PODCAST EPISODE #5: From Stars to Stones with Cate Larsen

Summary:

In episode 5 of Beneath Your Feet, A Geoscience Podcast, host Veronica Klassen interviews geoscience communicator Cate Larsen. Cate discusses her non traditional route from astronomy to geology and her passion for making geoscience accessible and engaging through social media platforms like TikTok and Twitch. She emphasizes the importance of dispelling misconceptions about geology, highlighting that it’s more than just the study of rocks. Cate also shares insights into her daily activities, including content creation, scripting, and planning educational content. Throughout the conversation, she underscores the value of face-to-face interactions and creative approaches in effectively communicating complex scientific concepts to the public.

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Introduction

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator, geology enthusiast and your host. Here at the APGO Education Foundation, our mission is to spark curiosity and passion for the geology of Ontario. Whether you’re a geology nerd, science enthusiast, or nature lover, this podcast is for you. Join us as we geek out over fascinating geology, uncover the hidden stories and secrets of our extraordinary planet and explore the captivating world beneath your feet.

Veronica Klassen: All right, well, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’m here with Cate Larsen, who’s a geoscience communicator, so both in person doing workshops, conferences, things like that, and through your really cool social media accounts and podcast as well. I found Cate through your TikTok account where you talk about what it’s like to be a geoscientist and what your life is like as a geoscience communicator. So thanks so much for being here with me.

Cate Larsen: Thank you for having me. This is so fun to talk about this stuff with a fellow scientist person who are interested in sciences. It is so fun to just geek out about this stuff and kind of talk about our experiences.

Veronica: Yeah, I’m super excited. All right. Do you want to start just by telling us about yourself? Who are you and what do you do?

Cate: Well, my name is Cate. I talk about rocks for a living. That’s a very simplified version of it. That’s what it says on my business card. I definitely feel like there’s so much more to geology than just rocks, but, and I’m, I mean, I keep it simple for the for the business card and for my quick intro pitches. But in in all I love to teach about geology and geoscience being more than just rocks because it is. And there’s such a huge misconception that it’s a boring science. It’s not a real science. It’s it’s just rocks. Who cares? We don’t need to be studying this. So I go out there and I go on social media, and I make these fun educational videos to kind of teach about geology in all these different ways that people I teach it in interesting, creative ways. But I’m also teaching interesting and creative stuff that people don’t know about. That’s what I mean to say.

Veronica: Yeah, yeah. It keeps people’s interest when you’re talking about something that, yeah, they might have no experience with.

All right. So as a geoscience communicator, what does a day in the life look like for you? Is there a lot of variety or are you kind of doing the same things. What’s that like?

Cate: Well, today happens to be a day that I have just a lot of meetings. This is one of my meetings. I’ve got two more today. I definitely like to connect with people. That’s my whole thing. I love connectivity and just like personal conversation, I feel like that’s one of the best ways to, you know, effectively communicate stuff is face to face, and that’s why I spend so much time with my social media, because I know that that face to face you know, showing I’m explaining something and my face is here, I’m talking to you. I’m making it sort of casual, conversational, almost. So I’ve got meetings today. I’m going to hopefully try to work on I’m going to finish up a script that I’m doing for a new YouTube video. And hopefully be able to record that before I lose daylight. Also this week I’ll be working on some itinerary plans for a field expedition that me and some people are doing next month in March. But we have to prepare for it way ahead of time.

Veronica: Where are you guys going?

Cate: Oh, we’re going to Southern California to make a bunch of educational content, in person with the geology hands on. So it’s a really cool opportunity to get out there and not just have to use green screen to teach about stuff that we’re pointing to. I feel like that’ll really show people that geology is is very hands on. It’s really interesting. And you can learn so much just from going in person. I’m also looking forward to just, bothering random passersby. I love grabbing hikers and being like, hey, do you want to learn something cool about these rocks? I love doing that. That’s going to be really, really fun.

Veronica: That sounds so cool. How did you hear about that opportunity? Or is this something that you guys are making for yourselves?

Cate: We created this. So me and my friends are a bunch of other geoscience communicators. If you are on YouTube, you probably have heard of Geo Girl. That’s that’s our wonderful, wonderful friend Rachel. She is a postdoc, and she’s doing her postdoc on geoscience communication. So she had written into her new grants like, hey, we can go do this, and we will track the data on these posts and the performances and show how effective it is to get out in the fields and do this stuff and also be working together and to collaborate, because we are all experts in this field of geoscience, communication and social media. So we all have our own expertise, and it’ll be really cool to get out there and be able to help each other with this stuff.

So it’s a lot better than going out with a tripod and then embarrassing myself in front of people passing by. It’s like, if I’m not out there filming, I’m talking to strangers, but if I’m out there filming, I’m just like, please don’t, don’t look at me. This is the most embarrassing thing ever. It’s a lot less embarrassing when you’re there as a group and you’re doing this stuff together and you’re really showing that, oh, this is an actual organized thing. And getting this, this funding from NSF really shows that they take this stuff seriously. Finally, they’re actually taking science communication on short form TikTok video seriously. So we’re really excited to see how these posts will do and then be able to put that data into a presentation maybe next year.

Veronica: That’s so awesome because yeah, it definitely shows that things are changing and people are taking geoscience communication more seriously, or science communication in general. I think people are starting to kind of realize its importance, which is really cool. All right.

Veronica: So how did you originally become interested in geoscience and how has your journey changed over time?

Cate: So I was a space kid growing up. I was 100% into astronomy. I had a telescope from the Edmund Scientific Catalog. I still have it at my parents house it is just in the corner. I take it out for full moons and lunar eclipses. I was really interested in moons and planets. Never really cared about stars and galaxies. It was just I don’t know, they were cool, but I really cared about the books that would talk about the moons of Jupiter and Pluto. And I loved the idea of Pluto and its moon rotating in tandem with each other. And that was such a cool thing for me to learn at 10, 11 years old. And when I got to college, I was like, all right, astronomy major, it is. I’ve had this passion my whole life. I’m finally going to do this. And I took one semester of astronomy classes and all of the gen eds [general education courses] that go along with it. And I was like, all right, this is this is this is great.

Next semester I did my class registration too late. And I missed out on the search for extraterrestrial life class. And I was like, all right, well, I don’t know what else to put on my schedule. How about planetary geology? It wasn’t an astronomy course. It was a earth science, a geology course. So I was like, all right, well, I don’t like geology. I didn’t like it in high school. It was so boring, I hated it. I only cared about the astronomy part of Earth science class. But I took this class, and after literally two meetings of the class, I changed my major to geology. Wow. I had no idea how cool geology could be, because it’s there’s so much overlap with geology and other sciences.

And if you have an interest in another science, you will be shocked at how well they overlap. And it really bridges your own interest into geology. It’s like, oh, well, it is more than just rocks. It is more than just landform names. In Earth Science we only learned about, all right, well, here are rocks and minerals and here are landforms. It was essentially just rocks and minerals plus geography. And that was not exciting to me. And I didn’t have a teacher who was particularly enthusiastic about the material, so I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. But this professor that I had for planetary geology, and he went on to be my professor for my other geology classes at community college, and he’s still one of my great mentors today. He was passionate and his passion is so contagious. And I really internalized that. And for me to see how much he influenced me through his excitement and his passion and his his just motivation to teach something that he loves, but also inspire the students that he’s working with that is so, so influenced what I do today. And I thank him so much for that.

Veronica: That’s awesome. I think that’s so true that like when someone’s passionate, you also want to be passionate about that because they’re excited about it.

Cate: It’s contagious!

Veronica: It really is. And if a teacher is not super excited about something, then you’re not going to be interested in it, which is unfortunate. And I feel from other people who have been talking to a lot of people have found geology through university courses, which I think is interesting. And in Canada, we actually don’t have any geology in high school at all. So a lot of people have to come across it through just randomly taking a course in first year. Which is super interesting that that’s kind of the way that it comes about. But also, I would love for it to come earlier for people that they would learn about it in high school and be excited about it in high school, you know.

Cate: Absolutely. Less than a quarter, I feel like at this point it might be going down because of the new administration and the cutting of the Department of Education. But I think it’s like at this point it might be less than ten, ten or less states in the US don’t require Earth Science to graduate high school, right? Most schools offer it, but it’s an option. You can choose between that or biology or physics. And it’s like, who’s going to choose the rocks? Or if you do, you do it because you think it’s easy and you think it’ll be an easy A, so you’re not paying attention to it. And a lot of times those easy classes are they’re definitely diluted. So you’re not obviously becoming excited by it or stimulated. It’s not stimulating. Yeah. So no one really no one who takes like, rocks for jocks from a professor or a teacher who doesn’t really care that much about it and just wants students to just get through the class. No one’s going to love it through that.

So I feel really lucky to have gone to school in New York and done my high school there. And we’re required to teach it in middle school and in high school. And we even get an introduction in elementary school as well. I think it might be third or fourth grade. We would get a gentle introduction into rocks and minerals, and we had a couple of them to look at, and that was kind of it. But it was a good introduction, and it definitely has inspired a lot of people that I know who are from New York, who were like, “Oh yeah, I remember doing that in elementary school. And that was really cool, and that’s what got me interested in it.” I’m like, man, I was not. I was not about that at the time, but I’m glad that I am now. And I’m glad that it took the passion of someone else to inspire me to be passionate too.

Veronica: Yeah, that’s so true. That’s awesome. All right, so you came across geoscience sort of by accident through your courses. Was that also the case with Geoscience Communication or did you intentionally go into it?

Cate: I think everything’s just been one big accident. I didn’t I wasn’t intending to do geoscience communication with my degree, but during Covid, that’s when I graduated. There wasn’t much else to do. I had gotten grad school rejection letters. There were no opportunities. I, I was just worried that I was going to lose all of the knowledge that I had. And I had wound up, being on TikTok, a lot of people during the, the early days of the lockdown. And I was making, comedy videos, relatable videos. One day I said, I have a fantastic idea for a funny geology video, and I made it and it blew up. All of a sudden I’ve got hundreds of comments, people asking me geology questions, and I’m just thinking, this is really cool. I love talking about geology, and my parents and sister are so, so sick of it. So I need to do this. I need an outlet.

So that was spring of 2020. I had gotten so many questions and I was making so many videos answering general stuff, but, I only had at the time, I think we only had a minute and a half on TikTok. Maybe it went up to three at some point, but I hadn’t earned that yet. So I was rushing to make my videos quick and fast. And I just was like, all right, well, maybe I can do something more.

And so August rolls around I’m dating this guy that I had met in my department that I went to field camp with. A word of advice don’t date your classmate especially not ones that you were spending days with at field camp. Just don’t. Don’t do it. We had broken up, and it was a really rough time for me because obviously, I’m home at my parent’s house, I’m alone. I feel distraught. And, you know, me being, the smart person I was–to a degree, I was like, I really just want to, drink at home alone right now. But I don’t want to do it alone, because that seems like it’s a problem that seems unhealthy. Let me get on TikTok live and just start talking about rocks while drinking and venting about my breakup. I’m so sorry to anybody who watched that very first, live stream, because I’m sure it was entertaining just for the drama of it all.

But people really enjoyed it. Like, I’m getting up, going around my room. At that point, the entirety of my rock collection was in my childhood bedroom, so I was just getting up, grabbing every rock I could, explaining things. I didn’t have a whiteboard yet. I just had a notebook, I had one of my class notebooks. I still had a bunch of pages left. So there are drawings. I have that notebook still it’s in my drawer. I can grab it, but I don’t want to make a bunch of noise. I still have all the drawings from that first stream where I’m explaining stuff.

And I was like, damn, I loved being a presenter like this when I was in school. I loved giving class presentations for our, assignments. I thrived on PowerPoints and explaining stuff and diagrams. I loved it, and I saw an opportunity here and people were kind of validating me that they wanted more of this, obviously in a less pathetic sense than I was that night. So I decided I was going to start doing that every week, except I wasn’t going to get shitfaced and cry. So I started what was called at the time, Drunk Geology, which was a play on Drunk History that everybody knew about. The thing was, I wasn’t getting drunk, so I had to change the name. I was just having a beer. Like geologists are known for enjoying a beer because we, you know, we like beers.

So I was doing that, and it was a fun little hook. So I like, played around with some ideas and I that’s how I wound up with “Rocks and Hops.” So the first ten lessons I think were Drunk Geology. And then I had a big rebrand. Now it’s called Rocks and Hops and I do graphic design on the side. So I made a really cool little thing. And Rocks and Hops has evolved so much in the last over four years. Now I do it on Twitch instead of TikTok live, so I’m horizontal instead of vertical, which is a huge change for me. And now we have these, these lessons every week. And, you know, I would write a lesson from scratch by hand in a notebook. And I would just teach it. And now? Now I type them, print them out. We have a whole lesson. We have question breaks. And at the end I have a little quiz for people who are paying attention. And if you answer a question right, you go on the prize wheel and then we spin. And then if you win, you win a Rocks and Hops sticker. So I give one of these away every week. And people are so excited about it.

And I’m like, teachers are onto something, when you give, when you incentivize learning and you offer little stickers, people love to pay attention. So I was like, I’ve definitely improved my presenting skills and my teaching skills over the years I’ve been doing this. It’s been a lot of trial and error. But something that always stayed the same is, is staying, I’m just I’m comedic about it.

And that’s something that is bled into me giving presentations in person. I am just all over a stage. Just running around, super excited, pointing at stuff. Who needs a laser pointer? I’m going to run over there and jump and point at the picture. And I’m just like that on Rocks and Hops too, and it’s so much fun. And tomorrow night we’re covering some of the coolest moons in the solar system. Which is going back to my planetary astronomy roots. This month we’re doing planetary geology. So last week we did the terrestrial planets, the cool geology of them. And this week we’re doing moons. So we’re gonna get to talk about some of the moons that have really interesting geology, geologic processes like Europa, which is just like ice. It’s like plate tectonics, but with ice. And I cannot wait to talk about it.

Veronica: That’s so fun. I love that a lot of what it seems your job is, is just making geology exciting and or communicating the ways that geology is already exciting and making sure people kind of understand that. And I love that. Yeah.

Cate: I think the casualness is good too. The casualness of it all, it doesn’t feel like a lecture. It feels like we’re just friends and we’re chatting and you’re letting me yap your ear off about about this stuff, and we’re laughing and making jokes. It really just feels very like we’re both into it. I, you know, read the comments and we make jokes and people ask questions. It’s great, and that’s that’s communication. Rather than just, speaking monotonously in front of an audience.

Veronica: Yeah. It’s that interaction and having the sort of relationship almost with the people who are watching.

Cate: Yeah.

Veronica: It’s really cool that you ended up both in geoscience and communications by accident. And I think a lot of the time we have this idea that we have to have our lives really perfectly planned out, especially our careers. We have to have it really, you know, down to a T what we want to do. But I think that’s not often how it works out for a lot of people. And sometimes you just have to keep yourself open to the different opportunities that come your way, and not be so fixed into one path that you can’t look around and see what else is available. I think it’s totally okay to try a bunch of different things and to change your mind, ultimately. I mean, you could go your whole life thinking you’re going to be an astronomer and then end up as a geologist, so I think it’s good, yeah, just to keep your options open.

Veronica: And speaking of life, surprising you, what do you think has been the most surprising thing about being a geoscientist?

Cate: Definitely dealing, front facing with the public I see firsthand that a lot of people don’t have, any idea about geoscience, and that comes from not being required to take it in school or not having any basic introduction to it. And I don’t just mean in the “we don’t believe in evolution or deep time.” It’s maybe they’re being taught that, but it’s not sinking in, it is a difficult concept to understand, and it does require critical thinking. It requires a lot of logicizing. And not many people really think of it as being that serious. Like, oh, it’s just it’s just rocks it’s whatever. You do have to think a little bit about it. And, and it’s so much cooler when you get into that. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to tell people that it’s more than rocks. It’s really exciting and deep time is just mind blowing.

There’s only so much you can do though, you have you have to have a really good background. You can’t just jump right into deep time you have to talk about other things. You have to talk about rock formations and talk about processes. But that takes time. And not everyone’s willing to learn about that in, you know, in school. So I’m trying to be out here talking to people, making it exciting, at least sparking some curiosity in them. So maybe they’ll walk away from it being more curious and wanting to learn on their own. But when I make, a video on TikTok, that’s very general and it goes viral. I’m looking at all the questions and comments and just being so excited that this many people are now asking me really simple geology questions. That means that this reached somebody who has no idea what this is, and I have made a difference. And then I get to answer their question, and I’m really excited about it. It’s a super long paragraph and it’s a lot of fun. I just I love going off and talking about this kind of stuff. It just makes me really happy.

Veronica: Yeah, that’s so awesome. Yeah, I think without the understanding of deep time, it can be easy to use geology in ways that, it’s like, that doesn’t make any sense. I think in our last conversation, we talked about people using rocks to explain, conspiracy theories or that climate change is real, stuff like that. And yeah, without understanding the basics of geology, there’s a lot of ways that you can go very wrong.

Cate: No, geology is like, rock formations and just rocks and minerals are inherently something that we think are cool. Not, maybe not everybody, I might be biased, of course. But people can look at that stuff and be like, wow, that looks kind of cool. My dad will text me and be like, “Hey, I found this big rock in the woods. It’s so cool. You have to come see it.” And I know what rock it is, and it’s a boring rock to me. It’s a big mound of quartzite in the middle of the woods, and he thinks it’s the coolest thing, and he wants to know how it got there. He has his own theories about it, and I’m explaining to him, oh, it’s a it’s a glacial erratic. It was just dropped here by a big old ice sheet 20,000 years ago.

But there are some people who will draw their own conclusions without having any geologic background. And then if they’re given a platform, then you wind up with a bunch of people who think that rocks that are shaped like faces are the remains of ancient giants. And those are mud fossil people, and they are the bane of my existence. I think I encounter more of those people than I do flat earthers.

Veronica: Really? Interesting.

Cate: Or I feel like it might be equal to the young earthers, but I see way less flat earthers in my, online experience. But people who don’t believe that the earth is as old as we say it is, you know, 4.5 billion years old. They say it’s way less. People think that, you know, the the mud fossil people are tied into the young earth people, and they just, they think that there were giants roaming around. And then the great flood killed them all off. And I’m just like, if you had any shred of understanding about how rocks form, you would know that none of this is true. None of this is correct.

And it’s frustrating because there’s a line between explaining this to somebody and arguing with them. A lot of times it’s not worth it to explain it to somebody who refuses to hear it, and they just want to argue. I am not somebody who debates people. I don’t want to do that. I have zero interest in debating people. And there there are scientists and science communicators that do. Bill Nye is a fantastic science communicator and a good debater as well. Have you ever seen that video where he was talking to the guy who runs the young earth creationist museum?

Veronica: Oh yeah, I think I have, yeah, yeah.

Cate: There are people who have the bravery and have the skill set to do that. I do not. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the will. I’m happy to teach the people who are willing to be taught. And that’s how I move on with my life.

Veronica: Yeah. That’s so true. We learned about in my science communication master’s that there’s different groups of people, people who are extremely, you know, against an issue. So young earthers are flat earthers, things like that who cannot be reasoned with essentially, like they’re just so far that it’s very difficult to change their mind because they’re very ingrained in what they believe and what they think. But then there’s a whole spectrum of people. So there’s people who just don’t necessarily know about an issue. And so maybe they’re making conclusions because they don’t have the proper information. And then there’s people who just don’t really care about an issue. So they’re not even really paying attention. And so you really have to kind of choose where you want to put in your effort in talking to people because, yeah, sometimes it’s just not worth it to engage in a debate that’s not going to go anywhere. But then it is very important to communicate for those people who might just not have ever come across this information or might be curious, but don’t really understand it or things like that. Yeah. And I think that could be really impactful in that way.

Cate: Absolutely. I was reading this article advertising for a book, and I forget the name. Kind of like how to talk to people who are in a cult. And this stuff has come up a lot lately because people are seeing, they’re losing their family members to the MAGA [Make American Great Again] cults. And there are, there are researchers who are coming up with, I guess, plans, hey, here is how you can try to talk to your loved one to get them out of this cult. And I’m reading those and I’m, oh my gosh, this applies so much to people who are in anti-science cults. They don’t know it’s a cult. They don’t think it is. They want to feel special. They want to feel like they know something more that that no one else does, and that they’re above the they’re above the bull, you know scientists are all just being paid off to say this stuff. And of course, if you’re being told all that, of course you’re going to feel special. And you don’t want to be taken away from that. You don’t want that taken away from you. So you want to stay there, believe whatever you’re being told. And don’t trust anybody outside. Especially not scientists like you and I. It is something that I am trying to learn more about.

But I still have to draw that line between, all right, how am I going to talk to somebody like this and not just wind up arguing or debating them? I don’t want to do that. I have to figure out where the line is, to just walk away and just be like, all right, not that their someone else’s problem, but it’s not my responsibility to, quote unquote, save this person from their beliefs. Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs, but I do get particularly enraged when the people that have a really big platform. And I’m watching them in real time make a TikTok and there are people in the comments who were just like, whoa, I never thought about this before. This is insane. I can’t believe that they’re hiding this from us. And I want to shake their heads and be like, no, don’t believe that. Don’t believe that. Please. It’s such a slippery slope.

But, you know, with social media, there’s as much as there’s an opportunity to mislead people and spread you know, disinformation, there is an equal opportunity to spread factual information, and we have to be presenting it in a way that’s just as exciting, just as enticing, because we have to compete. So there’s definitely motivation to create educational content because we feel like we have this duty to. And I’m glad to do it.

Veronica: Yeah, totally. And you do that work on social media, but you also do some of that stuff in person. Can you tell us a bit more about what that looks like when you do workshops or talks or things like that?

Cate: Yeah. So I have two sides to my communication. One of them is talking to general audiences and just teaching them geology stuff and, you know, just kind of engaging people of all ages and backgrounds to think about geoscience and be excited about it and walk away with something new. I love just ending my talks with, “And now you’ll be able to answer that completely random trivia question.”

But I also do a lot of work for my fellow geoscientists, and I want them to improve their communication skills. I want to see people not just be able to better communicate within our our field. Like going to a conference, you’ve been to several talks that are just–that person’s a genius, but they have no idea how to talk about their work or the things that they’re genius’s on. But also how we speak outwardly to the general public. If we can’t even communicate effectively to other experts in our own fields, how are we going to teach this stuff to the, the world? You know, how do we make it interesting? How do we tell them that it’s important? How do we explain why we’re doing this, why it needs to be done, what kind of implications it has? Not just here’s what we did, here’s what we found.

A big thing is the scientific papers they are just so much of them are just dense language that no one else understands. And it is something that I had to work on a lot in college to be able to read papers for my research and for class assignments. And it’s like, how am I supposed to decipher this? And it takes time. It takes practice. And now I’ve gotten to a point where I think I’m pretty good at it. So I have this podcast where I kind of break down these papers because I have this honed skill. And I need to update it, I haven’t made a new one in almost a year. It’s a really intense thing to do. And that just goes to show these papers are way too complicated, my guy, they are just–we we write these papers to impress other scientists. We’re not really writing them with the idea that they’re going to be read by the general public. And this is where the the disconnect happens. People who are having arguments online and they’re trying to validate, they’re trying to add some validation to their their wrong ideas. They’re reading these papers and they’re not interpreting them correctly. They are not getting the information. They’re not understanding what it’s actually saying, but they’re citing them and saying, this is proof of my wack idea.

And that’s a problem. We need to be making this stuff accessible to the general public and to people who are obviously curious about learning, but they’re getting the wrong idea because we’re not making the language–not simple enough–but we’re just not making it inclusive. And there are some journals that are requiring submissions to include a plain language overview, which I greatly appreciate. But then there are some people who are just straight up writing their own press releases. So they are writing and explaining in plain language, their own work, and it cuts out the middleman of a science journalist doing that who may very well not be a subject matter expert. I wouldn’t trust a biologist to decipher my work. I know that they can decipher biology papers, but maybe not mine or something obviously more advanced in a different subject. So I feel like if we put in a little bit of effort into, you know, making our work ourselves more accessible, I think it’ll have a huge impact on how people are able to interpret it without, you know, all this confusion and obviously misinterpretation.

Veronica: Yeah, I think academia doesn’t do itself any favours when it really focuses on just trying to be as complicated as possible in the language, in the jargon that we use. And yes, jargon has a time and place because it has, you know, specific meanings. But it’s not helping when you’re just using that jargon to communicate to the public, because people are not going to understand what you’re talking about. So, definitely. Yeah, I appreciate that. Some journals are trying to change that, and I think that’s a good first step.

All right. If you could, what would you change about the perception of geoscience in society or the way that people understand what geology is?

Cate: I would hope that they think of it as something in like a–I know that cosmic isn’t the right word because it’s the opposite of cosmic, we are on Earth, the cosmos are out there–but there is something cosmically special about the Earth being as old as it is, and all these things happening on their own long before anybody was around to see it. I wish people thought of it in that way, and considered it to be a lot more special than most people do. I think it’s so incredible looking at, looking at a stromatolite and realizing that this is the remnant of a microscopic organism. Millions of microscopic organisms all living together hundreds of millions of years ago. And stromatolites are fossil records of bacteria and algae and those stromatolites, not this one specifically I don’t know how old this guy is. I have the paper somewhere, but I don’t know where. But the stromatolites in general, were some of the records that we found of the earliest life on Earth. There was not stuff that left behind hard body material that could fossilize. This is just a chance that we’re able to see evidence of these guys having lived billions of years ago. This stuff was around way, way before we had trilobites crawling around or dinosaurs crawling around.

Geologic history is so vast and so exciting. At the time these guys were alive, the earth looked completely different. And the fact that it’s changed so much on its own over all this time and is still changing, that’s what really gets me, is the fact that all the rock formations and landforms that we see today are the result of processes that we’re observing happening right now, but we’re able to see the end result. We’re not going to see the end result of a lot of things that we’re looking at today.

I want so badly to be an alien geologist in several million years, coming to Earth and investigating stuff and then looking at like, oh my God, what are landfills going to look like? I want to see fossils of human life. And I know it’ll be such a tiny, tiny part of the rock record, but it will be groundbreaking research. Like that publication will shake the entire galaxy.

And that’s what I mean by cosmic. It’s so much more than just here today holding a rock and just saying it’s a rock. It’s so much, so much cooler than that.

Veronica: I love that. Yeah. I think one of the things I love most about geology is just how much awe it can inspire. When you start to try to wrap your head around deep time and around geologic features and things like that. And people, even if they’re not geologists I think can appreciate that when they start to realize what geology actually is and what we actually look at. So anyways, I just think that it’s really cool.

Cate: Well, we all think it’s very cool, obviously, because it is.

Veronica: Now the question that I finish all my podcasts with, what is your favourite rock?

Cate: Oh, my favourite rock is a good one. Do I have one? I don’t think I have one near me because my favourite rock is gneiss, but I don’t particularly have a good gneiss in my collection right now. I think I had given my good one to a kid that had sent me a really sweet email and she was like, I love geology, I love rocks, here’s a picture of my rock collection. And it was the tiniest little pebbles. And I’m like, girl, you’re gonna love this. And I mailed her one of my because I have so many. I don’t know if you can see all my field guides. I sent her one of my simple Peterson field guides along with a couple of rocks and descriptions of what they are. I gave for a little mini Rite in the Rain book. I hope that she’s doing well. That was two years ago. I should track down her mom’s email and try to remember her name and see what she’s up to. But yeah.

Anyways, I don’t have that gneiss anymore. But I do have this really cool rock that I collected myself in upstate New York in the Adirondacks. This is a garnet amphibolite from Gore mountain. And that is the home of the largest garnets in the world. You see them in museums because they’re just so spectacular. These ones are, they’re okay, but garnets, my favorite mineral. And going here and getting to pick up my own rocks was actually so much fun. I could go on and on about this, but I don’t want to, I don’t want to keep you.

Veronica: Do you want to just describe what it looks like for people who are listening to this?

Cate: Oh my gosh, I forgot this, this is a podcast. Duh. So this is a black rock, that is pretty heavy. It’s got lots of flat black, shiny surfaces, very reflective. And those are specks of amphibole. The whole rock is an amphibolite because of the primary content being the mineral amphibole. Now you’ve got lots of blobs of red in here. This one isn’t a spectacular example of what garnets look like in this rock, because these ones are just fractured and shattered and just broken up. And that is the result of all kinds of tectonic forces pressing on this during the formation of New England. So all these landmasses forming and coming together to make New England and the Adirondack Mountains, the Green Mountains, the White Mountains those are all separate orogenic events or orogenies which is mountain building events. Oro means mountain.

So this is one of the, my favourite rocks in my collection, because I got to go pick it up out of a pile of cool rocks and have to decide which one’s the coolest because you pay for it by weight. So I was like, if I’m going to pay a bunch of money and it wasn’t that expensive, but I just, I really love garnet and I love seeing minerals in their natural habitat. This is so much cooler to me than a little piece of garnet that, I’m going to roll off of my desk and my cat will knock it underneath the bed, and I’m just going to lose it.

Veronica: Totally fair. Well, thanks so much for showing us that really cool amphibolite. And thanks so much for being a guest on the show, and for talking to me about your roundabout journey to geoscience, your inspiring teacher, the nuances of communicating science to the public and breaking down scientific papers, and also the fun that you can have in communicating science. You’ve inspired me, and I’m sure you’ve inspired our listeners to continue to explore just how cosmically special the Earth is. I love that turn of phrase that you used, how cosmically special the Earth is. So thanks so much, Cate.

Cate: Well, thank you for having me, Veronica. This has been so much fun. I love talking with other science communicators and people who are just as enthusiastic about impacting society in this way. I think it’s a booming industry with the rise of social media and these short form educational videos, I am so happy to be part of it. And eager to teach other people how they can do it.

I guess a message that I have: if you are passionate about something and you just love to talk about it, consider the possibility that people on the internet might want to watch you talk about it. And you can be the reason that some people find out about this thing, and then maybe they will also be passionate about it, and it makes a bigger difference than you’d think. I’m so proud of everybody that had been inspired by me and gone to college for geology, or changed their major or decided to, you know, teach themselves as a hobby. People who have graduated, got their first job, landed an internship. I’m so proud of every one of them because it warms my heart to see that what I’m doing is making a difference and making people’s lives so full and happy. And it just like, I want to cry whenever I read those messages.

Veronica: Yeah, that’s so cool. You’re actually, yeah, you’re making a big difference in people’s lives. How can people find you if they want to watch your videos?

Cate: Well, I have a website. It’s called GroovyGeologist.com. I have a links page, so it has, it’s easier to find all of my links and up to date stuff that I’m doing, and that’s GroovyGeologist.bio. I wish they were slightly different. I regret not making them slightly different. But I’m on Twitch. I’m on Instagram, YouTube, still on TikTok. I feel weird about still being there. Something is off, but if people are still going to be there, they still need science, you know, science communicators. So I am going to stick around and provide what I can.

Veronica: All right, so that was GroovyGeologist.com if you want to find Cate. Thanks so much for being with me today.

Cate: All right. Thank you guys.

Outro

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator and geology enthusiast. As a reminder, please note that the opinions and views expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the APGO Education Foundation. If you want to learn more, visit us at GeoscienceINFO.com, where you can find our GeoHikes, podcast transcripts, and additional resources. You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at GeoscienceINFO or on LinkedIn and Facebook at the APGO Education Foundation. Stay curious and keep exploring the incredible world Beneath Your Feet.

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