HeyJaredEarthDate
EarthDate is a short-format weekly audio program delivering concise, science-based stories about the Earth: its geology, environments, and the processes that shape our planet over deep time and today.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 13
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 4, 2026
Latest episodes
Where Rust Shouldn't Be (opens the original)
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Rust is common on Earth. It shouldn’t exist on the moon. But somehow, it does. Rust is just the common name for iron oxide. Iron that has bonded to oxygen. The moon, however, has no oxygen. Yet lunar rovers have recovered grains of iron oxide in lunar soil. How could they have gotten there? One possibility is from Earth. Or rather, from our atmosphere. The magnetic field of our planet, called its magnetosphere, surrounds Earth like an invisible force field. The sun produces a solar wind of charg
Sole Survivors (opens the original)
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Imagine there was not one species of human…but many. One stronger. One smaller. All different, but closely related. Around 40,000 years ago, that’s exactly how it was. Homo sapiens – us – shared Earth with several other Homo species. Then those other ones went extinct, and we carried on. The sole survivors. Why? Because we could better adapt to changing climates. And that’s because of a few key qualities. First, we had more flexible diets. We could eat large animals or small. Fish, fowl, or fora
Gold is Abundant (opens the original)
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Gold is rare. Except in one place on Earth that it’s incredibly plentiful. But we’ll probably never get to it. Over the course of human civilization, people have searched for gold. Still, we haven’t found much – 220,000 tons across all those centuries. By comparison, we’ve mined seven times as much silver. And 3,000 times more copper. But we now know there’s much, much more gold on Earth. When the planet formed, more than 4 billion years ago, many metals swirled together in Earth’s molten magma,
Life on Mars? (opens the original)
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Is there life on Mars? That’s the question NASA wanted its first Mars mission to answer – in 1976. They designed their remarkable Viking rover -- well before modern computers -- to collect and test soil samples, 140 million miles from Earth. First, Viking added a nutrient solution to the soil, looking for carbon dioxide that microbes would produce if they consumed it. And the test showed a small amount! Next, Viking incubated the sample to see if microbes, if present, could produce organic matte
Warm Springs for Winter Manatees (opens the original)
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A large manatee can top 1000 pounds and eat 15% of its weight in seagrass each day. That may sound hardy, but manatees are actually very sensitive. There are three species, all adapted only to the constant warm waters of the tropics. But the West Indian manatee has found a way to survive Florida winters by taking advantage of the state’s geology. As temperatures drop, manatees leave coastal waters and swim up rivers toward headwater springs. Florida has hundreds of springs, more than any other s
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