Stromatolites – housing projects built by colonies of bacteria. ibid.
At regular intervals the magnetic fields switch upside down. ibid.
Fossil magnetism also helped solved the problem of continental drift. ibid.
Who will get rich from mining the ocean floor? ibid.
Further evidence of continental drift has come from earthquakes and volcanoes ... Plate Tectonics. ibid.
The process of chemical evolution necessary for life is not peculiar to our planet alone. ibid.
That long ago the Earth became so cold every inch of it was entombed in ice. The whole planet became one vast snowball that had lasted for ten million years. For years the snowball theory has been dismissed as impossible. Horizon: Snowball Earth, BBC 2001
Earth has no more terrible force than an ice-age. Only five times in its four billion years existence has our planet suffered this kind of catastrophe. ibid.
When Harland presented his theory of global glaciation colleagues dismissed it as laughable. ibid.
Joe Kirschvink had cracked it: he had found the way out of the runaway freeze ... By 1990 Kirschvink had evidence that the tropics had frozen over for ten million years ... He had no physical evidence to prove the ice had melted because of an extreme greenhouse effect ... Hoffman’s mission was to find that evidence that had eluded Kersvink. ibid.
In 1998 Hoffman and [Daniel] Schrag made a triumphal tour of the world’s universities promoting the snowball theory. ibid.
For many biologists there seemed to be only one possible solution: there may have been a severe ice-age but not a fully fledged snowball that covered all the oceans because life-forms that should have died out are still with us. ibid.
The ice becomes clean and transparent. Because of this transparency life-giving sunlight would have been reaching down into the snowball seas. McKay realised that even at its height there would have been havens around the snowball’s equator where the ice is thin enough for photo-synthetic life to cling on below. ibid.
It may just be that the snowball saga was the biggest force for the development of life the world has ever seen. ibid.
No-one knows why the snowball happened or if it could happen again. ibid.
For some unknown reason at the end of the planet of the apes there had been an environmental revolution of the planet. Horizon: The Ape That Took Over the World, BBC 2001
At the end of the Permian era 95% of all life died. It was the biggest traverse in the forward march of evolution ever recorded. Yet up to recently relatively nothing was known about this extraordinary event ... 250,000 million years ago hundreds of thousands of square miles of Siberia caught fire ... It started with the Siberian Traps. Horizon: The Day the Earth Nearly Died, BBC 2002
The Earth’s average temperature has already increased by 0.75 degree in the last one hundred and fifty years. And it’s set to rise even further. Horizon: What is One Degree? 2011
A bizarre and alien world: their work is opening up a window on one of the mysteries of the solar system: the Earth’s core. A hidden world 4,000 miles deep beneath your feet. Horizon: The Core, BBC 2011
4,042. Two ground-breaking new instruments have been installed on Hubble. They were designed to peer into deepest space and find black holes ... They were tightly clustered over the centre of South America and the south Atlantic. In fact this region of space has developed a reputation of NASA as a region of strange events ... Space’s Bermuda Triangle ... It also held important clues as to what’s happening in the deep Earth. ibid.
The Earth’s crust: a shell of rock typically around thirty-five kilometres thick. ibid.
It’s not just the temperature they’re contending with it’s the pressure. Here the rocks are particularly strong. ibid.
At the centre of the earth the pressure is three million times that at the surface. ibid.
The further Seismic travels the more revealing they can be. Because the speed they move through the ground changes depending on the constituency of the material they pass through. ibid.
Earthquakes: the shockwaves of major earth waves radiate through the globe. Scientists have gained a form of X-Ray vision into the heart of the Earth by analysing the speed at which they travel. And it’s revealed we aren’t simply living on one solid chunk of rock; the earth is made up of different layers. ibid.
The way in which the whole Earth resonates when it’s been hit in an Earthquake. ibid.
This sheer wave, which could only pass through solid material, had travelled through the centre of Earth ... Sitting inside our planet is a solid metal ball, almost the size of the moon. ibid.
In Japan one man has pioneered a new technique to investigate the mysterious inner core. Because Kei Hirose is a scientist determined to leave the surface world behind, and complete an impossible mission to see the centre of the Earth. ibid
Kei has to heat the sample to 4,700 Kelvin, the temperature found in the inner core and the surface of the sun. ibid.
Welcome to Kei’s inner core of the Earth. For the first time he has shown how iron-nickel-alloy crystals undergo a dramatic transformation under the temperatures and pressures found at the inner core. ibid.
As the intense heat at the centre of our planet escaped it caused the liquid metal within the core to move. The ceaseless motion in the depths of the Earth is what creates the magnetic field we experience at the surface. ibid.
And it’s the generation of this magnetic field that’s so vital to life on Earth. Because as charged particles are being blown off the sun the magnetosphere deflects them creating a safe haven for our planet. ibid.
If the magnetic field is continually changing, then that must be caused by how the metal moves in the outer core. ibid.
Our core may be a dynamo but it’s no simple one. Vast vortices and whirlpools create a magnetic field constantly in flux and that causes unexpected phenomena scientists are only now beginning to understand. ibid.
The Earth’s magnetic field could reach a tipping point and flip. ibid.
The reason why ice in the asteroids matters so much is that it could help explain something that makes our planet unique in the solar system – our beautiful blue planet is the only one to have an abundant supply of liquid water ... It means that asteroids could have played one of the most important roles in creating the Earth we see today. Horizon: Asteroids – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, BBC 2010
It seems incredible to us now with hindsight that for at least fifty years geologists were aware of the geometric fit between continental edges. Professor James Briden, University of Leeds, interview BBC Horizon
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep. John Milton, Paradise Lost IV:677
What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought? ibid. V:574
In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out, and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth. John Milton, Of Education
About the smoke and stir of this dim spot,
Which men call earth. John Milton, Comus, 1637
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky.
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die,
For after the rain when with never a strain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud
One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made. That this is still the morning of creation. This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere. The dew is never all dried at once. A shower is for ever falling. Vapour is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming. On sea and continents and islands each in its turn as the round Earth rolls. John Muir
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity. John Muir
How come then that this so-intellectual being is destroying its only home? ... We are destroying, we are polluting, we are damaging the future of our own species. Jane Goodall, primatologist
One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk. Crazy Horse
The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth. Chief Seattle