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. Listen now: You can also listen to our podcast on these platforms: Audible Apple Podcasts Spotify Read along with the podcast transcript: 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