Iain Stewart (geologist)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Iain Stewart was born in 1964 in East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, and by the time he stood inside an 8-by-2-by-2 meter box with banana trees while scientists lowered the oxygen around him from 20 percent to 12 percent, he had already spent decades making the ground beneath our feet feel urgent and alive. The question that day in 2011 was whether plants could compensate for a human being's need for oxygen in a sealed environment. Stewart was the mouse in the bell jar. What kind of scientist volunteers for that? The kind who started life as a child actor, earned an Equity card, and appeared on BBC Scotland at the age of fourteen. The kind who struggled through geology as a middling student before earning a first-class degree and a doctorate on earthquake fault scarps in the Aegean. Stewart's life cuts across acting, academic research, science communication, and international sustainability work. How a man from a small Scottish town became geology's self-described "rock star" is a story about curiosity, timing, and the conviction that the Earth's deep past belongs to everyone.

• 2. An Unlikely Start

  ›

  East Kilbride is a post-war new town south of Glasgow, and it was there that Iain Stewart attended Mount Cameron Primary before moving on to Claremont High School, where he studied from 1976 to 1982. Among his contemporaries at the East Kilbride Rep Theatre was a young actor named John Hannah, who would go on to considerable fame of his own. Stewart's first television appearance came in 1978, in a BBC Scotland adaptation of John Buchan's 1922 novel Huntingtower. He held an Equity card, the professional union card of the acting world. When he eventually stepped away from the stage and screen, he enrolled at Strathclyde University to study geography and geology. He graduated in 1986 with a first-class honours Bachelor of Science degree. By his own account, speaking to the Glasgow Herald, he was never the top student: "I was a middling student, never really at the top of the class, nor at the bottom. Which I think is good, in a way. When you're out there at the top, it can be quite isolating." He moved to Bristol next, where his doctoral research examined the evolution of neotectonic normal fault scarps in the Aegean Region, with a focus on earthquakes in Greece and Turkey. He received that doctorate in 1990.

• 3. London Years and the Broadcaster's Hunger

  ›

  In 1990 Stewart began teaching geology at the West London Institute of Higher Education in Osterley, where he and his wife lived in the Warden's flat for several years. When that institution merged with Brunel University in 1995, he continued there. He would later describe Brunel with genuine warmth, saying other places, for all their benefits, seemed "surprisingly narrow, and more fallow, in comparison" and calling it "a remarkable place to be." After twelve years in London he moved back to Scotland to pursue science broadcasting, and the path back to television began with a 2002 BBC Horizon film called Helike: The Real Atlantis. The film explored the destruction of the ancient Greek city of Helike by earthquake and tsunami in 373 BCE, a city newly rediscovered in 2001. Stewart said the experience "gave me a hunger to get more geology on telly." A second Horizon film on earthquakes followed in April 2003. Then, shown across January and February of 2004, came his appearance in the fourth series of Rough Science, a programme where scientists tackle challenges using only local resources and a limited supply kit. That same year he joined the University of Plymouth, eventually becoming Professor of Geoscience Communication, a position he believed to be unique in the world.

• 4. Making Earth Television

  ›

  Journeys from the Centre of the Earth, broadcast in 2004, was six one-hour films charting how geology shaped the history of the Mediterranean. The series won the Best Earth Science Programme award at the 2005 Jackson Hole Film Festival, and was shown in the United States on the Discovery Science Channel under the title Hot Rocks: Geology of Civilization. Two years later came Journeys into the Ring of Fire, four films examining how rocks shaped the history and culture of Japan, Peru, Indonesia, and California. Earth: The Power of the Planet followed in 2007, five films covering volcanoes, oceans, atmosphere, ice, and a chapter titled Rare Earth, examining the forces that shaped the planet. During the filming of that series, a species of Madagascar ant was discovered and named Cerapachys iainstewarti in Stewart's honour. The Climate Wars in 2008 traced the history of the science and politics of global warming across three hours. How Earth Made Us in 2010 explored how geology, geography, and climate have influenced human civilisation across five films. He also made Men of Rock in 2011 about the Scottish scientists who pioneered geological understanding, and Rise of the Continents, a four-part series for the BBC in 2013. His final major series under a fifteen-year BBC partnership was Planet Oil, which aired in 2015.

• 5. Research and the Bell Jar

  ›

  Stewart's academic interests centre on Earth hazards and natural disasters, particularly in identifying past major earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in the Mediterranean region. He also works on how geology has shaped culture and religion throughout human history. His edited publications reflect that range: a 2000 collection on the archaeology of geological catastrophes, a 2004 special issue on active faults in the Eastern Hemisphere, a 2010 Geological Society of America special paper on ancient earthquakes running to 280 pages. In 2011 he participated in a project called Eden, which revisited an old scientific demonstration called The Bell Jar. The original experiment showed that a mouse placed in a sealed jar would die quickly from oxygen depletion, but a mouse sharing the jar with a plant would survive longer. In the Eden version, Stewart stood inside a box measuring 8 by 2 by 2 meters, planted with banana trees and other vegetation, while oxygen levels were deliberately reduced from 20 percent to 12 percent. The plants held. The conclusion drawn was that vegetation could compensate for the oxygen deficit, underscoring how dependent human life is on plant systems. His 2022 edited volume, co-produced with V. Hurth and S. Sterling, addressed re-purposing universities for sustainable human progress, published in Frontiers in Sustainability.

• 6. Honours and Global Roles

  ›

  The 2013 Birthday Honours appointed Stewart a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to geology and science communication. That same year Kingston University awarded him a Doctor of Science. The University of Glasgow followed in 2014, and Ghent University in 2021. His professional awards span institutions on several continents: the Royal Geographical Society's Ness Medal in 2010 for popularising geography and earth sciences, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' Geoscientists in the Media award in 2014, the European Federation of Geologists Medal of Merit in 2016, and the Geological Society of America's President's Medal in 2018. In 2018 he was also designated a UNESCO Chair in Geoscience and Society. He holds fellowships at the Geological Society of London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and serves as President of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 2021 he left Plymouth on a four-year secondment to take up the Jordan-UK El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society, based in Amman. He also holds the role of co-director of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability at Ashoka University. The ant named after him during the filming of Earth: The Power of the Planet remains, perhaps, the most unusual entry in any scientist's biography.