How The Earth Was Made

These giant mountain sized boulders from space have wrought death and destruction throughout the millennia but until recently geologists could find no evidence that they had actually struck the earth. How the Earth Was Made follows the remarkable detective story that begins at Meteor Crater in Arizona as mining engineers desperately try to unearth the billion dollar iron boulder they thought was lying there. It's a detective story that also uncovers immense riches; the world's biggest nickel deposit in Sudbury, Canada, vast oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico and a Gold mine in South Africa - all the result of asteroid impacts. Evidence is also unearthed of violent impacts that decimated some of the first people to live in America. And finally Asteroids, and their smaller cousins Meteorites, could also hold clues to the formation of the early earth and perhaps life itself.

Iceland is the largest and most fearsome volcanic island on the planet. Scouring the island for clues, "How the Earth Was Made" hunts for clues to the mystery of what powerful forces are ripping Iceland apart, and lighting its fiery volcanoes. Here lava rips huge tears in the ground and new islands are born from the waves. Yet Iceland has a history of being covered in, and carved by ice. Locked in a titanic battle, fire and ice collide as glaciers explode and cataclysmic floods decimate the landscape. But Iceland's volcanoes have had ramifications far beyond the shores of Iceland, causing climatic chaos and devastation across the planet; a fate which may one day happen again.

The Hawaiian islands are the remotest island chain on the planet. Emerging in the centre of the Pacific their origins have remained a puzzle for generations. "How the Earth Was Made" follows the story of our attempts to try and understand these beautiful and yet violent islands. A story of raging volcanoes, vast landslides, mega-tsunamis and strange forces emerging from the bowels of the planet. We reveal that Hawaii's Big Island is over 25 times bigger than mount Everest, that the entire Island chain is disapearing faster than any other land mass on Earth and that volcanoes here might hold essential clues as to the inner workings of our planet.

The jagged backbone of Europe, spanning seven countries and providing essential water to millions, the Alps are Europe's most important landmark. But how did marine fossils get here, seven thousand feet above sea level? A team of investigators as far back as Leonardo da Vinci attempt to fathom out how the Alps evolved, a story that takes us to the bottom of the sea, up the slopes of the infamous Eiger and Matterhorn and deep into the heart of a glacier. But these iconic peaks won't be here for long. Mountains are tumbling down, glaciers are melting and the Alps are being washed away.

Explore Earth's 4.5-billion-year history of unimaginable timescales, incredible life forms, radical climates and mass extinctions.

Almost 200 miles long and over a mile deep, this deep scar in the American Southwest is easily visible from space. You could stack five Empire State Buildings one on top of the other--and they still wouldn't reach the lip of the Canyon. As the Pacific grinds into the North American plate, a giant plateau has been pushed up over a mile in the air. Meanwhile, the Colorado River has been draining the Rockies, and with its thick load of sediment, continues to carve this amazing canyon in the rising plateau.

Mt Vesuvius is the world's most dangerous volcano, and it threatens three million people. It was responsible for the most famous natural disaster of ancient history, the eruption that destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii. And its most recent blast was caught on film in 1944. Today Vesuvius is the most densely populated volcano in the world. Now recent scientific discoveries show that it is capable of an eruption larger than ever before thought possible and that hidden beneath Vesuvius there is a vast magma chamber of boiling hot rock, ready to come out.

Four and a half billion years ago the Earth formed from dust in space to become a molten ball of rock orbiting the Sun. This episode travels back in time to investigate how the fledgling planet survived a cataclysmic cosmic collision with another world, how molten rock solidified to land, how our oceans filled with water and how life arrived on Earth. Geologists study the oldest rocks on Earth and meteorites from outer space to solve the greatest geological mystery of all--the Birth of the Earth.

Africa's Sahara Desert is the size of the United States, making it the largest desert in the world. It's also the hottest place on the planet. But now an astonishing series of geological discoveries has revealed this searing wasteland hides a dramatically different past. Scientists have unearthed the fossils of whales, freshwater shells and even ancient human settlements. All clues to a story that would alter the course of human evolution and culminate in biggest climate change event of the last 10,000 years.

From Alaska to New Mexico, the Rockies are one of the great mountain belts of the world--caused by tectonic forces of the Pacific Plate pushing against the North American continent. They have formed as the earth's continental crust has been shortened under pressure--by around 1 inch a year. What's more, they are still rising and they are still young in geologic terms: when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth they had not even started to form.

The Sierra Nevada, North America's highest mountain range, contains one of the most awe-inspiring geological features on the planet: Yosemite Valley. Walled by sheer 3,000-foot granite cliffs and made from one of the toughest rocks on earth, it is home to the mighty El Capitan and iconic Half Dome. Yet how this extraordinary valley formed has been the subject of controversy for over 100 years. Was it carved by gigantic glaciers or a cataclysmic rifting of the Earth?