Iron
Sep 27, 2026 · 55 min · 15 segments
Iron is a vital part of machinery of all sorts, so today we’re going to examine its role in sewing machine history. Not only was it used to make the machines themselves, its physical properties drove…
Sep 27, 2026 · 55 min · 15 segments
Iron is a vital part of machinery of all sorts, so today we’re going to examine its role in sewing machine history. Not only was it used to make the machines themselves, its physical properties drove…
T.R. KellyHostAradiaHostIron is the last element to be forged in large stars before the star goes supernova and blasts space dust all over the place.
than iron is forged during the supernova or in even more extreme environments in the cosmic void or past.
As such, it is a very common element in the cosmos and also on Earth, where it makes up most of the planet's core and also is a critical ingredient in the chemistry of living things in general.
Hemoglobin in our blood being one very obvious example.
Two billion years seems like a pretty long event to me, but this was before life as we know it was happening, so I guess compressing the timeline is fine.
Basically what happened was that most of the iron that existed was dissolved in the ocean, which had just formed recently over the barely-cooled floor-is-lava version of the planet.
And there it stayed as free-floating ions, occasionally soaking up the stray oxygen molecules that sometimes showed up as the result of cyanobacteria evolving and expanding their population.
I'm yada yada-ing a lot of science, chemistry stuff, but, you know, envision that at a time-lapse sort of way.
At that time, oxygen was entirely a toxic waste product to life.
So once the iron was mostly oxidized out of the ocean and the gas started to accumulate in the biosphere, it killed off most of the life that existed at that time.
To be clear, that was still just single-celled organisms that would have all seemed like gross slime to us, but it was still a mass extinction event for that world.
And the world that we know today, where oxygen in the atmosphere is a foundational starting condition for everything else, was born out of that destruction.
This is a little bit more abstract, but it's no less contingent on the death of creatures in the deep past.
And I just find that fascinating.
Some of the most important ones are in the Great Lakes region in North America, the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the Karahas, I'm sorry about that pronunciation, Mineral Province in Brazil, and northern Sweden.
You'll note that all of these regions will be mentioned in the episode as places where Singer chose to expand to.
It's totally not in the same chemical group as magnesium.
Iron is the last element to be forged in large stars before the star goes supernova and blasts space dust all over the place.
than iron is forged during the supernova or in even more extreme environments in the cosmic void or past.
As such, it is a very common element in the cosmos and also on Earth, where it makes up most of the planet's core and also is a critical ingredient in the chemistry of living things in general.
Hemoglobin in our blood being one very obvious example.
Two billion years seems like a pretty long event to me, but this was before life as we know it was happening, so I guess compressing the timeline is fine.
Basically what happened was that most of the iron that existed was dissolved in the ocean, which had just formed recently over the barely-cooled floor-is-lava version of the planet.
And there it stayed as free-floating ions, occasionally soaking up the stray oxygen molecules that sometimes showed up as the result of cyanobacteria evolving and expanding their population.
I'm yada yada-ing a lot of science, chemistry stuff, but, you know, envision that at a time-lapse sort of way.
At that time, oxygen was entirely a toxic waste product to life.
So once the iron was mostly oxidized out of the ocean and the gas started to accumulate in the biosphere, it killed off most of the life that existed at that time.
To be clear, that was still just single-celled organisms that would have all seemed like gross slime to us, but it was still a mass extinction event for that world.
And the world that we know today, where oxygen in the atmosphere is a foundational starting condition for everything else, was born out of that destruction.
This is a little bit more abstract, but it's no less contingent on the death of creatures in the deep past.
And I just find that fascinating.
Some of the most important ones are in the Great Lakes region in North America, the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the Karahas, I'm sorry about that pronunciation, Mineral Province in Brazil, and northern Sweden.
You'll note that all of these regions will be mentioned in the episode as places where Singer chose to expand to.
It's totally not in the same chemical group as magnesium.
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