Talking Science Podcast
Deep Time – How We Learned the Earth's Age
Pick up a pebble from a creek bed and it feels like the most ordinary thing in the world. Yet the grains inside it may have been sitting in the crust…
Articles
Earth & Climate
Minerals and Mining – The Rocks Underneath the Economy
Look around any room and almost everything you see started as rock. The steel frame, the window glass, the copper wiring, the stone benchtop and the…
El Niño and La Niña – Australia's Boom-and-Bust Rainfall
Ask an Australian farmer which years they remember and you will usually hear about extremes. A summer of dust, cracked dams and weeks of total fire…
Bushfires – Fire, Ecology and a Changing Landscape
Drive through Australian bush a few months after a fire and you see something that looks almost impossible. The ground is grey with ash, the trunks of…
Fresh Water – The Coming Scarcity
Turn on a tap anywhere in an Australian city and clean, drinkable water pours out, as much as you like, for a fraction of a cent per litre. It is so…
The Magnetosphere – Earth’s Invisible Shield
Right now, without any drama or fanfare, an invisible battle is being fought high above your head. The Sun is firing a relentless stream of charged…
The Rock Cycle – How Stone Is Recycled
We reach for stone whenever we want to describe something that lasts. Set in stone. Solid as a rock. And on the timescale of a human life, that…
Ocean Currents and the Global Conveyor Belt
Stand at the edge of the sea and it can look like the water is just sloshing back and forth, going nowhere in particular. But the ocean is one of the…
Fossil Fuels – Ancient Sunlight
When you fill a car with petrol or switch on a gas stove, you are releasing energy that arrived on Earth as sunlight hundreds of millions of years…
Soil – The Thin Layer That Feeds Us
Kneel down in a garden, scoop up a handful of dark earth, and you are holding one of the most quietly astonishing substances on the planet. It looks…
The Atmosphere – Layers of Air
Take a deep breath. The air that just filled your lungs is part of something vast: a thin skin of gas wrapped around the whole planet, reaching…
The Ozone Layer – A Problem We Actually Fixed
Somewhere far above your head, higher than any aircraft flies, there is an invisible shield made of a faint blue gas. You cannot see it or feel it,…
Weather vs Climate – Why the Difference Matters
On a bitterly cold winter morning, someone will inevitably joke, So much for global warming. It is an understandable quip, but it reveals one of the…
Cyclones, Hurricanes and Typhoons – Engines of the Warm Ocean
From above, it looks almost peaceful: a great white spiral of cloud, hundreds of kilometres across, turning slowly over the sea with a calm dark eye…
The Ice Ages – When the World Froze Over
Imagine standing where a great city stands today and seeing, instead of streets and towers, a wall of ice a kilometre thick stretching to the horizon.…
The Deep Ocean – Earth’s Last Frontier
Look out at the sea and you see a shining surface, waves catching the light, maybe a boat or a seabird. But that surface is a lid. Beneath it lies the…
The Carbon Cycle
Every living thing you have ever seen is built, in large part, from carbon. The wood of a tree, the flesh of an animal, the leaf, the shell, the bone,…
The Water Cycle – The Journey of Every Drop
Take a sip of water and consider, for a moment, where it has been. The water passing your lips may once have drifted as a cloud over a distant ocean,…
Earthquakes – Why the Ground Shakes
The ground beneath us feels like the very definition of stability. We say something is on solid ground, or built on firm foundations, trusting that…
Volcanoes – Windows into the Deep Earth
There is something both terrifying and mesmerising about a volcano. A mountain that breathes fire, that can lie quiet for centuries and then wake with…
Plate Tectonics – The Moving Skin of the Earth
Look at a world map and let your eye wander along the coastlines. The bulge of Brazil seems to fit snugly into the hollow of West Africa, like two…
Climate Change – The Physics Behind It
Imagine standing outside on a clear night with no clouds overhead. The air grows cold quickly, doesn’t it? Now picture the same night with a thick…