Catastrophe - Episode 5 - Survival Earth

It's easy to forget when you're in a place like this, but the world has suffered a series of global

catastrophe

s that have wiped out 99% of all species that have ever lived, but the forces that wiped out many of our ancestors They are still standing. work today all we have to protect us is a wisp of atmosphere and all we have to endure is a thin crust humanity could be the next dominant species to face extinction this is the story of how vulnerable we really are our planet has been shaped by an endless cycle of destruction and renewal the result 99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct, but we tend to forget that the same forces that created all this chaos are as powerful as ever.

We've been lucky so far. We humans haven't yet faced a truly global crisis, but History Reve reveals that we're much more at risk than we might think. Another major crisis could be around the corner to understand the magnitude of the Earth's 4 and 2 billion year history. Imagine it as 24 hours on a clock that the Earth formed at midnight, just 9 minutes after a disaster struck our planet and collided with another, but the Earth survived and life evolved at 8:30 p.m. Another disaster: the entire planet froze at 10:40 p.m. Massive volcanic eruptions poisoned the planet and life nearly disappeared and at 11:38 p.m.

A giant like an oid wiped out the dinosaurs, leading to the rise of mammals, it was only in the final minutes of the day that our planet became a place we would finally recognize, less than a minute before midnight, a tough new species marched towards world domination. they spread rapidly adapting to every challenge this new species was Homo sapiens we were just leaving Africa 85,000 years ago today we are everywhere this is the story of what has happened since humans walked the planet and it shows how vulnerable we really are One and Again our ancestors faced

catastrophe

s.

They were all different, but any of them could have stopped human civilization. The first disaster struck India 74,000 years ago. Today evidence of this event can be found in the most unlikely place within cells. of our bodies the history of the human race is written in our genes our genes control not only our appearance but also record evidence of past disasters for geneticist Steven Oppenheimer is a crucial clue as you move away from Africa genetic diversity In general, it is reduced in different populations until we reach the Native American populations that have the least diversity of all, but there is one place where there is an anomaly, which is India.

In India, genetic diversity is much less than it should be. Oppenheimer believes some kind of disaster must have occurred. He affected the early settlers of India so severely that the genetic diversity of their descendants is still affected today. Whatever it was, this ancient disaster nearly wiped out the entire subcontinent. It is difficult to estimate the size of the reduction, but it could have been reduced to about 600 people in the 19th century. All of India, whatever hit India, was absolutely devastating, something powerful enough to wipe out most of the population. Of course, there is one very obvious catastrophe, um, that is clearly dated in the correct time zone and that is that Toba Toba is a super Indonesian. volcano its last eruption is described by volcanologists as mega colossal that is as large as date 74,000 years ago the estimated time of the Indian disaster was a coincidence or was it the catastrophe that almost killed the population of India on our Earth clock History Less than 2 seconds to midnight 74,000 years ago Indonesia's supervolcano erupted Our ancestors faced a terrifying threat Volcanoes are one of the most powerful forces on the planet.

They can devastate entire regions and even affect the global climate. This Mount Augustine off the coast of Alaska is not a super volcano, but it illustrates the raw power of even a fairly small eruption that last erupted in 2006. Volcanologist John Power is monitoring how it has changed since then we are on our way to the Augustine volcano. It is one. One of the most active volcanoes in the Cook Inlet region during the last eruption here, Augustine expelled 65 million cubic meters of rock, so much debris that the summit grew by about 70 meters. The eruption here was large, although it was nothing compared to the power that could be unleashed by a super volcano, but studying smaller eruptions like Augustine gives scientists an idea of ​​the incredible power of the Tober eruption ago. 74,000 years.

We are sitting on Agustin Island, which is home to the Agustin Volcano, seen behind us. We are at the northern end of what is called the Ring of Fire. The Ring of Fire is the chain of volcanoes that surrounds the Pacific Ocean. It is the region with the greatest volcanic activity in the world. Mount Toba is located in Indonesia and its western edge here in many of these volcanoes in the ring of fire you have very explosive types of eruptions very powerful things that spew ash and so on at a very high elevation in the atmosphere there is no place where things are as active as Indonesia Indonesian volcanoes have produced some of the most violent explosions on the planet, the Toba eruption was the largest on Earth for 2 million years.

The forces are quite extreme during one of these large explosive volcanic eruptions. You have magma emerging from beneath the volcano. Within that magma you have a lot of gas, etc. they absorb into the magma itself and it is really this gas pressure that drives much of the eruption. An average volcano could contain enough gas and magma for an eruption to last for hours. Toba must have been erupting for days, but while such eruptions are rare, it is unsettling for volcanoes. This causes them not to be 47 super volcano sites have been discovered around the world, many are no longer active but some are and represent a real threat to human society, the most famous of all is located in the United States Yellowstone this Strange scenery attracts more than 3 Million visitors every year who come here to witness the raw power of the park's famous Geyers.

Yellowstone has the largest collection of such hydrothermal features anywhere on Earth. 2/3 of the world's geers are found in this park which requires a lot of heat, in fact take a super volcano like Toba only hidden underground the last super eruption here was 640,000 years ago, long before humans ruled the planet , but even after all this time you can still see evidence of this ancient explosion and the volcano itself remains active someday. erupt again for geophysicists like Bob Smith Yellowstone is a vital research center for decades Smith has been studying Yellowstone's cira, the giant volcanic crater at the center of the park, his work revealing how devastating the Toba eruption would have been.

We're here on the east side of Yellowstone Lake and this steep hill in front of us is actually the Calder boundary and the cder essentially takes up this entire expanse of landscape that we can see, this whole system blew up during the last GI disruption. This is a giant Caldera. probably one of the largest in the world that is known and active the large size of the Yellowstone system makes it a key location for the study of the ancient Toba super eruption the tone that Calera compares to Toba in approximately the same dimensions uh Approximately 60 km by 40 km DOA has a large lake that occupies the Caldera like Yellowstone Lake, so it is very similar in size.

These hills and rocks were sculpted by immense forces. The entire landscape has been shaped by the giant volcanic furnace beneath the magma chamber. This is the area where molten rock builds up under immense pressure in the depths of Cera the larger the magma chamber the more lethal the eruption Smith's work here in Yellowstone shows that the Toba magma chamber would have been huge this is your laboratory we are here at a site on the east side of the Caldera where we have a seismograph that records the movements of the ground that are related to the vibrations of the

earth

when we have the passage of the seismic Wes, so here we record 2 to 3000

earth

quakes a year by mapping your seismic data.

Bob can estimate the size of his magma chamber. The results are surprising. This simulation shows the entire United States. Yellowstone Park is located near downtown. Its limit is marked in green. Yellowstone Lake is marked in blue. The edge of the volcanic cira is marked in red. Bob's seismic data plotted beneath the surface shows the enormous size of the magma system. Beneath Yellowstone's magma chamber lies an astonishing 16m wide, 31m long and 5m deep surface, which is five thousand times the size of the city of London. A lot of magma scientists now believe that Toa's magma chamber was about the same size and the scary thing is that if that amount of magma were to erupt again it would be absolutely devastating and the consequences would affect us all, but the problem wouldn't be the red hot magma, the real killer would be the volcanic ash when the magma finally reaches the surface, the gas pressure will cause the magma to fracture, pulverizing it into what a volcanologist would call ash.

This is pulverized rock and minerals, all crushed together by explosive forces, those things can be thrown into the atmosphere at a high altitude. The Toba Colum eruption is believed to have reached the very edge of space. These space shuttle images of the eruption of the Russian volcano Mount Kevco show how high ash can be shot into the atmosphere, but October 74,000 years ago this was just the beginning, as all that gases and pulverized rock is hot, very hot. , around 1100 degrees Celsius, when it comes out it will first rise buoyantly under its own heat and as it begins to cool it will become too heavy for the atmosphere to support and rush down the sides of the volcano creating a very dangerous phenomenon that we refer to as pyroclastic flow.

These superheated ash flows can be immense. In Tooba they buried the landscape up to 200 m deep. Any humans nearby would have been annihilated, but even those outside this initial danger zone. were not safe the volcanic ash from Toa traveled thousands of miles there was a massive release of ash and that ash headed northwest into the Indian Ocean and covered India 12 and 2 million square miles of the Earth's surface were covered in ash Anyone who lived in the Fallout faced famine, the fall of Tober Ash would have affected the vegetation greatly in India and the immediate effect of that would be that the game that humans relied on had no vegetation to eat and then for Of course, human predators were at the top of the chain suffering much more.

The ashes were deadly but volcanoes have an even more lethal weapon in their arsenal: Toba sulfur dioxide gas may have released up to 3 billion tons. Volcanologist Bill Maguire has studied how sulfur dioxide can affect the entire planet when sulfur dioxide enters the atmosphere, which occurs with a large volcanic eruption, combines with water vapor and forms a fine acid mist. sulfuric. Billions of these tiny sulfuric acid droplets in the atmosphere act like little mirrors and reflect each other. Solar radiation returns to space, as a result, the planet cools and enters a volcanic winter. There is some debate about how much of Toba's warming actually led to um, but in the extreme case, it could have reduced global temperatures by 5 to 6° C comprehensively over a period of several years and that would have literally caused the death of the largest part of the world's vegetation the effects of another super eruption today I can hardly think that hunger would wipe out a large number of people if we saw a super eruption today that caused the same drop in temperature then we would experience a failure in the Global Harvest.

I don't see any way that couldn't result in billions of deaths. If another of Earth's active supervolcanoes does what TOA did 74,000 years ago, it would be a disaster for us all. On average, eruptions seem to occur every 50,000 years or so, but of course the Earth doesn't work on a calendar, so when the next one will occur we really have no idea the Toba super volcano affected a large number of people in India. but 70,000 years ago the survivors faced a new threat, this time one that would affect the entire planet a great global freeze half a second before midnight on our world history clock 21,000 years ago the planet was in the middle of an Age of Ice throughout history ice Sheet layers have helped shape the history of the Earth.

The largest was 650 million years ago, when theplanet was practically submerged in ice and we had a lucky escape when the volcanoes crossed it and warmed the planet again in the millions of years since that great planet. Ice sheets have often returned just as they will again one day in the future 21,000 years ago The Earth was trapped by the most recent of these great freezes Glaciers advanced steadily across the northern hemisphere For our ancestors there was no escape Ice ages occur in a regular cycle caused by variations in the Earth's movement through space. Sometimes the Earth moves away from the Sun so the planet cools and the polar caps expand.

The glaciers of the last ice age reached their southernmost point 21,000 years ago they go to a period known as the last glacial maximum the last glacial maximum in Europe is the worst it can get and that meant a 3 mile thick ice sheet that covered half of Britain and around that ice sheet to the south was a polar desert that had no ice but it didn't have ice either. There wasn't much vegetation or people for our ancestors, it was my migration or perish, they didn't return until the great Thor began around 7,000 years later and when the glaciers receded, it changed everything released from the clutches of the ice, civilization was finally free to start. agriculture cities the banks of the industrial revolution you get the idea the end of the Ice Age made everything possible but the irony is that our civilization is now so complex that we would be defenseless if the glaciers advanced again and if there is one thing for sure it is that one day the iceeven now the Earth's orbit is moving it away from the Sun, another glacial advance will occur at any moment, the return of the ice would be a brutal shock.

In 1998 we got a glimpse of how brutal an ice storm hit the city of Montreal. The strange weather conditions created a relentless accumulation of ice 1,000 pylons collapsed under its weight the power supply failed millions of inhabitants were left without heat and the temperature continued to drop the Montreal ice storm exposed the Achilles heel of our society our dependence on near-perfect conditions if the glaciers melted advance once again there is not much we can do to protect ourselves inevitably a new Ice Age if it occurred very quickly would lead to a complete social and economic collapse people would move towards the equator from countries from the north like the United States and the United Kingdom Europe that would be a recipe because for war and conflict, without a doubt, the civilization that makes our lives so comfortable also makes us vulnerable, but 13,000 years ago, less than a second to midnight on our clock, our Stone Age ancestors were luckier: they had simply migrated south and survived off the land. humans had already overcome a supereruption and an Ice Age, the risk of lightning striking for the third time seemed remote, unfortunately it was not that the planet had been through the worst, but there was still room to take into account that asteroids have hit The Earth throughout history in the ancient past even caused mass extinctions and scientists are now beginning to wonder if humans could also have been affected by a cosmic catastrophe this is Ohio in the US this is the show A great catastrophe happened something that had a profound effect on life.

From time immemorial, archaeologist Ken Tankersley believes that at the end of the last ice age, 13,000 years ago, this region suffered a catastrophe that originated in space. Today, most of Ohio is farmland, but a small area of ​​swamp remains as it was 13,000 years ago. Except for these, back then the area was home to an impressive collection of beasts, there were megamammals roaming this area, which included mammoths and mastadons, these megamammals were food for the main predators of the continent, humans, the people who lived here to The hunter-gatherers of Stone AG hunted wild animals and gathered wild plant foods and lived in extended families.

These people had successfully adapted to the landscape for thousands of years and then came a catastrophe. Megamammals became extinct. Their livelihood disappeared forever. Clues to the cause. of this catastrophe are found 10 m underground this is the Sheridan Cave it is a natural time capsule its secrets could solve the mystery of the missing megamammals the work of the oilmen in the cave has unearthed a treasure of archaeological remains, all of them Dating back to the time of the disaster, it is a long descent to the bottom of the cave and a trip back in time. A recent excavation has revealed an opaque red layer that marks the exact moment when the megamammals disappeared from the fossil record.

It is known as the Clovis layer that we are looking for. in the Clovis layer it is a very different layer here in the cave below we have remains of megamammals on top of the layer there are no more megamammals this literally represents the extinction event and you can find the same thing in more than 20 other sites throughout America the clovis layer sediment marks the exact moment when the megamammals disappeared. One of the things that intrigues me about this time period and about this site is that we don't have a clear answer as to what caused the extinction of these megamammals due to hunting by people who killed these animals.

It just doesn't fit and when we look at all the other Ice Ages that came to an end, these megamammals didn't go extinct, so why now and why here? This is one of the most intriguing questions I have ever faced. The excavation here continues. Even after a decade, they are still digging up bones, although this bone looks fresh, it is actually 13,000 years old, dates back to the extinction event, and suggests a violent death. What's really exciting about this particular specimen is that there is clear evidence that a blackened bone was literally burned away. color this is the tibia of a now extinct pig-like creature the size of a modern wild boar to burn the flesh of an animal the size of a European wild boar we are talking about temperatures between 300 and 600° centigrade this is not an animal that was subjected to a fire to cook this animal was incinerated and also the entire landscape we are talking about a massive fire almost an explosion of heat and pressure the question is why is it almost midnight on our clock The history of the Earth 13,000 years ago a disaster hit the United States, the megamammals were wiped out and the people who hunted them lost their main source of food.

The cause of this disaster has long been a mystery, but deep in these Ohio caves, archaeologist Ken Tankersley has discovered something that might be the answer is a meter that measures magnetism the amount of iron the higher the content. of iron, the greater the magnetic susceptibility of this layer. First I will place the probe in this gray area under the Clovis layer which is a perfect place and we verify the magnetism we see that it has a magnetism of eight now what we are going to do is compare that with the layer above the reading is 50 times the iron content in other words the magnetic susceptibility is 50 times greater than the area that is gray to A basic experiment reveals how rich in iron the Clovis layer really is.

A magnet dragged across the surface becomes covered with iron particles. It's a simple test with a surprising implication. It suggests that this region was hit by an asteroid. This suggests that there was some type of catastrophic explosion that not only deposited meteoric iron but was also intense in temperature and pressure. An asteroid impact meant that North America's megamammals were doomed; They could not adapt to the challenging conditions that followed the disaster, but humans could and the survivors prospered. A controversial theory but it would not be the first time that death comes from space. Scientists believe that 65 million years ago an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving behind a giant crater.

The problem is that for this event there is no crater except one. The man has a theory that could explain why there is no planetary geologist. Peter Schulz has come to this NASA research center in California to conduct an experiment with this giant weapon. It is so powerful that it can fire projectiles at more than 15 times the speed of sound. It is one of the big guns, the fastest gun in the West. This is where we have the opportunity to fire small bullets, small munitions, at very high velocity. Schulz and his team will fire the weapon to find out if an object from space could hit the Earth without leaving a crater.

Schulz is testing the theory that glaciers could have protected the Earth's surface during the Clovis era. Much of North America was covered in a vast sheet of ice up to a mile thick, a remnant of the last big freeze. Schulz hopes that a scaled experiment will show whether glaciers could have prevented an asteroid from leaving a trail in the underlying rock. The question we really want to address is: will the ice really protect the Earth below? This is our projectile, it's just an eighth of an inch long, about 3mm, or so. We are going to shoot this at a speed of about 5 km.

Second, the team prepares the gun to fire. A series of ultra-high-speed cameras will fill the impact for later analysis inside the impact chamber. Schulz prepares the objective that represents the Red Arena. the surface of the Earth this will add some color at least to the surface layer and this way we can know whether we drilled into the surface or not so we have loose sand underneath and we have the red layer on top. To do an experiment when we hit this target like we have it and the other one where we put a thin layer of ice and the idea behind that is whether or not this ice will act as a flat jacket, now we just have to go.

Hit it, let's see what happens, the gun rises to the firing position and the countdown begins, the team waits in a sealed bunker, far away from the gun. Wow, that did some damage, so this is big, so we have to do it. To slow this down now and take a look at the dust in slow motion, so this is now the full impact with the streak and the impact going down at an extremely high speed clearing up and we have the crater forming and now the crater. It just grows and grows and grows and grows and keeps growing.

High speed images show the devastating impact on the exposed sand surface, but the best evidence is inside the impact chamber, sweet, oh that's good, now that caused some damage, so this impact was a was a good sized impact, this was hypervelocity, it crashed, it dug things up from below, we built this to scale to make a big crater in the earth, it would last millions of years, so the next stage is to repair this target to make it look like this. This was before we had the impact, but this time let's put in an ice sheet that looks like what might have been on Earth when there were glaciers.

Now we have the ice on top of the Objective and what we want to know is if it is not like that. the ice actually cushions or protects the underlying target from impact, very well, and we see the vapor expand and we see some ice come out and the ice clears up and the real question that I'm really eager to see is do we actually produce or not a crater right now I don't see a crater let's see what we did oh man that's remarkable the ice was here and it really protected the target underneath and that's just loose sand so over time these pieces disappear.

They melt and everything we have is a little bit bigger and if this were the Earth, it could easily erode and when that ice disappears there is nothing left. It is a perfect crime. It's just a scale model, but it shows an eye. The leaf could have masked evidence of a powerful impact 13,000 years ago, perhaps the megamammals were wiped out by a cosmic catastrophe, one day we may face a similar disaster. Advanced warning will be essential to our

survival

, something astronomers in Arizona are working to provide. Mount Lemon Station part of the Steward Observatory here asteroid Hunter Ed Beaw Combs space for near-Earth objects NEOS there are millions of them right now and it's no surprise that governments around the world consider them a real threat to, well, traveling Earth around the Sun is very similar to a racing car.

Traveling on a circular track and a neo-cision could be a lot like a car suddenly leaving the pits in front of racing cars, posing an immediate impact threat and of course the consequences of a collision would be devastating every night. The bw team photographed the skies looking for anything that moves Hi Andrea, look at this, it's very fast, yes it's quite bright, it's magnitude 19 and it has a summary score of 100, let's check if it's known, yes there isn't idea about this, this item is new, the team has it. I found a Neo, it's painstaking but vital work.

We take fourimages in space for about 45 minutes about 10 minutes apart, so here you see four images displayed in sequence. Our computers record the images so that the stars do not move, except for any objects. moving in the sky is revealed as the object looks like here fortunately this near earth object is probably harmless this object is in fact what is called a virtual impactor which means there is a very small chance that there could be an impact on The future is big but fortunately it represents little risk, but for every large object in space there are thousands of smaller ones and they can represent a real threat.

Asteroids are like gravel. If you pick up a handful of gravel, you will find that there are some. There are large objects there, but there are many more smaller objects and it may be these smaller objects that could in fact be on a collision course with Earth and you don't have to look far to see what even a small asteroid can do. This meteorite crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago, this impact devastated hundreds of square miles and the asteroid that made it was only 50m in diameter, but if you think 50m is small, check this out, this is the result of a huge explosion in the remote region of Tanga. of Siberia in 1908 Fallen trees fanned out from a central explosion point for hundreds of miles.

There could only be one cause: an asteroid that exploded with the power of a nuclear bomb and its estimated size of just 10m across Tunguska is the only hard evidence we have of a recent impact on planet Earth, so we can look at that. and to say it's quite scary if there was a city underneath it it would be completely destroyed and it's quite interesting that if you look at the area that was destroyed and you overlay it with London for example, pretty much the entire area of ​​Greater London would be wiped out. This catastrophe shows how vulnerable we are.

Tangu-sized projectiles hit Earth about once a century, the last time was a hundred years ago, another deadly asteroid could appear any day in the history of Our planet is an endless cycle of extinction and rebirth, so it shouldn't Surprisingly, humans are as vulnerable as our long-extinct predecessors. We have suffered disasters, but not on a global scale. If we had, we wouldn't be here. It's not at all that we've been lucky, it's just that we haven't had bad luck yet.