Eavesdrop On Experts

Dr Ashleigh Hood’s career in geology started as a child. “When I was just a kid, my grandpa used to take me on walks. I’d find rocks and put them in people’s letterboxes, so that was the start of my love affair with geology,” says Dr Hood. She now searches the globe for ancient reefs, looking for ancient life forms and information about animal evolution. No longer in the oceans, these 500 million-year-old reefs are preserved high in mountains across Canada, Namibia and Australia. “Earth’s history spans back about 4.5 billion years, so these tiny little slivers of rock record one snapshot of time, Dr Hood says. “Our work addresses one of the most fundamental questions in science and that’s how did we get here? This is, of course, a very big question.” “For example, these reefs formed during a time called Snowball Earth, which is when the Earth froze over almost completely, twice. This is our most severe climate change in Earth’s history and so right in the middle of this big ice age we see these huge tropical