Tune into this captivating guest podcast from our friends at Geology Bites! Join podcaster Oliver Strimpel as he takes curious listeners on a fascinating journey into the world of geoscience with a series of engaging and thought-provoking interviews.

In this episode, Alex Copley, a professor of tectonics in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, describes the sharply contrasting nature of the very strong and dry regions of continental plates called cratons, and the much weaker regions where the rocks contain some water.  The weaker regions form zones of deformation thousands of kilometers long where the behavior of the lithosphere is far from rigid.  In his research, Copley tries to understand how this differentiation comes about, why it appears to have persisted as far back in time as the Archean, and how it affects the present-day topography and seismic behavior of mountain belts.

To hear more great geoscience interviews, please visit www.geologybites.com.

A man with a brown and gray beard and glasses, wearing a blue t-shirt and a beanie, stands outdoors in front of a body of water. A small white dog pokes its head out of the man's backpack.
Alex Copley. Photo by Helen Williams.