57: New Horizons

Location 1: Western Australia.

Western Australia was our very first spot in Season 1, way back in Episode 10.

More accurately, those episodes covered just a very small corner of Western Australia, the Jack Hills, which hold Earth's oldest crystals, more than four billion years old.

That's January 14th on the Earth calendar.

We have come a long way since then.

But Western Australia is a very large place, and most spots are a bit younger.

So let's zoom out from our old location of the Jack Hills and get our bearings for some new spots.

Western Australia is a land of extremes.

It is the largest state in Australia, holding one-third of the nation's land.

Western Australia is the second largest division of any country on Earth.

We're talking provinces, states, territories, et cetera.

That makes it larger than Alaska, larger than the Northwest Territories of Canada, and larger than the entire island of Greenland For examples that are slightly closer to most listeners, Western Australia is half the size of Europe, ignoring Russia, and it is four times larger than Texas.

Western Australia is a large land, but a very lonely land.

Ninety percent of folks are clustered around the capital of Perth.

Beyond this corner, the vast majority of the state has only two hundred thousand people.

Now, I've just thrown a lot of stats at you, but for one last comparison, imagine a realm nearly half the size of Europe with fewer people than Iceland.

Western Australia is a land of extremes.

Fortunately, we are not covering the entire state.

Just like Greenland, we're focusing on one corner.

Where is that corner? Well, if you fly into the capital of Perth, the thriving metropolis, how far would it take to drive to our field spot? Yeah, just a cool eighteen hours straight north.

I should know.

I've ridden that entire distance in tour buses and pickup trucks.

Oh, yeah.

This is the first time on the show that I have visited one of our destinations.

I've even done fieldwork here in twenty eighteen and twenty twenty-two.