💎 Carbonatites: To REE or Not to REE?Earth's strangest magma is carbonate-rich, comes from the mantle, and there's only ONE erupting on the planet right now. It's called a carbonatite, a rare igneous rock that hosts the world's largest rare earth element resources. But here's the plot twist: only about 10% of the ~600 carbonatites that have been found are actually rich in rare earths. So how do we find the REE-bearing ones? Dr Shirley Hu and Dr Louise Schoneveld from CSIRO are using geochemistry and samples from India to understand carbonatite systems, including the ones that don't contain REE. Because sometimes, science learns as much from what isn't there as what is. Featuring actual rocks, one active volcano, and the exploration mystery that's reshaping how we hunt for critical minerals.Funded by the Australian Government, the India-Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership ran from January 2023 to 30 June 2026, advancing sustainable and environmentally responsible critical minerals development for the benefit of both nations.🔗 Find us:📺 @theGeoCo on YouTube📻 Wonder on Spotify🐦 @theGeoCo on TikTok📸 @theGeoCo on Instagram📬 Geoco News on Substack: thegeoco.substack.com

✨ The Weirdest Critical Metal You've Never Heard Of: Indium, Mine Waste & the Hunt for Hidden SuppliesYou've touched it hundreds of times. It's in your phone screen, your laptop, your solar panels, your TV. But unless you're a obsessed with periodic table trivia, you probably have no idea what it is.Meet indium. Its a critical metal so rare, yet so essential. But here's the catch: there's basically no such thing as an indium mine.Today we're talking to the wonderful Dr Olivia Mejas-Gonzales, a research fellow at the Centre in Critical Resources for the Future, who did her entire PhD on this obscure element. Olivia - you're going to love her. She's a dynamic Chilean and a curious scientist who's not afraid of getting her hands dirty. Olivia shares some of her experience working underground at El Teniente, one of the world's great copper mines; including the challenges she faced - and overcame - being the only female on site at the time. Amazing!And Indium? Well for Olivia that story involves mine waste, surprising mineral discoveries, mysterious supergene enrichment zones, and some super cool synchrotron research. Plus, she's got a teaser about using biology to extract critical metals from waste rock. Trust us, you'll want to hear more.🎯 This episode:🌍 Why indium is critical (answer: every screen you own)💻 The supply chain paradox: we need it desperately, we barely mine it🪨 Why indium is almost nothing in the Earth's crust⛏️ How indium hides as a byproduct of zinc extraction, mostly in China🔬 Olivia's PhD adventure: finding indium in mine waste environments🪣 Supergene enrichment: when waste rock dumps hide geological surprises🔄 The living angle: can organisms dissolve and extract critical metals?🧪 Synchrotron science and the power of asking unconventional questionsAnd one of the standout quotes from Olivia:"I'm just curious without fear to fail. It doesn't matter if I fail because I know I will try again."Kinda one of the standout quotes from our whole Wonder series to be real!🔗 Find us:📺 @theGeoCo on YouTube📻 Wonder on Spotify🐦 @theGeoCo on TikTok📸 @theGeoCo on Instagram📬 Geoco News on Substack: thegeoco.substack.comThis episode was produced in partnership with the ARC Training Centre in Critical Resources, which brings together industry, four of Australia's leading universities, and state and federal governments to address the challenge of securing our future resources.🙏 We acknowledge the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, on whose country the Wonder podcast is made.Thank you to Podbooth studios, Adelaide where we record our podcast.— Holly and Anthony

Electric vehicles are the future. But here's the problem: India's lithium demand is skyrocketing, but the local supply is nearly zero. Enter pegmatites: fancy, crystal-studded rocks hiding in the Rajasthan desert that might just hold the key to India's battery revolution.Today we're back with Dr Louise Schoneveld and Dr Mario Iglesias-Martinez from CSIRO to tell the complete story of the CSIRO's Australia-India research partnership on critical metals, centering here on lithium exploration. And boy we cover it all. From fieldwork in India's desert landscape to the analytical work happening in Western Australian laboratories, it's a tale involving unexpected geological encounters, shepherd guides, sparkly purple minerals, and the kind of detective work that makes the journey from field to lab the best kind of science.From pegmatite formation theory (yes, there's a debate, of course!) to the geochemistry that helps you sort the lithium-rich rocks from lithium-poor ones, this episode digs into what happens when you find a promising rock in Rajasthan and bring it home to Australia for detailed analysis, and its all part of a larger collaboration to tackle a global supply chain challenge.🎯 This episode:💎 Why pegmatites are fancy granites with bigger crystals (and what makes them really fancy)🔋 India's lithium challenge: massive demand, almost no domestic supply🏜️ Exploring Rajasthan: a region previously mined for tin and tungsten, now reimagined for lithium🪨 Two competing theories of pegmatite formation, and why it matters which one is right👀 The Clevelandite moment: how a feldspar on a roadside sparked a breakthrough🧪 Geochemistry in the field: reading element ratios to find the fertile pegmatites🤝 Fieldwork as collaboration: Indian Institute of Technology researchers and good science📍 For a bit of background - these are the main lithium and related minerals we talk about on the episode: - Lepidolite (bright purple lithium-bearing mica; stunning) - Spodumene (chunky lithium silicate with crystals measuring centimetres) - Clevelandite (the sodic feldspar that started it all)Funded by the Australian Government, the India-Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership ran from January 2023 to 30 June 2026, advancing sustainable and environmentally responsible critical minerals development for the benefit of both nations.🔗 Find us:📺 @theGeoCo on YouTube📻 Wonder on Spotify🐦 @theGeoCo on TikTok📸 @theGeoCo on Instagram📬 Geoco News on Substack: thegeoco.substack.com🙏 We acknowledge the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, on whose country the Wonder podcast is made.— Holly, Anthony & the CSIRO team

When you connect wirelessly to anything, you have CSIRO to thank - they are the ones who invented Wi-Fi. But beyond the banknotes and wireless tech, Australia's national science agency is working on something equally important: methods to find the critical minerals that will power the future.Funded by the Australian Government, the India-Australia Critical Minerals Research Partnership ran from January 2023 to 30 June 2026, advancing sustainable and environmentally responsible critical minerals development for the benefit of both nations.As part of a special partnership between CSIRO and Wonder podcast, we sit down with Dr Louise Schoneveld and Dr Eric Romaneido from CSIRO's Mineral Resources Group and discuss this important multi-year research collaboration that they have been part of.From the dense forests of Meghalaya to the ancient weathered rocks of Odisha, this is the story of how science travels, how geology shapes exploration, and how Australia and India are building resilience in global supply chains. It's a love letter to fieldwork and the diverse, brilliant minds making modern minerals exploration smarter.In this episode: 🔍 Why critical minerals matter (and why you should care) ⚒️ CSIRO's greatest hits and their mineral resources mission🗺️ Exploring the three distinct geological region across India where the research fieldwork was undertaken: jungles, deserts, and weathered coasts 🌏 The Australia-India partnership tackling sustainable mineral development 👥 All about the diverse team running the program, spanning postdocs, students, and research scientists from Australian and Indian institutions. 🔗 Find us: @theGeoCo on YouTube 📻 Wonder on Spotify @theGeoCo on TikTok and Instagram Geoco News on Substack: thegeoco.substack.comWe acknowledge the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, on whose country the Wonder podcast is made.— Anthony, Holly & the CSIRO Australia-India Partnership team

Australia's largest platinum deposit was hiding 70km from Perth CBD, and nobody had thought to look. In 2020, Chalice Mining drilled the very first hole at a site on the western edge of the Yilgarn Craton, ancient geology everyone had ignored because the exciting stuff was supposed to be much further away from the city.... That hole hit platinum, palladium, nickel, and copper. It was Australia's largest PGE discovery in history. There is a road that passes within 200 metres of it. Generations of geologists drove right by. Matt Demmer is one of the economic geologists working to understand the Gonneville deposit ever since, first with Chalice Mining, now also completing his PhD at the ARC Centre for Critical Resources. He joins Holly and Anthony to discuss how you find things nobody expected, what the sulfur isotopes inside the rocks are whispering about deep Earth recycling, and why thinking about mineral systems as interconnected planet-wide stories might be the key to finding the next one. A 15-year industry career feeding directly into frontier academic research: as Holly puts it, spectacularly punk geology.----Make sure you're following Wonder wherever you get your podcasts — and chuck that notifications bell on!We release a GeoCo News email newsletter. You wouldn't want to miss out... sign up hereFind us at www.thegeoco.com.auAnd on Instagram & TikTok: @thegeocoGeoCo comes to you from the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

The Earth bobs up and down like a yo-yo over geological time, and it's drawn a treasure map of the world's metals... What if the ground beneath your feet has been silently rising and falling for millions of years, driven not by earthquakes but by something churning deep in the mantle? And what if that same invisible process explains where the world's great copper, zinc, and nickel deposits are hiding?Dr Mark Hoggard (ANU and previously of Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia) joins Holly and Anthony for a conversation that will genuinely change how you picture Earth. Starting with a tour of the solar system's rocky planets and ending with a treasure map of Earth's metal deposits, this one covers deep Earth dynamics, dynamic topography, the mystery of the Eastern Highlands, and how the thickness of tectonic plates controls where critical minerals form. "The idea that old rocks in the middle of Australia do nothing for a billion years is not true," Mark says — and by the end of the episode, you'll understand exactly why.Make sure you're following Wonder wherever you get your podcasts — and chuck that notifications bell on!We release a GeoCo News email newsletter. You wouldn't want to miss out... sign up hereFind us at www.thegeoco.com.auAnd on Instagram & TikTok: @thegeocoGeoCo comes to you from the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

On today's episode of Wonder, Holly & Anthony are joined online by Dr Jacqueline Halpin from the University of Tasmania for an armchair geological tour of one of Australia's most spectacular and surprising places.If you've hiked the Overland Trail, wandered Salamanca, or stared up at kunanyi/Mt Wellington from the Hobart warf, this one is for you. Tasmania's geology is in-your-face, world-class, and wildly underrated!It turns out the rocks of Tasmania have a story that starts not on this continent, but in North America, 1.4 billion years ago. From the ancient quartzites of Rocky Cape (cousins to the Rocky Mountains), through violent continental collisions in the Cambrian, Devonian beach granites, Gondwana-breaking dolerites, and a Pleistocene ice cap that carved the deepest lake in Australia... Jacqui walks us through the extraordinary archive written into Tasmania's landscape.Find us at www.thegeoco.com.au | Instagram & TikTok: @thegeoco | Newsletter: thegeoco.substack.comGeoCo comes to you from the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

Did you know that humans are a type of lobe-finned fish!? Turns out our story begins 400 million years ago, when some very special fishies began making the move from sea to land, and we want to talk about it!! Dr Alice Clement heads up the Early Vertebrate Evolution Lab at Flinders University and has dedicated her career to understanding this history of life on Earth ... how the evolution of fish is the story of our own beginnings, too.Alice joins us in the studio for a conversation about her first fieldwork at the GoGo Formation in the Kimberley - one of the most extraordinary fossil sites in the world - to the moment she split open a limestone nodule and found a beautifully preserved fish inside (now on display at Melbourne Museum!). Alice brings the joy of discovery into every corner of this fun episode. One of our favourite moments was when she walked us through her favourite fossil - an Elpistostege - a predatory fishapod from a famous site in Quebec that Alice then helped image using high-powered X-rays. The x-rays revealed finger bones, hidden inside a fish's fin, that are anatomically equivalent to your own. How good!And we get the full story of Materpiscis, the pregnant fish with a fossilised embryo and umbilical cord still intact, whose species name is Attenborough (yes, the Sir David...). Alice is a wonderful guest, and this won't be the last time you hear her on Wonder.Thanks to the Geological Society of Australia for making this episode of Wonder possible!Find us at www.thegeoco.com.auInstagram & TikTok: @thegeocoSign up for GeoCo News on Substack: thegeoco.substack.comGeoCo comes to you from the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

What does it take to discover a continent? Apparently four months in the Madagascan wilderness with no phone, some crunchy crickets to snack on, and a whole lot of time bouncing around on terrible roads in a beat-up Peugeot while thinking some very big thoughts.Professor Alan Collins from Adelaide University joins Holly and Anthony for a conversation that spans the formation of Gondwana, the naming of a long-lost ancient continent, and the importance of being beautifully, productively bored. This is a genuine delight as Alan shares with us his vintage field photos, stories of sleeping in remote villages, learning Malagasy on the fly, and finding dinosaur bones by the side of the road. What a geology-kinda-life!!And the science? Alan's research reconstructed continental collisions 600–700 million years ago when the oceans were pink and the continents a rusty-red... and a mountain range as mighty as the Himalaya that has long since vanished. Alan walks us through the plate reconstructions and explains why understanding all of this helps us understand why our planet turned out the way it did. Oh, and we find out where the name Azania actually came from. Spoiler: it involves a very well-thumbed Lonely Planet!Alan is a returning guest on Wonder. If you’ve heard him before, you’ll already know why we had to get him back. If you haven’t, this is a very good place to start.Make sure you're following Wonder wherever you get your podcasts - and chuck that notifications bell on! Find us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.thegeoco.com.au⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And on Instagram & TikTok: @thegeocoWe release a GeoCo News email newsletter. You wouldn't want to miss out... ⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up here https://thegeoco.substack.com/?u...​Thanks to the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Geological Society of Australia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for making this episode of Wonder possible! GeoCo comes to you from the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

The Rocky Mountains - lands of towering peaks glacier carved valleys, huge faults and unique geological heritage. In this episode of Wonder, we lace up our boots and head into the heart of the Rockies with the endlessly enthusiastic Nick Zentner, professor of geology at Central Washington University . Nick is a great storyteller, and together we unravel the colossal forces that built this iconic mountain range.Nick is a friend of our little podcast and we really appreciate his generosity of spirit in giving us his time.Make sure you're following Wonder wherever you get your podcasts - and chuck that notifications bell on! Find us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.thegeoco.com.au⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And on Instagram & TikTok: @thegeocoWe release a GeoCo News email newsletter. You wouldn't want to miss out... ⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up here https://thegeoco.substack.com/?u...​Thanks to the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Geological Society of Australia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for making this episode of Wonder possible!GeoCo comes to you from the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.