Field science from the Colorado Plateau.
Science Moab treats southeastern Utah as a living laboratory, from hanging-garden primroses to Navajo Sandstone, dryland carbon, lichen, volcanoes, rivers, and sagebrush country. The tone is curious and practical, with local fieldwork, public-land questions, and scientific process kept close to the surface.
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Science Moab is regional science journalism with its boots in southeastern Utah. The show treats the Colorado Plateau as a complex, readable landscape rather than a scenic backdrop. Its episodes move across geology, botany, ecology, paleontology, volcanology, water conservation, and public-land management with a steady, conversational style. The questions are often simple on the surface. What grows in a hanging garden? Why does Navajo Sandstone look rounded, streaked, cracked, or checkered? How does carbon move through dryland soils? What can lichens reveal about overlooked biodiversity? From there, the conversations open into deep time, field methods, climate stress, land use, and the daily work of scientists. The show is especially good at making technical ideas feel attached to places people can imagine walking through. Primroses become a story about isolation, glaciers, adaptation, and fragile wet habitats. Sandstone becomes a record of ancient dunes, iron chemistry, groundwater, Mars analogs, and erosion. Soil carbon becomes a management question tied to grazing, public lands, cores in the ground, and rural economies. Paleontology episodes bring students and scientists into the same frame, emphasizing careful observation and respect for fragile track sites. Conservation episodes widen the view to the Colorado River Basin and the sagebrush sea, where partnerships, restoration, and water limits matter as much as data. The show does not rush toward spectacle. It favors patient explanation, local knowledge, and the useful humility of scientists still asking questions. Its Moab focus gives it a scale that national science shows often miss. Research is not abstract here; it is tied to seeps, lava, soils, rivers, museums, agencies, grants, and field sites. The result is a thoughtful guide to how science happens in one remarkable region. It suits listeners who like landscapes better after they understand the forces, organisms, and decisions shaping them.
Made for: Science Moab is for hikers, desert residents, students, naturalists, public-land watchers, and curious travelers who want rigorous but approachable explanations of the Colorado Plateau. It also suits listeners interested in how research, conservation, and local communities meet on the ground.
What sets it apart: Its strength is place-based specificity: the same region returns episode after episode, letting geology, ecology, water, land management, and community science build on one another. Few science shows keep local fieldwork, public lands, and accessible explanation this closely connected.
A podcast exploring the science and learning about the scientists from southeast Utah and the Colorado Plateau. Produced by Science Moab and KZMU.
This is the show that turns a desert outcrop into evidence, then asks what humans changed.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear geology conversation follows Navajo Sandstone from iron-rich color to surface weathering.
Navajo Sandstone gets a focused, accessible close-up through color, cracking, and weathering. Marjorie Chan, a retired University of Utah professor, keeps the geology anchored in visible evidence, explaining diagenesis as the changes that happen after sediment is deposited,…
Documentary storytelling on ecology and Indigenous land stewardship, hosted by Mendel and Adam.
Books, systems, and the questions that unlock them.
Coastal science, patiently and beautifully reported.
Soil life, climate repair, practical regeneration.
A botanist discusses the diversity and conservation of native plants in southeastern Utah, focusing on the unique ecoregions and endemic species of Grand County.
Daniel Mendoza discusses his personal experience with asthma and his research on ozone pollution, its formation, and health impacts.
["Science Moab's second Navajo Sandstone episode pairs Peggy Hodgkins with retired University of Utah professor Marjorie Chan for a field-focused look at concretions, cracks, and color in the Colorado Plateau.", "Chan explains diagenesis, iron-oxide cementation, and why Navajo concretions differ from carbonate concretions by forming goethite- and hematite-rich masses.", "She connects those rounded iron masses to Mars rover 'blueberries,' saying the match helped argue for past groundwater on Mars.", "The episode also covers Checkerboard Mesa, White Pocket, a Bureau of Land Management case over stolen Moki marbles, and Chan's push to leave specimens in place."]
This episode explores the deposition and unique features of the Navajo Sandstone with retired professor Marjorie Chan.
A student shares his passion for paleontology and geology, highlighting the supportive community and his experiences in the School to Science program.
Science Moab host Peggy Hoskins interviews Utah State University Moab biogeochemist Brooke Osborne about dryland ecosystems across southeast Utah and the Colorado Plateau.
At Mill Canyon, Shadis McDaniel cleaned fragile dinosaur tracks in socks while the team protected a sensitive plant.
Science Moab host Peggy Hodgkins interviews BYU lichenologist Steve Levitt about diversity hotspots on the Colorado Plateau.
Science Moab host Peggy Hoskins interviews Brian Davis, a University of Louisville School of Medicine anatomy professor, about a Late Jurassic mammal quarry in the Morrison Formation's Brushy Basin member near Cisco, Utah.
Science Moab host Peggy Hodgkins interviews Randy Irmis of the Natural History Museum of Utah about the Chinle Formation, which spans roughly 220 to 205 million years ago and records many successive ecosystems.
Science Moab host Peggy Hotchkins interviews geologist and volcanologist Michael Ort about Sunset Crater's eruption in northern Arizona around 1084-1085.
Aaron Derwingson discusses the Nature Conservancy's collaborative approach to freshwater conservation and restoration across the Colorado River Basin, balancing human and ecological water needs.
Matt Cahill discusses the sagebrush sea, one of North America's largest natural systems, and the Nature Conservancy's efforts to conserve and restore it.
Ecologist Rebecca Fingerhiggins discusses the uncertain recovery of pinyon-juniper ecosystems after wildfire in southeast Utah.
Peggy Hodgkins interviews Gautier Dubois about his journey to becoming a documentary filmmaker and his new series on rocks.