Summary In this episode of Beneath Your Feet, A Geoscience Podcast, host Veronica Klassen interviews Charlotte Spruzen about her research on ancient reef systems in the Yukon and their role in the evolution of complex life. Charlotte explains how these ancient ecosystems provide clues about early animal life and Earth’s changing environments. Beyond her fieldwork, she shares insights on geoscience communication, including her experiences making educational TikTok videos and the challenges of debunking misinformation online. The conversation highlights the importance of making science accessible, engaging, and accurate in a digital age where myths can spread quickly. Listen now: You can also listen to our podcast on these platforms: Spotify Apple Podcasts Amazon Music Audible 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 Welcome. Thanks so much for being with me here today. Today I’m going to be talking to Charlotte Spruzen, who is a PhD candidate at McGill University, studying the evolution of complex life. So, thanks for being with me here today. Charlotte Spruzen Thank you for inviting me, I’m so excited to be here. Veronica So, yeah, why don’t we just start with, tell us a little bit about yourself, who are you and what do you do? Charlotte Yeah. So I’m Charlotte. My pronouns are she/ her. I came to Canada three years ago, so I’ve been in Montreal since then, working at McGill University. I’m a PhD candidate in sedimentology and stratigraphy. So that’s basically looking at sedimentary rocks and seeing how they change as a function of distance from the shoreline and how sea level changes as well. And before that, I was in the UK, as you can probably tell from the accent. I love it, I love Canada, I love being here. I am really into my research and yep, that’s a little bit about me. Veronica Amazing. Thanks so much. Yeah. And I found you via your TikTok channel, which is really fun. And so you also do a little bit of science communication there, which is also a really cool part of what you do. Charlotte Yeah. I keep forgetting to plug that. Yeah. So I do a bit of science communication under the username @charbonate. And I do that on Instagram and TikTok it’s the same content on both and I make videos about mostly sedimentary rocks but I’m moving a little bit more into climate change just because I feel that’s important in the current political landscape. Veronica Yeah, that is definitely very important. All right. So with your studies, what what is it day in life look like for you both when you’re out doing research in the field or when you’re at home at the university? Charlotte So my time, as you kind of alluded to, is split between fieldwork, which is maybe like 1 or 2 months per year and office work. So when I’m in the field, it sort of depends on where we are. But most of my fieldwork has been in Yukon, so that’s helicopter fieldwork out in the Ogilvie Mountains just north of Dawson City. It’s an absolutely beautiful part of the world and I’m so lucky to work there. And a day in the life there, we’ll be staying in like individual tents. So we will have slept in the tent overnight. You wake up, you go into a group tent, you make coffee, you make breakfast, which is normally just oatmeal with just the same thing every single day. It gets pretty boring. And then we leave at, you know, between 8 and 9 a.m. and we go out into the field and we do between an eight and a ten hour day. And we’re walking off to the outcrops and we’re studying the rocks, mostly taking what are called stratigraphic logs. So that’s when you walk up a hill and you’re measuring how the rocks change through time. Well, how the rocks change up the hill, which means how they’re changing through time. And then we come back, we make our dinner, which again, is pretty much the same thing every day. It’s just a dehydrated meal and you add hot water. And so we have that. We have maybe some like, fun snacks and then we go to bed. So, yeah, it’s very much the same routine, but different rocks every day, which is pretty cool. Veronica Hm, that’s awesome, yeah. Charlotte And then when I’m in the office, again, there’s like a lot of, so I guess kind of the opposite of the fieldwork where there’s a lot of variety. I’m kind of doing something different every day. So sometimes I might be doing some lab work measuring the geochemical composition of things. Sometimes I might be writing or maybe doing some coding, figure plotting, basically preparing things for manuscripts or for my thesis. And then other days I’d say most days right now I’m doing microscope work. So my main area of interest is looking at really thin slices of carbonate rocks and trying to figure out if they’re getting more complex through time. So I’m just spending hours staring down the microscope looking at these tiny little like micron scale features, which I love, but it does give you a headache after a little bit. Veronica I believe it. Okay, awesome. That’s super cool. I love that, there’s so much variety in what you do. I think that’s really fun. How did you get where you are? Like, how were you originally