Season 1
Earth: The Power of the Planet is a British documentary series in which geologist Iain Stewart embarks on a personal journey to tell the life story of our planet and how, over the course of 4.6-billion years, it came to be the remarkable place it is today.
The series originally premiered in the UK on the BBC on 20 November, 2007. There are five hour-long episodes in the series.
Earth: The Power of the Planet originally aired in South Africa on SABC2 from 7 April to 5 May, 2008, on Mondays at 19h30.
The series premiered on DStv's BBC Knowledge channel on Wednesday 8 October 2008, at 21h30.
BBC Repeats
Thursdays: 04h00, 06h00, 09h00, 14h30
Mondays: 00h00
Synopsis
Examining the great forces that shape the Earth - volcanoes, the ocean, the atmosphere and ice - the documentary explores their central roles in our planet's story. How do these forces affect the Earth's landscape, its climate, and its history?
CGI gives the audience a ringside seat at these great events, while the final episode brings together all the themes of the series and argues that Earth is an exceptionally rare kind of planet, giving us a special responsibility to look after our unique world.
The programme shows the Earth in new and surprising ways. Extensive use of satellite imagery reveals new views of our planet, while time-lapse filmed over many months brings the planet to life.
Offering a balance between dramatic visuals and illuminating facts, this ground-breaking series makes global science truly compelling.
Episodes
Episode 1: Volcanoes
(7 April, 2008)
Volcanoes are usually seen as destructive and frightening, but they are absolutely critical to making the Earth a home for Life. No force has played a more important role in creating the planet we know today.
Our story begins in Ethiopia at the extraordinary volcano that is Erta Ale, one of only two lava lakes on Earth.
A bubbling, seething cauldron of molten lava, it is a dramatic illustration of the heat that lies just beneath the Earth's surface - heat that drives some of the most fundamental process on the planet.
In Iceland, we discover how the Earth's inner heat drives plate tectonics. At Thinvellir, we dive between two continents, in the eerily beautiful pools and canyons that have formed as Europe and America pull away from each other.
At Rotorua in New Zealand, we explore how volcanoes have played a critical role in keeping the planet habitable.
Early in the Earth's history the sun burned much less brightly than it does today. The planet was kept warming because the early Earth was highly volcanic, and all those eruptions poured out huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
A natural form of global warming meant the planet stayed warm enough for early Life to evolve.
We explain the critical role that the Earth's inner heat plays in shaping the Earth; without it Earth would be a waterworld, completely covered in a 4km deep ocean. It is only because new land is being continually created to counter the forces of erosion that Earth has a land surface at all.
Episode 2: Oceans(14 April, 2008)
The oceans are almost as ancient as the planet itself - when you look out over the sea, you are looking at a view that has not changed for billions of years. Yet oceans are also the planet's great unknown; their greatest depths have been visited less times than the surface of the moon.
For the Earth, the oceans are its great stabilising influence. They moderate the climate, distribute heat around the planet, and absorb dangerous chemicals. But push the oceans too far, and the results can be catastrophic.
The greatest disaster for Life on Earth happened when the oceans rebelled, and ended up killing 95% of all Life on the planet.
In this episode, host Iain experiences the full power of a storm on the open ocean, in a small fishing boat.
On Hawaii, we film some of the biggest waves on the planet and talk to surfers about
what it is like to experience them.
We talk to the fishermen who survived the biggest recorded wave in history - 1km high - and use CGI to re-create this awesome experience.
Episode 3: Ice(21 April, 2008)
Few of us can resist the beauty of snow and ice, and yet this is a substance that is strikingly ephemeral. For most of Earth's history, there has been virtually no ice on the planet at all. We live in a time of ice and ice has some extraordinary powers that make it one of the most powerful forces on Earth.
The message in this film is that, when the ice changes, the effects are much greater than just the obvious changes in ice cover. The times when ice has taken over have seen some of the most dramatic changes in the Earth's history. They have driven evolution, including our own evolution.
This episode explains what remarkable stuff ice is, and its properties. Amazing albedo (reflective power), so it is a temperature regulator and magnifies temperature changes.
It also floats - how different the Earth would be if it didn't. It shapes our landscape; we show glacial landscapes and ice erosion of valleys.
In Greenland, we show how quickly these layers can build up, through the story of the Lost Squadron, a flight of World War II aircraft that were forced to land on top of the Greenland ice cap in 1945.
In the early 1990s, a team of American aviation enthusiasts went back to rescue the aircraft, and had to dig down 80 metres to find them. One of those planes is now flying again.
In Antarctica, we discover an entire continent buried by ice - a weight so great that it has pushed the land down by a kilometre. Buried beneath this vast world of ice is one of the world's largest lakes - a body of water cut off from the rest of the planet since before the human race evolved.
We visit a unique icelab in the Arctic north of Norway, which has been dug out inside a glacier. We can see the glacier in action from the underneath and learn how it is able to cause so much destruction.
Episode 4: Air/The Atmosphere(28 April, 2008)
You can’t see it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it and you can't touch it, yet without it Earth would die instantly. The atmosphere is Earth's protective layer, cloaking it in a warm, wet embrace, warding off damaging cosmic rays and providing the life-giving oxygen which we depend on for our very lives.
Today we visit the largest iron ore mine in the world. Satellite imagery reveals the hidden ore deposits, they cover a vast area. But this is also a place that tells us how the Earth's atmosphere was made, and the central role that Life played in creating the air that we breathe.
But it goes further than that. Life gives the Earth the ability to self-regulate, to correct imbalances when things go wrong and to always sustain the conditions appropriate for complex life. It all began with these massive iron deposits.
They were formed by some of the earliest life on Earth - primitive bacteria - which absorbed carbon dioxide and produced oxygen. This was the beginning of Life's transformation of the Earth.
The oxygen reacted with iron in sea water to form rust; this is where nearly all the great iron deposits we depend on today come from. But then when the iron ran out, there was nowhere for the oxygen to go but into the Earth's atmosphere.
This was the moment when Life seized control of the planet.
We also explore how changes in the atmosphere explain the mystery of why, in the past, giant dragonflies ruled the skies when today they could not get off the ground, and how at the same time Earth was ravaged by terrible fires. Our changing atmosphere also explains how we got our coal, oil and gas.
Finally, we see how changes in the atmosphere are changing our weather and climate as the carbon dioxide buried in previous geological epochs is released in a giant experiment in atmospheric chemistry.
Episode 5: The Rare Earth(5 May, 2008)
In the final film, we bring together the themes of the series and reach some startling conclusions.
We discover that Earth is an exceptionally rare planet. It is also an exceptionally unusual planet which has only been able to nurture and sustain complex life thanks to an extraordinary number of lucky breaks and coincidences.
Since Life first inhabited the Earth four billion years ago, it has led a charmed existence. But every now and then, something has happened to threaten the existence of Life itself - a shock so great that it almost destroyed the Earth's metabolism.
New imaging technology reveals the 'scar tissue' of former disasters, like the great meteorite strike that helped destroy the dinosaurs. A huge crater off the coast of Mexico is only visible using magnetic anomaly imaging.
But the impact has left its mark in other ways; in spectacular flooded caverns called cenotes we see a legacy of that long-ago disaster.
We use CG to re-create in second-by-second detail what would have hit the dinosaurs; the 2km high tidal waves and the 'hypercanes' - hurricanes with winds in excess of 500mph - which scientists now believe may have been created by the impact.
But the big news is that, but for an extraordinary piece of good fortune, the Earth would be hit by a huge meteorite every few million years. That piece of amazing good fortune is called Jupiter.
Mighty Jupiter lurks further out in the Solar System, protecting the Earth with its huge gravitational field. Earth has been incredibly lucky. Without Jupiter, it would have been hit by meteorites every few million years, and complex Life would never have got a chance to get going.
The conclusion of our journey is a surprising one: the Earth's systems are incredibly robust. It may take a million years, but the Earth's systems will recover. It is us humans who are likely to be found vulnerable.