Science Moab

50 episodes listed below

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Field science from the Colorado Plateau.

The gist

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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About Science Moab

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.

In their own words

A podcast exploring the science and learning about the scientists from southeast Utah and the Colorado Plateau. Produced by Science Moab and KZMU.

Why you'd press play

This is the show that turns a desert outcrop into evidence, then asks what humans changed.

Press play if you want

to see familiar red-rock landscapes as evidence rather than scenery
working scientists to explain how they measure slippery things like soil carbon

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Colorado Plateau geologynative plants and hanging gardensdryland ecosystems and soil carbonlichen diversityvolcanoes and eruptionspaleontology and fossil tracksColorado River conservationsagebrush sea restoration

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Find your next episode

About Science Moab

In their own words

Why you'd press play

Talks about

Podcasts like Science Moab

Episodes

Life in the Hanging Gardens

Unveiling Ozone

A Modern Wonder from Ancient Dunes: The Iconic Navajo Sandstone, Part 2

A Modern Wonder from Ancient Dunes: The Iconic Navajo Sandstone, Part 1

PALEONTOLOGY PASSION: A School to Science Story

Drylands: The Dark Horse of Carbon Cycling

Nanosaurs & Good Lore

The Miracle of Lichen

Eureka at Cisco: Jurassic Mammals

Dieback Dynamics

Utah's Chinle Formation: Understanding Life in the Triassic

Underneath the Rivers: Stewardship of Utah's Sovereign Lands

Creating Water Resiliency on the Navajo Nation

Clearing Out the Fuels

Monitoring Stream Flow

Return of the Buffalo

Water, Land, and Identity

Dear Ovis...Volume 1

Wintertime Stories

A Day of Science in the Park

Backyard Creek Restoration

Understanding Threats to Old Growth Ponderosa Pines

Collaboration for Preservation

Changing Food Webs

Rock Glaciers and Water Sustainability

Living with Volcanoes

Day at the Museum

Memory In Trees

Finding Collaboration and Trust Uncovering the Past

Studying Growth Rates of the Humpback Chub

Restoration on the Range

Working Together for River Conservation

The Space between the Mountains

The Next Generation of Indigenous Scientists

Beautiful and Resilient

Preserving the Past

Unique Alpine Giants

Human Noise and the Desert Bighorn

Recovery After Fire

Sculpting a Plateau

Talus Interactions

The Rocks Below

Chasing the Eclipse

Drainage Reversals on the Colorado Plateau

Restoring Biocrust

Roiling Rapids

The Art and Science of Conservation

Beaver and Healthy Riverscapes

Reconstructing Climates of the Past

Preserving Ancestral Puebloan Roads