.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yes, and he was heckled like openly and constantly because
of this, and he was kind of fighting in the
face of fighting in the face of the Church. And
this is actually a little bit that we bridge into
Charles Lyle and Darwin. So Charles Lyle nineteenth century more
like Golden Age of geology, expanded on a lot of
(14:31):
James Hutton's work, and he and Charles and Darwin were
absolutely besties, which I'm going to talk a little bit about.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yes, that's what I was confused about.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Yeah, So Charles very much influenced Darwin. So I think
it's the idea of uniformitarianism is an idea of evolution,
which heavily influenced obviously Darwin's ideas around what we are
or what living species and the fact that if the
living world or the geological world is evolving, were very
(15:05):
likely evolving alongside of it to continue to adapt to
its changes. Also very long periods of time, right that
take place to make this happen. Oddly enough, Charles Lyle,
while Bessie's with Darwin, was super hesitant to endorse Darwin's
theories of evolution. He was like, eh, and he was
so yeah. So Charles Law was also quite a fastidious
(15:29):
gentleman who operated amongst the upper echelons of society, and
as a result was also kind of close at that time.
You know a lot of church leaders and church people
also quite prestigious, and his embracing of evolution would have
likely not downgraded but challenged his status amongst his peers.
(15:50):
So he danced around it. And it's kind of said
that he was actually extremely appreciative of Darwin's Darwin's work,
but didn't tell much later on start to really embrace it,
and even then was a little bit tepid in terms
of how he embraced it. Said that when Darwin wrote
on the Origin of Species that his biggest concern was
(16:11):
disappointing Lyle. Oh yeah, and actually I did go read
a little bit like there's no documented love affair there.
But Darwin did call him master and guide and actively
named various geological large hard geological formations after Lyle.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Weirdly, though, if there was a romance, it would have
been a love triangle. Because Lyell's wife Mary, studied sea
shells and she was interested in the evolution of snails
and was giving shells to Darwin. So she was collecting
shells giving them to Darwin for his studies, and she
(16:55):
was more accepting of the theory of evolution.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Than Charles was not.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Her name is Shelly, No.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It's Mary Horner.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
No, I'm just joking. Shelley sells seashells on the sea shot.
I was going to say, it actually kind of turns
out to your to your point, Kse, like a lot
of these folks were all in and related, they all
knew each other, they all kind of ran in the
same circles, and we're in reality, I think, very very
supportive of each other. But this is where I was
(17:24):
going to bridge into and kind of go off on
a in a different area, just because it came to
my mind and I needed a way to get there.
How much time do I have left, Michael, I got
to figure.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Out how two and a half minutes.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Oh, this is perfect. So the next thing that kind
of came to mind was geodes, and like the whole
culture around geodes, and just a preface like there's quite
obviously no known physical effect of geodes on humans that
I actually liked the way the research I did kind
(17:58):
of laid it out, which is there's no peer reviewed
science that says that there's an effect. Now that being said,
geodes fairy much likely have a placebo effect. So in
other words, because you believe it is, your mind allows
it to be. They are clearly a meditational tool because
they provide a point of focus. They are a form
of retail therapy. So if you enjoy them and you
(18:19):
look forward to purchasing them, it is an outlet for
stress relief. But I think the reality here is that
the power of a geode is that it's really kind
of a primordial a capsule of primorial soup that tells
a bit of history. Now, unfortunately, we actually have some
(18:40):
we have one kind of famous scandal in this space
and it revolves around a jade vaginal egg.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I've heard about this.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Our favorite gal, Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Gwyneth Paltrow on her group website sold the jade vaginal
egg that was intended to improve hormonal balance, enhance sexual energy,
strengthened pelvic floor. Now, actually, I think that's the one
thing that it may have actually contributed to, like the
ability to hold it up in there. That was the
that was the one thing.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
A could do the stone egg inside of you in there.
That sounds so uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
My favorite is to clear feminine energy blockages. She sold
this thing on her website and like obgyns went crazy
and they're like, okay, so jade is fairly porous, which
means it's collecting bacteria every time you use it, and
you're returning that bacteria. Oh no, back like bacteria you
(19:45):
probably don't want back there. So like the way one
obgo input, it is like, this is a clear class
action uti waiting to happen. And basically California find her
one hundred and forty f thousand dollars and forced her
to return the cost to to them. But as I
(20:08):
understand it, Gwyneth wishes them well so which I don't know.
That's the quote from from that skiing case where she
walked out and she's like, I wish you well anyway.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
The greatest, the greatest court case. We were saying she
deserves an oscar for that entire court case. Oh yeah, yeah,
well that was time, Ryan. I did not know that
that was the scandal. I just figure goop to me
is just irritating. So like her and her company, I was.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Like Gwyneth is just irritating. She's made it a brand
but entertaining. Yeah, Kate, are you ready for more?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Yes? Please?
Speaker 3 (20:53):
All right?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Ryan?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Ready set go?
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Oh gosh, okay, Hi Kate. I'm glad you're hydrating, and
let me start this up with I really like your
T shirt. It has a big flower on it and
it's happy.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I slept in it last night and wore it all
day yesterday.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Good free. You're living your best life. And I really
appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
I work from home.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Ugh, I have a very long commute in subways that
are in tunnels surrounded by rocks. Manhattan shist, Manhattan shist,
so much schist, which actually I can't wait to now,
like work that in conversation, look around for shift.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Belvider Castle is made of that rock, by the way,
just anyways gone gone, ooh, I'm.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Going to go hunting for garnets. I know that's my
mom's birthstone. I think. Okay, So when I think of geology,
I think of Broadway legend Carol Channing. She is a
fun YouTube rabbit hole someday. She was a really wacky
Broadway star from like the nineteen forties through to like
the nineteen nineties early two thousand. If you know the
(21:55):
show Hello Dolly, if you've ever heard of that, she
was the original Dolly. That was like her biggest thing.
I'm going to get to how I end up at
Carol Channing. Why I do that is because of a geologist.
So right before lockdown, or a couple years before lockdown,
I went to Antarctica with my family. This is really
cool through this company called Quark, and it's like one
(22:16):
of those smaller like expedition style trips, not like a
you know, Princess CRUs And so we get down there
on the day one we sort of split up into
little groups, and the way they design the trip is
there's all these different guides from around the world and
they all specialize in something different. And one of the
guides was this German geologist who's a professor in Germany
(22:37):
but like loves Antarctica. So he comes and works for
this company for like two months out of the year
during his break and just like is one of the guides.
So and it's sort of like you never know who
you're going to get depending on the day and where
you're going. So we just happen to end up in
his little boat, his little rubber boat with like the
six other people, and so everybody's kind of going off
(22:59):
with their different guides, and he was like, oh, you're lucky,
O it's me. I'm going to take you to aavonderful place.
None of the ota guides know about this, So we're
going to go and downta. It's a big secret. And
you're like, okay, it's a secret to like everybody who's
gone on this trip before you. Okay, great, So so
Vig and he's he's going. He's like, so I'm so
and so I'm a German Geolgic. I don't remember his name.
(23:20):
We're gonna come likeon so anyway, he that's not a
German name. So he takes us around. So all the
other what are those called, those little rubber boats with
little motors, dinghy dingy dinghy's I guess we'll come digg
as the dinghy's all dingy is gone. One direction our's
goals and theata direction. And so a little bit of
(23:41):
me was like, is this guy gonna murder us? But
we'll see. So we go around this big band, this
big you know, it's it's an articus, you know, iicy glacier,
you know, gorgeousness, and we come around and the water
is so dark. It's like this deep, like black navy
blue color. I don't know if you've if you've been there,
you're not.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Have you been to?
Speaker 1 (24:00):
An arch looks like, oh what's gorey?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I did?
Speaker 3 (24:04):
I didn't. I went.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
I was like, wow, I've never seen water like this.
And so we're sitting in this bay and he turns
off the motor and we're just sort of floating quietly
and there's a huge glacier in front of us, and
he was like, just give it a suck and give
it von minute Vi said all you would be an awe.
And a couple of minutes later, this mist comes over
the glacier and it's just absolutely beautiful. And then the
(24:25):
sun pops out and the whole bay just lights up.
And it turns it was full of black ice, and
which you can't it's like pure ice that's coming off
of the glacier. So for people who don't know black ice,
it's like ice, but it's completely it almost looks like
diamonds because it's just completely clear, so you can't really
see it. Turns out the bay was full of it,
but you didn't see it until the light hit it
(24:45):
just the right way, and then the whole bay just
sparkled like it was just full of these big, beautiful
diamonds and it was stunning. So it made me think
of diamonds, and well, he's a geologist, and so now
I associate him with diamonds and diamonds. I associate with
Carol Channing because she did the original Broadway version of
the show called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which they turned into
(25:05):
a movie with Maril Monroe, and that's where the song
Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend comes from. Oh, she
was the first one to sing it before, and she's
got this weird, raspy voice. It's very different from Marilyn
and she's like, damn mean, yeah. Lots of drag queens
play Carol Channing because she had this like wacky, deep,
raspy voice, and she was tall, and she had the
white hair, and she's sort of like, imagine IF's like
(25:28):
a box of tissues was on a spring and he
chopped like a muppet. That was Carol Channing and anyone
listening has seeing her, I am right, And she always
had diamonds and so but now this is where I'm
really So that's how Carol Channing and a German geologist
are forever fused in my brain. And so for the
(25:50):
rest of the trip. By the way, in Nautiga, he
was brilliant. I always wanted to be with him because
anytime we went her he would point out these really
cool rock formations and you know, just sort of go
up on these wonderful tangents, and he have some great
presentations on the trip. But so anyway, so my brain
went to Carol Channing though on diamonds, and so it's
curious to learn more about Also, a Carol Channing was
the first person to perform at the Super Bowl, the
(26:11):
first halftime performance, Wow, which is also amazing. How we
went from like Carol Channing singing diamonds or a girl's
best friend to like Beyonce and like just interpret and
doing these epic shows. So maybe what I end up
going down was trying to just sort of learn more
about diamonds. But then a friend right before I started
(26:33):
this told me that's not geology, that's gemology.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, I mean gemology of people who are really into
like the formation and the context of how minerals form,
that's mineralogy. That's geology, petrology. I mean there are minerals,
so like everything's connect connected, right, and geology encompasses like
(27:02):
the looking at stuff and making interpretations about how it
formed and what happened there. You'd have to understand mineralogy.
You have to understand petrology to make an interpretation about that.
So if I was going to find diamonds in a rock,
I'm like, oh, this was really deep rocky. There must
(27:23):
have been caimber light pipes somewhere coming up to bring
this deep, deep diamond to a much less deep rock area.
So you'd have to have some kind of understanding there.
But gemology is less of a science than mineralogy is
in terms of like the natural world. Gemology focuses on
(27:45):
like the optical natural, not like the the pretty properties
the things that we want out of gems and minerals
make jewelry and precious stuff out of Like that's that's gemology.
Those kinds of people understand the like the optical properties,
the ways that you cut it and polish it to
(28:06):
make it look the best. Study a lot of the
chemistry stuff without a lot of the deeper science. So
people who were genmologists are like a very hyper specific
kind of mineralogist. That makes sense.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yes, find a bunch of them on thirty seventh Street
in Midtown.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
But yeah, it was It was interesting though because I knew,
I know about how diamonds, you know, being the hardest
you know thing, but I didn't know that they came
from like the reason that they are is because they
come from so deep like when you said that something
so deep down. It was just interesting to be like
this to learn because I don't know much about them
to think that they what they're they developed in the mantle.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
I could not say for sure. I don't think it's
the mantle. I think it's like upper mantle. I can't
say for sure because I don't know enough about that.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Stuff is like, but then that it's brought up from
like like Lava, I saw this. There was this one
really interesting woman I think she's right, who had this
YouTube video that I watched all about it, and you know, I'm, oh,
what's the good. I'm still in German accent world Russian.
So she's like, we welcome to youtel page and I
have you know, diamonds. They started in the Manto and
(29:15):
then they brought up by the lava to higher up
and I was like, that's insane that diamonds could like
that's how they came up was through like volcans essentially
volcanoes from way back god knows when, but so cool
that you could use them to trace like this must
be if it surrounded by something. This must have come
from somewhere very deep and where that Actually, how much
time do I.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Left from you? I feel like every forty five seconds?
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Oh wait, but no, that got me into nano diamonds,
which is what I was excited about. So I didn't
know about nano diamonds until I read about this. That
there are diamonds the size of like two strands of
DNA that they think originated from when a meteor hit
Earth and hit diamonds that had been brought up during
that age. And so now we have nano diamonds which
they're using in science, Like I watched a very complicated
(30:02):
presentation on how they're using nanodiamonds to try and treat
prostate cancer because nanodiamonds can carry medication and it can
bring it. Can they can pass through the brain blood barrier,
And I think I said that right, and so now
it's like the next stage in medical research is using
nanodiamonds to carry medication through our body.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Oh my god, and you made it just in the
forty five I just did.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
And sorry, that was actually the real crux. I was
just having too much fun doing accents and talking about
Carol Channing. But where I yeah, that's actually where I
was going. Where I's like I and I didn't get
to do a really deep dive because like you were
saying about how you translate papers. Sorry, I'm just going
over time now, how you translate papers into things. The
problem I had in researching this was I didn't understand
(30:46):
any of it because it was I think it's at
a stage where like nobody's done that yet, or if
they have, I didn't find it. I really I watched
I because I was trying to read it, and it
was very it was beyond what I could understand because
I don't speak you know, medical, So I tried to
watch presentations on nano diamonds and their uses in the
medical field, and even still I was like, this is fascinating,
(31:09):
but I still don't fully get it. But using it
was like the diamonds and specifically the mineral around it.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
That they're using anyway, is it is it kim Was
it kimberlyight?
Speaker 1 (31:20):
I think so? That sounds right?
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, because you find them in that can you find
diamonds and kimberlight pipes that are like extending up from deeper.
Bring it up there. I'm very loosely educated about that
specific thing. I do not study tetrology or mineralogy. It's
(31:42):
a miracle that I passed those classes in college.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Well you have the hard part now, well maybe not
that hard, but I mean I.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Think it's easy ase to who our winner is today.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Well you had you had an amazing accents. I do
love a good impression, and that is that is so
so funny. I'd love to hear more about this German geologist.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
He was great. I wish I remembered him just like that.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
We were literally just like that.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, he was a fun, wacky dude. He gave really
solid like Miss Frizzle vibes if Miss Frizzle was a
German geology.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Yes, yes, Oh my gosh. I think I'm gonna go
with Ryan though, because I liked that you went with
You took like a history dive, and that's exactly what
I do. Every time I go to write a lesson
or research something or write a podcast episode, I wind
up doing deep dives into who knows who, how did
(32:38):
they do this? How are these people connect connected? And
how is this connected? I did that in college, and
I got like extra credit. I got like a like
a bonus point on my page because I wrote like
a whole second page about how these people knew.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Each all knew each other.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
And my professor was just like, you don't have to
do all that, and I was like, I know, it
was fun. I didn't find out like, yeah, it was
like an extra point. I didn't have like one hundred
and one. It was nothing less than one hundred, because
it was you know, it was college and I wasn't
great at this stuff yet.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
But I honestly I thought I had lost on the
on the on the impressions, because your impressions are so good,
pretty cool and funny.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Oh it's so good.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
But Kate, thank you very very much. I was like you, Kate,
you were like laughing at the impressions, and I was like, wow,
this is a right.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
I love impressions, but I also really love the I
love deep dives. I love seeing how I like to
see you guys realize just how connected not just all
of geoscience is, but how all of these people are connected.
And they all learned from each other, and they all
(33:47):
work together and collaborated, and we're still doing that. That's
something that is very normal in this field. And it's
it's funny when you compare to something like palaeontology, which
they're constantly beefing with each other over nothing bones bone wars. Oh,
that's your next week topic, bone wars, bone wars. Yeah,
(34:11):
you guys are going to talk about the bone wars
and I can recommend you a paleontologist if you wanted
to learn about yes it please.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Okay, So I actually think I read about this, this
came up in my research for this, and like they're
nasty to each other. To each other, Yeah, they're like
really like they're mean to each other.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Why has Ryan Murphy not gotten on this? This sounds
like a great Like few series like forget Hollywood starts
throwing paleontologists.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
It's a fun thing to like slowly be learning about
here and there, and just I'm meeting more paleontologists like
through my work because there's a lot of overlap, and
so I meet paleontologists who have been in the field,
you know, for decades, and they've all got beef with
each each other. They've all got stories to tell. I've
heard stories from like srit different paleontologists about this one
(35:06):
person who I've never met. I don't remember what their
name is, but they're like the worst person ever and
everyone hates them. And I'm like, this is insane if
you guys are beefing over this and they're all like
and they're all in like the same like research groups
in the city and in the West, I guess. But
the Bone Wars is like a really interesting one because
that is like and I'm going to the place. I'm
(35:29):
going to Canyon City in Colorado in a few weeks,
and that is like where the first dinosaur stuff was
found by one of the people in the Bone Wars stuff.
So that was a pretty cool That's I'm excited to
go there and just be learning about that and then
go nuts talking about it.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Please well and please post about it.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Everyone can find you at Groovy Geologist and if they
want to, like, see you speak, do you do? Do
you post what where you're speaking? Engagements are or like
what you'll do to.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I usually about that on my Instagram. I'm giving a
talk at the main gem In Mineral Museum in a
couple of weeks. Yeah, they April twenty six, I think
is the day that we're going to I'm giving the talk.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Well, thank you so much, Kate. You can finally go.
We have coffee. Do what you need to do start
your day. But thank you for starting actually starting your
day with us. Yeah, bus, I really appreciate you.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Now, this is the perfect thing to wake up and do.
This is actually just perfect. Every morning I wake up
and I want to talk about rocks and yeah, not
everyone around me wants to do that first thing in
the morning. Ryan, my bourther's name is Ryan. Oh.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
I was like. I was like, but I was like,
I know this is I just did you guys, see,
you're gonna make me cry. I told you.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Oh, there he goes again. Wait, what we'll tell Ryan that,
you know he needs to step it up in his
rock chat first thing in the morning.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Then here we go.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I will see you next week for Bone Wars.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
The name La
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