nature

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Our world is teeming with life – from the simplest creatures to humankind itself. Now Imagine a world bathed in deadly gases ravaged by searing heat waves and crippled by lethal falls in temperature, a world smashed by asteroids – blasted by superheated shockwaves. A killer planet, capable of wiping out 95 % of all the creatures that live on it. Sounds like a terrifying apocalyptic vision

But amazingly all these things have happened to earth. Mass extinctions have wiped out more species than exist today. And another could be just around the corner.

Part 1: 65 million years ago an asteroid the size of Mount Everest strikes the earth at 20 times the speed of a bullet. Could this be the smoking gun that wiped out the Dinosaurs and 55% of life on the planet? Dr Phil Currie, dinosaur detective, investigates the fossil record to find clues to the untimely death of T-Rex, while Dr Dan Durda looks at the evidence that the asteroid was the killer. What are the chances of an asteroid hitting the earth in the future? If it were to happen could we survive?

Part 2: 250 million years ago 95% of life on earth vanished. A chain of events, beginning with the largest volcanic eruptions the earth has ever known, the Siberian Traps flood basalt eruptions, led to the greatest mass extinction in the earth’s history. Poisonous gasses, dramatic changes in temperature saw the beginning of the end for the Gorgonopsians. Roger Smith investigates the fossil record in the Karoo Basin, South Africa. We ask Dr Bill McGuire, hazards Expert, if a flood basalt eruption were to occur again could we survive such a toxic environment?

Part 3: in addition to the extinction on land 250 million years ago, there was huge loss of life in the oceans. Peter Ward describes how carbon dioxide blankets the earth, sending temperatures soaring, and oxygen levels in the oceans drop. This leads to the emission of hydrogen sulphide, which could well have been the final straw from our Gorgonopsian and the 95% of life that disappeared at the end of the Permian period.

Part 4: 440 million years ago, an ice age occurs at the end of the Ordovician Period, in a relatively constant temperate environment, leading to the extinction of two thirds of life on the planet. But what could have triggered it? Palaeontologist Bruce Lieberman and Astronomer Adrian Melott suggest it could have been a gamma-ray burst, one of the most powerful explosions in the Universe, which, if directed at Earth, would have zapped much of life in it’s initial impact, destroying species through UV radiation and DNA damage, before sending temperatures plummeting. What would happen to life on earth today if a gamma-ray burst were to explode in our direction?

Part 5: The fossil record seems to correlate with a 62 year cycle in biodiversity on our planet. A Russian-American collaboration (Misha Medvedev and Adrian Melott) has suggested this may be a result of the movement of our solar system within our galaxy, making us more susceptible to deadly cosmic rays every 62 million years. Due to reach the peak of the cycle again in 10 million years, will we be alive to suffer the consequences, or will we have been the victims of our own existence. Are we in the midst of the next mass extinction on earth, where neither asteroids, huge volcanic eruptions nor explosions in space are to blame? Botanist Guy Midgley shows us the shocking evidence that man-made climate change is already threatening species in one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots, South Africa’s Cape. Could humankind be in real danger of triggering its own wipeout and the extinction of millions of species on the planet?

ASPECT RATIO 4.3
MAIN SOUNDTRACK English Stereo
DISC FORMAT DVD 5
REGION 1 NTSC
CLASSIFICATION Exempt
NOTE Not available for shipment outside the USA

Runtime: 54 minutes