Brooke Johnson

Geologist

My name is Brooke and I am a geologist, this means that I read the story written in the rocks. Rocks are just like pages in a book and a geologist learns to read those pages and then shares the stories they find with other people. I am interested in the story hidden in rocks because humans like us are part of that story, if even we don’t realise it sometimes.

I’ve loved collecting rocks and fossils ever since I was a wee boy. I loved using my imagination to travel back in time hundreds of millions of years and imagine these creatures when they were alive and when the world was like an alien planet.

My work looks at rocks from 1.3 billion years ago, when life was just tiny single cells. I want to understand how much food the cells had to eat. To do this I collect rocks from a desert in Australia that used to be an ancient sea and look at them under a microscope. By using a microscope, I can see which minerals grew on the ancient seabed and that tells me how much food the ancient cells had to eat.

My YouTube channel that I’ve just started that is aimed at teaching people with no scientific background about geology by looking at the world around them. First episode just went online.

Check out my YouTube channel here!