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Catastrophe - Episode 1 - Birth of the Planet

Jun 03, 2021
this city the people in it in fact all life on Earth we are here just by chance we survived 99% of all species that ever existed weren't they wiped out in a series of global

catastrophe

s that brought life to the brink? of extinction four and a half billion years ago the earth collided with another

planet

the impact almost destroyed our world but instead turned it into a home this is the story of the difficult

birth

of our

planet

well, you will read all these people it is difficult to believe How lucky we are because we are here just by chance.
catastrophe   episode 1   birth of the planet
Evolution was not an orderly progression from individual cells to us, it was an imperfect and often violent process, and it is a miracle that we are here in this series that we will see. to theories about

catastrophe

s that shaped our world and almost stopped evolution in its tracks, such as when the planet was encased in ice for 25 million years, freezing the land and oceans, life survived, but only just when enormous Volcanic eruptions poisoned the planet's atmosphere and pushed all life to the brink of extinction or the moment a six-mile-wide asteroid crashed into the planet killing 70% of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, not even humans escaped unscathed, we may have only existed for a short time, but we have faced and survived supervolcanoes, ice ages and even cosmic impacts, these catastrophes almost ended life, but from the ashes new species evolved without them, we may not be here tonight we examine the first major catastrophe the day our planet collided with another.
catastrophe   episode 1   birth of the planet

More Interesting Facts About,

catastrophe episode 1 birth of the planet...

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, so it's difficult to keep track of such a huge amount of time to put it into perspective. Let's imagine the entire history of the Earth compressed into the 24 hours of a single day. Every minute on our clock represents about 3 million years. It begins to run at midnight and the first catastrophe was only a few minutes away our solar system had not even finished forming twenty infant planets surrounded a new star our Sun one of them was the earth its surface was a vision of hell an arid place and without life wrapped in toxic volcanic gases there was no water or oxygen or moon, but all this is about to change as our clock reaches 12:00 nine minutes, that was 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth faces its first and greatest disaster, an impact of biblical proportions that reconstructs the Earth's early history. is a major challenge has been erased and obscured by billions of years of erosion and volcanic activity astronomer Bill Hartmann has spent his life studying the events of the early solar system recording the early part of Earth's history all of it has been erased on the Earth itself because we have erosion and rain and continental drift and continents colliding and mountains rising and so on but all is not lost there is a record of the early days of the Earth but not on Earth it turns out the best place to look en Near Mercury and Mars, their surfaces have barely changed in more than four billion years, providing us with a unique record of events in the early days of our solar system.
catastrophe   episode 1   birth of the planet
They are dotted with ancient impact craters. You start looking at those craters and you discover that there are not only hundred mile craters and 200 mile craters, but also 600 mile craters and some very large objects, these craters paint a picture of an intensely violent period of a solar system plagued by cosmic debris where millions of asteroids and comets crashed into the young. planets in the midst of this all-out assault, the Earth must have been hit as well. It was a window into the early history of the Earth and it made us realize that the Earth itself has had this tremendous history of impacts, huge impacts that really could have damaged the entire planet, it made people think about what the effects of giant impacts on Earth.
catastrophe   episode 1   birth of the planet
Hartman realized that it wasn't just small asteroids hitting the planets, but there were much larger objects. The larger the object, the more dramatic the consequences, so the impact process is a kind of wonderful paradox - on the one hand, small impacts tend to make everything the same, millions and millions of impacts averaged out, but large impacts give individual personalities to the planet. Take our planet tilted on its axis at 23 degrees with a close orbit. satellite the moon we used to think they were born together until Hartman proposed a radical theory the earth had been hit by something the size of another planet creating that tilt and the moon the key to our idea was that as the planets grew you had the planets finished, but you still have leftover bodies, if one of those collides with the Earth just as the Earth finishes forming, that can eject material from which the Moon could form in orbit around the Earth.
Imagine the scene where the newly formed Earth plummets. the Sun and many other planets do exactly the same thing, including this fear about the size of Mars which was orbiting the Sun and at exactly the same distance as the Earth, the two planets were on a collision course and hit the Earth at 25,000 miles per hour. hour with the force of billions of Megaton bombs the impact tore away huge sections of the Earth's crust billions of tons of debris flew into space a ring of red-hot dust and rock formed around the Earth over the next hundred years When Hartman suggested the idea in the 1960s, people found it difficult to accept that scientists thought of everything in terms of slow geological processes, one grain of sand at a time.
Knowing that it would wear down mountains, thinking about something as colossal as the moon forming as a result of a single event was hard for people to swallow, but then Hartman got the first real clue that his theory might be true: the Apollo project in one of the American programs for the deaf. astronauts made six visits to the moon explored its surface toured its craters and brought back 840 pounds of lunar rock for the first time scientists were able to discover what the moon was really made of lunar samples had remarkably similar chemistry to that of the layer outermost part of the Earth's crust for most researchers it was an interesting discovery, but Hartmann was vital new evidence, so you have rocks from the crust, you have rocks on the surface and a big impact comes and carries away all those rocks from the crust and that material goes into space and forms the moon, but many scientists were still skeptical, they just couldn't see how a massive impact could create the moon and the earth as they are today.
In fact, I had people telling me that we should exhaust all the other theories first because it was such an outlandish idea. It was a chance meeting at a conference with astrophysicist Robin Canner that gave Heartland the breakthrough he was looking for. She was using computer models to study Saturn's moons. Bill Hartmann approached me after my talk and asked: have you ever thought about applying your models? about how moons form in and near Saturn's rings to the origin of the moon and I said no, so she tried it and used modeling software to recreate the early solar system and then plotted a planetary collision of the type that Hartman was suggesting, so where four and a half billion years ago, at the end of the formation of the Earth and we are in space and we are observing as a small planet, the planet on the right is about to hit the Earth young person represented by the largest planet on the left, the collision takes place. place and when we see it hit, it hits glancingly and you can see that the impactor is completely destroyed by the collision.
Thea, the impactor is annihilated, the earth survives, but only now is this collision incredibly violent, so violent that there is enough energy to completely melt. The Earth, and in fact, at the end of this impact, the Earth is surrounded by an atmosphere of vaporized rock. Trillions of tons of debris are shot into space. Here we see a part of the impacted planet cut into this long arm of material that produces a disk that we are seeing almost edge on in this view and it is from that disk that the moon then fuses is muggle cannabis shows that the moon was probably made of debris from both there and the Earth explains why those lunar rocks were so similar to rocks from the Earth's crust, so I called my colleague and said, "You're not going to believe this, but I tried.
I tried this case of Mars-sized impactor with an impact angle of about 45 degrees and everything worked and he said you better check it again and So I checked it again and did a lot more of these simulations and sure enough, that type of impact is the one that gives us the current Earth system. The improvement work was further proof that Hartman's radical theory could be correct, so it was very exciting. Robin made his models and they started saying that yes, there may be remnants of moon formation in orbit around the Earth and that the moon would form from those remains.
The harmonious work of the students demonstrated that our moon was created by a violent cataclysmic collision between the Earth and its twin. Earth narrowly survives total destruction, but the collision set off a series of events that transformed our planet. It became a climatic hell with extreme weather conditions and giant tides, but interestingly, those deadly conditions created the building blocks for life itself to evolve on our clock in just 10 minutes. 30 million years have passed in real time, it was the most important period in Earth's history, a time of incredible violence that saw the creation of a new Earth and our Moon, the massive impact that created the Moon almost destroyed our planet , but out of this catastrophe a new beginning emerged because the impact set in motion a chain of events that transformed Earth from a vision of hell to the blue-green oasis we call home.
Scientists set out to reconstruct those events starting with the moments immediately after the impact. The myth happens Upstate New York paleontologist Judith Nagle Myers searches for clues that may reveal what happened on Earth right after its impact. There is no evidence left on Earth of the moment of the collision, so scientists are constantly looking for inventive ways to look back in time. Nagle Meyers Uses fossilized corals. These are only four hundred million years old, but they contain a vital clue about what conditions were like on Earth four and a half billion years ago. I personally love fossils because you find them and they open a window in time by just looking at their remains and their skeletons you can reconstruct the environment that existed here long before humans were on earth.
Coral fossils have an unusual property that allows them to capture a snapshot of early conditions, day by day. On Earth they deposit layers of limestone, a new layer for each day of the year. You can see the same process in all reefs, including today's coral. If you look closely at these modern corals, you can see little lines that they built as they grew. They are somewhat similar to the growth rings of trees, we know today that in one of these lines we present a day when the layers of daily growth accumulate to create a larger annual ring.
If you count these daily growth rings, you can actually count them in modern corals. 365 growth lines per year, but four hundred million year old fossil eye corals don't have 365 growth lines per year, they have 410 when these corals were alive in ancient oceans 400 million years ago, the world was very different one year The last 365 days lasted 410, but whether you measure it in days or hours, the Earth's orbit around the Sun always takes the same amount of time per year and is always constant. The only explanation for there being more days in a year has to be that it was millions of years ago. each day was shorter, that means that at the time when this animal lived in the ocean, the days had fewer hours than today 400 million years ago, a day lasted only 21 hours and if the days were shorter than the Earth must have been spinning faster, estimate from 400 million years ago to four and a half billion years ago, just after the big collision, and each day would have lasted only six hours, meaning the Earth must have been spinning much faster than today.
It seems that the massive impact that created our Moon also caused the Earth to spin like a top. It was the first step towards the habitable Earth we live on today, but you would never know it. The rapid rotation unleashed the worst weather the planet has ever seen. It seemed as if the collision with TheĆ” had left the earth and the worlduninhabitable at 12 minutes after midnight on our clock 40 million years after the earth first formed frozen comets began crashing from space it was a savage bombardment but it was not a In fact, it was a disaster.
Icy comets melted and helped create the first oceans, but the young Earth was still a violent and hostile place. Its rapid rotation hit 500 miles per hour. Hurricanes, rain and storm-force winds swept over the planet's surface and the atmosphere melted. a lethal cocktail of carbon dioxide and acid rain it seemed like there was no way life could have started if it weren't for a reason when the moon rose four billion years ago it wasn't the familiar moon we see today, it was 10 times Its proximity was another consequence of that enormous collision that led directly to the emergence of life on Earth because the moon was much closer than today its gravitational pull on the earth was much stronger, it attracted with force Earth's newly formed oceans are the result of enormous tides that swept across the planet at hundreds of miles per hour.
You might think that they hindered the development of life, but you would be wrong. This is the Bay of Fundy, Canada. It has the highest tides. Physicist Neil Cummings is here to study what happens when the tide rises today and what that can tell us about tides in our planet's distant past. I would expect to see here a huge wave maybe five or six feet high called a tide. You're waiting for the tide to come. It surges during high tide so you can see firsthand the kind of forces that shaped the ancient landscape and created the conditions for life to begin reading here, actually, in the middle of the channel. , you can start to see the tide, you would see the way. from curling up on each other, seen whitewater, it's an absolutely fascinating sound, like you can really start to hear a little, you get the feeling that there's some action here that you don't see anywhere else, we should go find it as it increases the incoming tide.
Upstream it meets the outgoing tide, creating one of the largest tidal waves in the world. The turbulent waters crash against the edge of the bay. Favorite sand minerals and other materials away from the shore and carry them to the sea. The thunder of the tidal wave is replicated in miniature for the tides. On early Earth, ancient tides would have been at least a thousand times higher. There wasn't a huge amount of power in these tides, but nothing compared to what it was. War travels at about 12 kilometers per hour. The ancient tide would have been traveling in the order of.
One hundred to three hundred miles per hour and they would have gone much further inland much faster and would have caused much more damage four billion years ago when the Moon was much closer the tides would have crashed inland hundreds of miles per hour each rough tide. millions of tons of debris when it receded left a devastated coast the young planet Earth was being devoured by its oceans and farce that was good news because what the tides stripped from the earth they gave to the ocean creating the perfect environment for life To emerge for life to begin, a large amount of minerals are needed in the oceans that are free to mix and interact.
The only way the Earth could have gotten that was through the huge tides that the Moon gave when it was much closer, the tides breaking. minerals and nutrients from the earth and mixed them with the oceans creating a primordial soup. Scientists believe that chemical interactions in that soup created the first amino acids and basic proteins. The basic components of life from these ingredients. The first primitive cells would eventually emerge as life. Perhaps it would never have developed if it weren't for the tides created by the moon a moon born from a catastrophe a disaster that almost destroyed the earth but without which life could never have evolved but the earth was still a brutal place the planet The climate was too chaotic and the seas too brutal for single-celled organisms to evolve, but beneath those churning seas a vital brew was brewing: a few simple chains of molecules were being assembled, and those molecules would be the precursors to life. on our Earth clock.
History 500 million years have passed since the impact that created the planet and its moon. Thanks to the Moon's violent tides, the first building blocks of life have been created in the deep ocean, but the tides are too violent to allow organisms to evolve. Something must have happened. it happened to calm the planet and allow life to take the next step otherwise we simply wouldn't be here this is kwazulu-natal in south africa for paleontologists nora naka this ancient gorge is a truly remarkable place here discovered fossils of some of the first life forms on the planet three billion years ago this landscape was an ancient sea full of single-celled bacteria a billion years after the catastrophe that almost destroyed our planet life on Earth was in full bloom it was truly one of the great moments of my On our run we were looking for fossils all day and then in the late afternoon when the sun was shining at the right angle we suddenly saw fossils appearing everywhere.
It was simply incredible, the fossils were the remains of vast colonies of bacteria that grew like maps in shallow oceans and were some of the first living cells to inhabit the planet. There are bacteria very similar to these that are still alive today. They are colonies of live bacteria. We call them microbial mats and you can easily see why those mats look small greenish. carpets found everywhere on sandy beaches today the similarities between ancient and modern are striking, you can see that the surface of the rock is greenish in color just like the living microbial carpet, follow my finger now I will show you the edge of the fossil microbial mat here and here you see, the sand underneath is a microbial mat like this piece here, but it's fossilized and it's 3 billion years old.
Rocks throughout the gorge reveal an astonishing diversity of ancient microbial communities, ecosystems of bacteria as complex then as they are today, but The rocks reveal something else: They show not only when cellular life took hold, but how it could do so because when Life emerged not in the violent oceans left by the collision, with fear, but in calm, shallow waters, it entered first. On this side outcrop I saw all these different wave marks and they looked just like they do today. If you walk along the beach you can see the same structures in the sand, so the preservation of those structures is just exceptional.
Here it looks as if the tide has just gone out except these waves are three billion years old the fossilized record of an ancient ocean gently lapping the coast with no sign of giant tides or hurricane winds the site shows that at least 3 billion years ago of years the living conditions were normal this is a peaceful environment here so that life could evolve something had changed the climate of the planet making it hospitable for life and once again that something was the moon and its effect on the oceans the tides since that started to form have acted as a brake to slow the Earth's spin.
I can almost think of it as the brakes on a car putting pressure on the tire and causing... this joint slowdown, that's what's happening and has happened with the tides. It's a process called tidal friction, when tides and continents meet water pushing against the land. a creates friction and that friction is literally slowing down the Earth gradually over millions of years, the Earth began to spin more slowly as a result, the days became longer and the hurricane force winds decreased. It was a step in the right direction, but on its own it was not. It was not enough to create the calm seas we saw fossilized in Kwazulu-natal.
The Moon was still close to the Earth. Her gravitational pull on the oceans was still strong so the oceans calmed down into a gentle wave. Something important must have happened and the answer to what was discovered in NASA's Apollo program the final stage of man's mission to the moon McDonald Observatory USA here 40 years after man first landed on the moon the Apollo mission is still going strong every day NASA engineer Jerry Wyant approaches his laser telescope in this remote part of Texas his mission to measure the distance from the moon to Earth we are the last living piece of the ax power project you probably also think that's all the pol projects there are dead and gone and that's why they are surprised when I tell them what I do: I send a laser to the moon when the astronauts landed on the moon they left behind the American flag and something else reflectors almost daily jerry wyant and his colleague pointed their laser at one of the lunar reflectors that are measuring the precise distance between the moon and earth this is a billion watt laser we point it at the moon reflector and we measure how long It takes this light to go from here to the moon and back and that's our data that the laser measures.
The time it takes for the light to bounce back from the moon is a billionth of a second, but first they have to find the reflector. Each panel is about the size of this map, so if you think about it, we're trying to hit it. something this size about 240,000 miles away is not easy they need a clear night so they need to locate the target yes they are all alike on this yes since you will get lost it can take up to four hours just to find the reflector right? There it is, that would be the searchlight on the moon, right there tonight, the laser beam takes two point three nine six seven seconds to travel to the moon and back when I see the moon in the sky instead of having romantic thoughts, I think, wait. the laser is working well, it may not be romantic, but it is amazing because every year once the laser beam takes a little longer to bounce back, that means every year the moon is a little further away, one of the reasons why What scientists used our data is to confirm their suspicion that the moon is actually moving away from the earth and they have used our data to tell us the value of that, in fact, yes, it really is that the moon is moving away from the earth. us at 3.4 centimeters per year and it is this that holds the key to understanding why the oceans calmed down and life emerged. 3.5 billion years ago, the Moon was only fifteen thousand miles from Earth, which caused mountain tides, but interestingly, these tides were pushing the Moon away;
They were so large that they had a gravitational pull on their surface. own and that began to affect the moon that had created them, the gravity of the water is acting on the moon that raised the water in the first place and this water is pulling the moon forward, giving energy to the moon as the earth spreads over it. the moon further away, like an athlete throwing the hammer, you can think of the earth system as dancing together as the moon creates the tidal earth, the earth is slowing down and the tides are causing the moon to gain energy and move away in spiral, they've both been doing it. this dance for four and a half billion years, so the catastrophe that nearly destroyed our planet before life began actually ended up making life possible.
Violent tides filled the sea with vital chemicals, then the Earth's spin slowed and the moon moved away from the ocean. The nutrient-rich seas calmed and life began, but this flourishing new life was about to face another catastrophe, a disaster that would wipe out much of life on the planet but without which we would probably not be here, some bacteria began to release a deadly poison. gas called oxygen it is 8:00 a.m. m. In our planetary clock just over one and a half billion years since the earth was born, the first third of life on Earth was violent, chaotic and lifeless, then the climate stabilized and life began to take hold under the seas but suddenly some bacteria underwent a change that would affect all life on Earth it eliminated many species but without them there is no complex life none of this would be here at all this arid landscape is the high desert in northern Mexico it is one of the only places in the world where we can glimpse what the Earth might have been like three billion years ago.
Biologists Janet Seaford study the bacteria that live in these pools, giving you a unique insight into how ancient bacteria changed the Earth forever. You can go out. to the pools and you can see evidence of microbial communities with the naked eye, that's very similar to what the early Earth was like. The early Earth was certainly dominated by bacteria, there were no large animals or plants, so we can use this as an indicator of the early Earth. These strange looking lumps are particularly interesting, forwhich is actually quite remarkable. I know it doesn't seem extraordinary. It looks like just a rock found at the bottom of this small river, but it is actually a complex community of microbial life.
These lumps are called stromatolites, they are made of bacteria, the limestone deposit accumulates to form these mini reefs, it was organisms almost identical to these that populated the early Earth, these fossilized stromatolites in the Flinders Ranges in southern Australia are 3 billion years old. There is practically no difference between these and the living structures that Seaford studies today in Mexico. Each stromatolite contains millions of blue-green organisms called bacteria and 3 billion years ago their ancestors developed an ingenious means of obtaining energy. One branch of bacteria actually learned to do one thing. They were just using sunlight for energy, but it turned out that when they did it they did it in such a way that they could split water and create and emit as a byproduct something they didn't want oxygen.
These ancient microscopic cyanobacteria evolved a chemical process called photosynthesis converts light into chemical energy with oxygen as a byproduct it was a biological revolution and changed the planet forever the cyanobacteria pumped oxygen into the oceans then the atmosphere without the cyanobacteria we could never have evolved it is thanks to them that breathe oxygen today if they had not invented photosynthesis about three billion years ago there would be almost no oxygen in today's atmosphere once cyanobacteria discovered how to produce oxygen as a byproduct it changed our planet forever it changed the way biology was going evolved and changed the atmosphere completely, it is a process that continues today.
I remember the first time I was swimming around here and you could see the little bubbles accumulating under the edge of the stromatolite, it was quite surprising to think that that process what we were actually visualizing in that way is what is creating the atmosphere today and those ancient signs of bacteria are the ancestors of all plants in the world today photosynthesis was incredibly successful bacteria flourished and evolved we always thought that microbes are a bad thing and give you strep throat, but if bacteria hadn't been able to take advantage the Sun and then as a byproduct producing oxygen, you and I probably wouldn't be here now because it's such a complex and noisy animal evolution that happened, there was just one problem, three billion.
Years ago, oxygen was bad news when it first happened that the derived oxygen was poisoned to most of the life on the planet, so it was a devastating thing that happened, all life had to acclimatize to the fact that was going to exist, that there would be oxygen in the atmosphere, but some bacteria learned to manage it and those are the ones that led to things like ours. In fact, I feel very lucky because that bad, poisonous gas that cyanobacteria had as a byproduct if it hadn't built up in the atmosphere, then it wouldn't be here, so one of the major biological innovations that happened in 3.8 billion years has to be be at the top of the list of one of the best for us as humans my 8 12 in the morning on our clock the atmosphere had oxygen and the oceans were full of bacteria evolution life had begun and it all began with a catastrophe whose impact It's the only reason life evolved, but if it had been slightly different, maybe there wouldn't be anyone here if you consider all the different types of impacts that could have occurred and left Earth-Moon systems that weren't as habitable as the Earth. ours, it's really quite You have to think that in a sense we were lucky and that's the point at which we were lucky, not just with that first impact, but in countless ways over billions of years.
What we are realizing now is that catastrophes have played a much more important role in evolution. of life on Earth than anyone believed before, you have to realize that we are at the end of this long chain of unique events if they had developed differently this guy wouldn't be sitting on this rock here, there is only one conclusion: we are not here. because we did something right, we're here because we're lucky that the collision with Thea was just the first of many random dice rolls. It really makes you think about this completely unique sequence of random events that we all must give. us the earth we know today and if someone had been a little different, the whole world around us would be different, we wouldn't even be here, this gives you an idea that a catastrophe is always, in some aspects, the beginning, the collision Was the beginning. of a new earth instead of an earth separate from all other planets in the known universe and started us on the long and difficult journey to life as we know it and without it, the city, the people in it, you, me , we probably wouldn't be here. not at all in the next catastrophe

episode

the earth freezes because life had just begun and then the surface of the planet turns into ice and forms a snowball.

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