How the Earth Was Made: THE EXPLOSIVE FORMATION OF EARTH'S GEOGRAPHY *3 Hour Marathon*

Earth a unique Planet restless and dynamic continents shift and Clash volcanoes erupt glaciers grow and reced Titanic forces that are constantly at work leaving a trail of geological Mysteries behind and there is nowhere more mysterious than Death Valley the hottest and driest desert in the United States this is a place where even 700 lb rocks appear to move by themselves it's the lowest point in the US and right here the Earth's crust is thinner than almost anywhere else on the planet Death Valley is a dynamic laboratory for investigators who uniquely read rocks like x-rays to reveal the inner workings of the earth and its history adding to the Continuing Story of how the Earth was [Music] made Death Valley is the largest national park in the lower 48 states more than three times the size of rad Island straddling the border of California and Nevada and surrounded by towering mountain peaks 140 M long and up to 15 Mi wide with temperatures reaching a scorching 134° F this is one of the most inhospitable places on [Music] Earth but for geologists Death Valley has a a unique attraction here they can witness the interplay of the Earth's most Titanic geological forces when you look at Death Valley really you're looking at a battle a battle between processes that are occurring on the Earth surface and we can see the record of those forces of nature locked been to the Rocks Death Valley has an archive that is almost unrivaled worldwide to uncover death Valley's early history prave is hunting for its oldest rocks he is searching in one of its most remote spots in the extreme South of the valley in the isolated Alexander Hills this is one of the oldest rocks in death valy it's 1.2 billion years old and given the color of this rock and the fact that it's quite soft it can powder when I scratch it these are all clues that tell me that this is a limestone the limestone is a major clue to revealing the way this arid desert used to look if we think about the type of environments that limestones can be deposited in the first that comes to mind is an underwater in a marine setting there is only one way to form Limestone it is made from the tiny bones and shells of sea creatures they die and sink to the sea floor where the weight of further layers on top of them crushes them slowly into Solid [Music] Rock and prave has discovered other startling evidence that Death Valley had a watery past fossils are a major clue they are vital in the type of evidence that a geologist will use and these are some very nice examples of the type of fossils that you you can find in these ancient rocks and you can see here these curving surfaces outlining what looked to be large cabbages that are sliced in half these were algae known as a stromatal ironically these Marine fossils have survived in the Death Valley desert only because there is so little water that might otherwise have washed them away but they would have originally looked like this when they flourished in the Death Valley Waters as the limestone formed more than 1 billion years ago these tell us that the environment when this rock formed would have been a shallow sea if I'd been here when these rocks were first being formed I'd be sitting in my swimming trunks about waste Deep in water very much like the Bahamas today the stromatolites are some of the earliest signs of Life on our planet to discover what happened over the next 1 billion years prave studies evidence in the surrounding Hills the different bands of colors and The Rock layers and the hill represent ancient seas that covered the Death Valley area the Seas would deposit a layer of limestone move back across the land another layer of limestone would be deposited and so we have a history of the Seas moving across the Death Valley region from the time of the stromatolites to these Rock layers now now more than a million years later geologists wanted to figure out what dramatic geological upheaval could have turned Death Valley from a shallow sea to the baking hot desert of today and prave has found clues in a rock that is entirely different from the Marine limestones he has studied up until now this is a nice example of a rock type called a granite and it forms those veins that are in the hillside behind me you can think of these like the fingers of my hand they're fed upward from a much more larger massive area of granite sitting underneath the granite tells scientists the reasons why death Valley's ancient Seas vanished today it is solid rock but it was once hot molten magma from deep underground only one force of Nature has the awesome power and 2,000 de F heat to melt rock into magma and fire it to the surface volcanoes the Seas here didn't just drain away they were pushed back by these mountains of Fire it was only in the 1960s with the realization that Earth's continents were drifting around the planet that scientists figured out why the volcanoes erupted under Death Valley the theory of plate tectonics revealed that around 100 million years ago an ancient oceanic plate began sinking under North America pushing up the land heat from the Collision powered AC Coastal chain of volcanoes erupting on the land and finally driving away the Seas submerging Death Valley this landscape would have been very explosive a hostile type of setting and that then set the stage for what was to become Death Valley still surviving in the valley to this day is the ghost town evidence of another substance far rarer than granite that the volcanoes brought to the surface gold although gold occurs naturally in more than 30 different US states the golden Death Valley was concentrated in veins in the rock as magma solidified near the surface it made it worth Mining and millions of years after its formation it sparked the Death Valley Gold Rush It's a Wonderful example of a gold mine shaft is the Eureka mine high up in the Panamint mountains associated with trying to find gold in the granates that were intruded into these rocks 100 to 200 million years ago the gold would have been in veins these fingers that would have been injected up into these rocks and the gold would have been concentrated in these [Music] veins the gold brush here lasted just a few years miners often had to remove a ton of rock to recover only one/ tenth of an ounce of gold enough to produce just a single wedding [Music] ring today All That Remains are empty tunnels and ghost [Music] towns it's interesting to consider that the frenzy of activity mining gold was actually a direct result of the kind of volcanic activity 100 to2 100 million years ago geologists investigating the battle that raged in Death Valley between fiery volcanoes and ancient Seas have found important evidence stromatolite fossils are proof that Death Valley was once submerged By the Waters of a shallow sea veins of granite could only have formed in the fiery heat of the volcanoes that burst to the surface around 100 milli million years ago and drove that sea away the volcanoes built up the land that was to become Death Valley into Peaks as high as the cascade's mountain range but deep beneath the earth's surface awesome geological forces were about to destroy those Peaks stretch the land apart and transform the mountains of Death Valley into the lowest point in the US for a billion years Death Valley remained a flat plane Under the Sea around 100 million years ago erupting volcanoes formed high mountain ranges but then the real geological mystery began the land here must have undergone an extraordinary transformation because today in Death Valley those high mountain ranges have vanished incred incredibly the one-time mountains have sunk below sea level to become the lowest point in North America yet all around the valley snowcapped Peaks still soar up to 11,000 ft into the air the investigation digs deep under the landscape to discover what vast geological forces could have caused that huge difference in height between two places just 20 miles away from each other there are a lot of mysterious aspects about Death Valley it's a unique landscape because the valley floor itself is is very deep it's below sea level and the mountains rise up very steeply on either either side Clues to the power of these underground forces lie all over the valley if you know where to look many of the rock layers were originally deposited on the ancient flat seabed they can still be seen as horizontal layers but other nearby layers aren't horizontal at all they tilt downwards into the ground Miller finds a further clue of Earth's power in the unusual shape of this cinder cone a mound of Ash and debris lying on death Valley's floor it looks like it's two Cinder cones but in fact it's really just one that's been pulled apart along a big fault [Music] Zone this has moved some 700 ft in some 700,000 years so that's about a foot per thousand years which sounds like it's really really slow but if you look at it over a great length of geologic time you get quite a lot of slip and give it even longer time it'll be offet said even [Music] more Miller's next challenge is explaining what is making the fault line move for that she studies other ancient rock formations whose Jagged outline has given them the name turtlebacks the turtlebacks are crucial to understanding death Valley's early Origins they have so much of the record here if you're willing to spend time to try to rvel it the real clue lies in The Rock's distinctive texture if you just take a look at this rock closely you can see that it's very kind of strung out very stringy it tends to be uh pretty fine grained this texture tells Miller where these rocks came from we see evidence that if these rocks were deformed just like if you take a piece of plastic and re heat it up you could bend it it's it's the same thing with Rock and so these rocks formed at high temperatures and pressures within the Earth's crust a depths of about 10 miles or so and they have since been brought to the Earth's surface Miller concluded that some overwhelming underground force must have raised the turtleback rocks to the surface and stretched them out like warm toffee as Death Valley formed the final explanation of what happened here once again came back to the way continents drift around the globe as the Collision of the plates that had forced ancient volcanoes to the surface slowed down and ceased the high mountains that once dominated the land were slowly pulled apart and tilted downwards gradually as the underlying crust grew thinner and thinner a deep Basin formed between the mountain ranges Death Valley is the most extreme example of what such stretching forces can do by measuring seismic waves scientists discovered that here the continental crust is just 16 Mi thick this might sound like a lot but it is far thinner than almost anywhere else on the planet around the globe the Earth's continental crust averages 25 Mi thick it's strongest beneath the Himalayas at 43 Mi thick enough to support the weight of massive mountains such as [Music] Everest the turtleback Rocks also offer Miller evidence as to when death Valley's stretching started dating these rocks reveals that the deformation started here around 13 million years ago although Death Valley did not take on its final shape immediately Death Valley is really young um when you look at the whole geologic time scale modern Death Valley is probably 3 or 4 million years old at the most the stretching started before that but Death Valley itself is a very recent feature scientists know that the process is far from finished they've found irrefutable evidence in the alien Death Valley landscape known as badwater Basin I'm standing here at badwater which is the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere it's 282 ft below sea level we're actually standing below sea level about the depth of a football field this floor has been sinking is about a tenth of an inch per year which is about half of the speed of at which your fingernail [Music] grows continual stretching of the Earth's crust has turned bad water into one of the lowest spots on any continent on the planet yet its true depth is even lower still the surface that we see here is the present day surface but what one has to realize is that beneath our feet we can go down through sediment that represents ancient periods of time when death B was a surface that goes down 3 Mi you would need to drill down through the sediment to a depth equivalent to 11 empire state buildings end to end before you hit the crustal Bedrock the total volume of material in this Basin would bury New York to the depth of nearly a mile the valley floor is constantly being covered with sediment cascading from the surrounding mountains but it can never fill up completely the sediment is coming in at a rate that is less than the rate of sinking of Death Valley itself so that we're always maintaining a surface here on the valley that is sitting below sea level and is continuing to sink through time this constant movement shows Earth's geological forces at their most dynamic and makes Death Valley unique the Allure is that nowhere on Earth do we see continental crust being pulled apart at this rate or this magnitude the investigation into death Valley's creation has established how it sank to become the lowest point in North America the turtleback Rocks were deformed by the powerful tectonic forces pulling the mountains apart to form a wide valley floor the still sinking lands Escape of bad water currently 282 ft below sea level is proof that the crust here is still being stretched today but the sinking of Death Valley is just one part of the story geologists still need to investigate how one of the hottest places on Earth was shaped by the power of moving ICE 1.2 billion years ago Death Valley was submerged by ancient seas around a billion years later volcanic mountains drove the Seas away 13 million years ago the continental crust started stretching apart here and by 3 million years ago Death Valley was one of the lowest points on Earth the clue that show showed investigators what happened next was the discovery in the valley of a little known but highly valued White crystallin Rock when one thinks of Prospectors in the Death Valley region one often thinks of them hunting for gold and for silver but there was one mineral that was much less glamorous much less sexy and exciting and that was borax but it was actually known as the white gold of the desert in 1880 borax was a rare but in demand mineral us used in antiseptics and detergents one impoverished couple desperately trying to make a living in Death Valley was Aaron and Rosie Winters they heard from a passing prospector that they could make good money from borax if they could find it they learned from their fellow prospector the then secret method of testing Rock for borax anxious to keep potential profits for themselves the couple waited until the dead of night to perform the test in Death Valley you burn the mineral to see if the powder that we have in front of us here contains any borax now what the winters did is to add sulfuric acid to borax bearing mineral We'll add some alcohol the winters probably used cheap whiskey back in 1880 and the flame should burn hopefully a green color if borax is is there and as we can see the flame is green in color and in 1880 the winters knew that they would become wealthy cuz they had borax from these humble beginnings a whole industry grew in Death Valley it made the Winter's fortune and also gave scientists A Priceless clue in their quest to understand the geological history of Death Valley because borax deposits like these can only be found in the beds of ancient freshwater lakes the seawater that once covered this Valley had long gone a billion or more years earlier but the presence of borax proves that fresh water must have flooded into the area when Ice Age glaciers started to melt from the surrounding mountains around 200,000 years ago as the the glaciers melted Rivers flowed towards the lowest point Death Valley gradually a vast Lake spread out across the flooded valley floor the Valley's catchment area was huge its rivers drained more than 9,000 square miles an area bigger than New Hampshire the water pouring in from the surrounding mountains leeched minerals such as borax from from the rocks and deposited them on the lake bed in a lot of the lake beds this mineral borax would appear as kind of a white fuzzy mineral it was actually called cotton [Music] ball The Borax proved that a lake existed here geologists called it Lake Manley after one of the Pioneers William L Manley who had named Death Valley in 1849 but they had no evidence to tell them its depth and its [Music] size a solution to this puzzle is revealed in this small hill with a road cut straight through it near the Valley's Edge at a spot called Bey [Music] Junction it's very fortunate to have a road cut right through this gravel deposit so in the exposure we can see very well-rounded Pebbles we can also see some crude layering in the gravels and they're stacked in against each other and we call that shingling the shape and the smoothness of the stones tells casy exactly how these Pebbles got here the way their stack tells us that the direction of water flow that laid these Pebbles down like this was from the right to the left so we know that this had to be wave action that's strong evidence that this is a beach environment by looking at the height of this Pebble Beach above the valley floor casy calculates the dimensions of the lake from this beach Gravel Bar that we're standing on um the waves would have been crashing at our feet and as we look South it's hard to imagine a lake sitting out there across that vast salt pan but Lake Manley would have covered about 600 square miles and it would have been about 450 ft deep it's odd mapping shorelines on a really hot day in Death Valley you kind of long for the the ancient days of your when there were big lakes out here you imagine this was a beautiful place full of lush vegetation yeah it was quite a different place than it is today for casy the next step is discovering why Death Valley no longer has a lake and there is evidence about that in one of its most unusual landscapes this Twisted Jagged field of white Peaks that's called The Devil's Golf Course even the Sounds here are mysterious in the Silence of the desert there is a faint popping noise as the Relentless Sun sucks every drop of moisture out of the parched surface the salt that we see here is the remains of an ancient Lake it's called Devil's golf course because it's probably the least likely surface that you would ever want to play golf on the surface is made up of rough salt crystals popping when they expand and contract in the Searing heat but this salt did not come from the sea just like the borax the salt was leeched from the Rocks when fresh water started flowing into Death Valley 200,000 years ago the salt was originally dissolved in the freshwater lake Manley and casy has a simple experiment to show exactly how it ended up on the floor of Death Valley I'll pour the water and salt solution into this pan and as the water evaporates we should see salt forming and that's exactly how that this um salt crust forms so it's hot enough out here today it should evaporate pretty [Music] quickly in Fairly short amount of time some beautiful salt crystals formed along the edges but that's essentially how a salt pan forms when the rain water comes in the salt goes into solution uh basically just like the water that we have in this water bottle and from the moment the water starts evaporating salt crystals start forming today today Death Valley salt pans cover more than 200 square miles an area three times the size of Washington DC they are the remnants of the ancient Lake that finally disappeared 2,000 years ago when earth's climate began to warm up from then onwards death Valley's temperatures just kept on Rising Death Valley is definitely one of the hottest spots in the world the record hot was 134° F recorded back in July 10th 1913 and just to give you perspective on that the caretaker of the Furnace Creek Ranch who actually was the one doing the recordings back then he describes that day as being so hot he saw the swallows falling dead in Flight geologists today understand how death Valley's unusual geology is responsible for the punishing climate that killed off its Lake it stays so dry because there are three distinct mountain ranges between Death Valley and the moisture carried off of the Pacific Ocean over 200 miles away where we have the sier Nevada to the west of us the storms com in from the West Laden with moisture as they rise up they lose most of that moisture on the west side and each set of mountains Wicks a little more moisture out of the clouds and here with our three sets of mountains in between us and the ocean by the time that moisture to gets to Death Valley there's either all gone or we just get a few drops of rain almost all storms from the coast are stopped by the three mountain ranges each one in turn having an effect the scientists call a rain shadow so we are in the rain shadow of a rain shadow of a rain shadow and average less than 2 in a year and there is another way that geology influences the desert climate air heated under the cloudless sky is trapped by the surrounding mountains in summer Death Valley becomes a deadly dangerous [Music] furnace the local weather station provides a graphic demonstration of how quickly that heat could have destroyed death Valley's Lake every day cigan checks the rate of evaporation the summer months it may take five of these containers here so I'm going to fill them up and dump them into the pond until it brings the water level up to the needle now our average rainfall is barely 2 in a year but the evaporation Pond records up to 150 in of evaporation that huge discrepancy between the amount of rainfall and the speed of evaporation means that a lake 12 ft deep and 30 miles long would evaporate in just a single year Lake Manley was bigger than that but over time it never stood a [Music] chance the scientist studies of Death Valley have solved the mysteries of its freshwater past borax discovered here in the 1880s proves that Death Valley was once filled with a freshwater lake Pebbles Unearthed on an ancient Shoreline show the lake once covered 600 square miles an area three times the size of Chicago when the last freshwater pools dried up here 2,000 years ago Death Valley started its reign as the driest place in the US which makes it ironic that the investigation's next phase examining the Valley's most recent geological upheavals involves scientists studying the awesome power of f fast flowing water around 100 million years ago death Valley's ancient Seas gave way to exploding volcanoes whose Peaks were then wrenched apart to create the lowest spot in America from around 200,000 years ago the valley filled with a freshwater lake but the rain shadow of surrounding mountains dried up the water for the past 2,000 years Death Valley has been hotter and drier than anywhere else in North America which makes it all the more mysterious to find Mosaic Canyon a deep Chasm seemingly cut by water in this parched and arid land especially when there is evidence of massive Boulders having been pushed around like Pebbles just look at the size of that Boulder and look at how high above my feet it is it's about 3T in diameter and I can't even estimate what the weight of that thing is she may be in a desert but MSA knows there is only one force that could have lifted the boulder up so high water brought it here and left it here the force of the water that came through here had to have been pretty severe in order to get that boulder up there plastered against the wall this Boulder gives us evidence about the force of the water that comes down these Canyons during flash floods a flash flood is one of Nature's most lethal weapons if there were a flash flood coming down this Canyon I wouldn't have enough time to run out of its path because the water flows down at an incredible velocity flash floods are among the most violent processes on the earth they can carry material the size of an SUV without any problem at all in one of the driest places in the world the flood water comes from a surprising Source [Music] rain on average Death Valley receives just 2 in of rain a year this is less than half the rain that falls on New York in a single month but violent summer storms mean it can all fall in just a single day the floods transform the desert landscape in a number of ways one is known as the Desert Bloom where seeds and plants that may have Lain dormant for up to 10 years burst into flowers hour after a sudden rainfall this phenomenon might be beautiful but there is another deadlier side to these floods with a human cost in 2004 there was a flash flood that came down Furnace Creek it was just this muddy slurry that was dense enough to pick up a vehicle and carry it downhill and several people died in it the 200 04 flash flood is small in comparison to some of the events that we see preserved here in the Rocks flash floods happen all over the world but there's evidence here of their particular and rare geological effect in Death Valley this marble is very highly polished it's not scratched it's not gouged it's been Polished by very fine grain material it comes down as part of a flash flood so it's really smooth and it's fluted it's really unique to uncover how these unusual polished walls were formed mesina takes a closer look at what geologists term the bad lands I think it's called bad because nothing will grow on it there's just this very loose material out here and it erodes so readily that plants can't even take root so this is bad land the rock that makes up the bad lands is the dried up remains of the 2,000-year-old lake bed that once submerged Death Valley this is nothing more than desiccated mud it's called mudstone because it's slightly lithified meaning it's turned into rock the mudstone minerals are arranged in tightly packed flat sheets the rain can't penetrate the mudstone and therefore the rain picks up a lot of particles and carries them downhill these particles are the key to the Canyon's smooth polished walls it flows through here so Laden with sediment that it causes a lot of polishing and incision so every time a flash flood comes through this Canyon gets deeper the walls get higher and The Rock gets more polished the sediment Laden floods can carve into death Valley's rocks with tremendous speed and force these Canyons have been gouged out where the Rocks here have been fractured and weakened by The Continuous stretching the valley is undergoing this is upfront in-your-face geology happening right here Death Valley is dynamic this is a place where things are happening in a human lifespan in this arid desert the investigation has identified water as the latest factor in death Valley's continuing geological Evolution the giant Boulders plastered high on the canyon walls illustrate the power of flash flooding in the desert the smooth walls of Mosaic Canyon show how the dried mud from an ancient Lake still affects how Death Valley is being shaped to this day and yet some Mysteries remain unsolved including one of the world's most intriguing geological riddles the rocks that seem to walk by themselves moving thousands of feet across the floor of Death Valley over 1.2 billion years Death Valley has been transformed from a watery landscape to a Barren desert but even though geologists Now understand the processes that have shaped this extraordinary region there are still Mysteries to be solved and there is no part of Death Valley more mysterious than an area known as the [Music] racetrack this parched cracked Lake Basin just 2 and 1 half miles long and a mile wide is the setting for one of death Valley's most intriguing geological puzzles it's sliding Stones I love this place cuz it's odd I could come here a hundred more times and every time there'll be something different something I didn't see stretching Behind these rocks are long grooved trails in the earth it is clear that they are tracks left behind as the rocks move across the valley floor the puzzle is to work out how the rocks can slide uphill against this slightly tilted surface these are no mere Pebbles some of these rocks are over 700 lb and some of the trails are nearly 3,000 ft long the phenomenon was first recorded here by scientists some 100 years ago and yet in this remote location no one has ever seen the Rocks moving MSA has been tracking the movement of each individual Rock on the racetrack since 1996 her GPS readings are accurate to within a single inch geology is really nothing more than um detective work and rather than looking for evidence of things that took place a long time ago what I really like about working on the racetrack is you are looking at things are happening right now it's an ongoing process her first clue is the surface on which the Rocks slide if I try to move my hand over it I could probably file my nails right now however after it rains there's so much clay in the lake bed sediments that it gets slick it's almost like Teflon you wouldn't need very much force to set even a very large rock into motion just because the friction on the surface is almost nil but water alone isn't enough to make these rocks move mesina has identified a second Factor at work you can have rain but if you don't have wind a couple of days later I don't think these rocks are going anywhere the racetrack is a natural wind tunnel the wind funnels into the valley from the south close to the ground the wind can exceed hurricane strength reaching speeds of over 90 mph enough to push the Rocks into action if you have wind and there is no friction all you'd need to do is hit a rock with your finger like that and it would go into motion when all these elements are in place the rocks can begin their mysterious Journey since no one has ever seen seen the rocks in motion we can only guess how fast they go but based on some of the evidence that I've seen these rocks aren't inching Along by any means and the best estimate we have is about 3 to 4 miles an hour so a nice brisk walk but until this phenomenon is witnessed the mystery of death Valley's sliding rocks will remain I hope that this mystery isn't solved it's what keeps me interested and I think it's what keeps a lot of people [Music] interested geologists studying Death Valley have figured out its extraordinary geological Evolution stromatolite fossils show that this area was once covered by seeds turtleback rocks pro that the land was stretched apart by tectonic forces dropping the valley floor down to the lowest point in America pebbles at Bey Junction prove that Death Valley was once covered with a freshwater [Music] lake and the smooth polished walls of Mosaic Canyon show that water is still at the heart of death Valley's modern [Music] Evolution Death Valley remains one of the most extreme geological Wonders on Earth and it's still evolving its Valley floor is being constantly pushed apart by forces deep within the Earth this means that the crust here will continue to stretch and thin one day tens of millions of years into the future Death Valley could be separated by the sea from the rest of the US today Death Valley continues to sink at a steady rate of 1/10th of an inch a year while its surface continues used to be sculpted by water living proof that the Earth is never at [Music] rest Earth a unique Planet restless and dynamic continents shift and Clash volcanoes erupt glaciers grow and recede Titanic forces that are constantly at work leaving a trail of theological Mysteries [Music] behind this episode investigates the deadliest and most destructive volcanic event in US history Mount St Helens a pristine snowcapped Mountain suddenly blew 600 ft off her Summit in a type of eruption no one had ever witnessed before scientists trying to understand what made this event so lethal uncover evidence for one of the the biggest landslides in history a sideways directed blast that knocked over 230 square miles of forest and mega mud flows that thundered down the valleys and destroyed everything in their path what scientists have discovered from this unique event brings geologists one step closer to understanding how the Earth was [Music] made in Washington state 100 Mil south of Seattle stands Mount St Helens one of 20 major volcano that form part of the Cascade mountain range at the North American West [Music] Coast before May 18th 1980 she was at the center of a thriving recreational paradise and prosperous Timber industry the volcano had a beautiful conical form it it was called the Mount Fuji of North America and the form was a bit concave but beneath her beauty lay an ominous secret the mountain was brewing something that had a deadly potential the story began on March 20th 1980 when a 4.2 magnitude earthquake woke Mount St Helens from a slumber that had lasted 123 years the last known eruption was witnessed in 1857 by local tribes in 1980 the earthquake was an alarming sign because earthquakes may be an indication that an eruption is building up earthquakes can happen when magma rises from deep inside the earth shifting and breaking the rock on its Journey up the very first signals we had were earthquakes at shallow depth beneath the volcano and within a matter of just a few days it was clear this was something unusual so the word went out to scientists around the country and very quickly we started to converge at St Helen and started trying to understand what was going on and what we saw was the volcano was becoming more and more and more Restless volcanoes are dangerous because they are hard to predict and in 1980 the science of predicting volcanic eruptions was still in its infancy the most recent explosive eruption that occurred on the Continental USA was Lawson peak in California in 1915 since then most of the experience volcanologists had gained came from studying quiet lava flows on Hawaii volcanoes are incredibly complicated natural systems and they're always full of surprises um St Helen surprises this all the time other volcano surprises but we're learning armed with the latest scientific equipment Vulcan ologists were anxious to study a possible eruption little did they know that they were about to witness the most deadly volcanic blast in the US in living memory on cold waterer Ridge 6 Mi Northeast of the volcano they installed a trailer with highly sophisticated equipment and began to closely monitor the mountain from there they had a perfect view over the volcano we had a front row seat to seeing the evolution and Reawakening of a major Cascade volcano and we were fortunate in that we had people here with a lot of energy people were working 15 to 20 hours a day in addition to earthquakes another key indicator for volcanic activity is gas emissions magma made out of hot molten rock contains gases that come from deep inside the earth 30 m down as magma moves up from these depths there is less Rock weighing down on it from above so the pressure on the magma decreases gases dissolved in the magma escape and rise to the surface but gases are not just a Telltale sign of rising magma they are also responsible for the explosiveness of the eruption the greater the buildup of gas pressure within the volcano the more explosive the eruption will be well this is a simple experiment to demonstrate the importance of gas pressure in a magma the bottle is partially filled this is filled about 80% with water this will be simulating a volcanic eruption so I'm going to carefully place the bottle here will tilt it a little bit away from me I'm going to put on my safety goggles and now I'm about ready to start pumping here we go oops there's a little bit of of gas coming at the bottom little bit more and the pressures are up to about 60 lbs per square [Music] inch whoa did we get it we got it yeah like in the bottle the presence of gas at the surface of a volcano is a sure sign that an explosive eruption is building in Spring 1980 cadaval job was to detect these gas emissions the gas he was looking for was sulfur dioxide it's a gas that smells like rotten eggs and is associated with volcanic activity but the key to the measurements wasn't the smell the secret was subtle differences in the color of the light this instrument looks at the light in the sky and it looks for the presence of certain molecules like sulfur dioxide which also absorb light from the sky and it measures the difference between the light absorbed by sulfur dioxide and the light available in the rest of the Sky in March and April 1980 cadaval and his team were using this instrument to detect the amount of escaping gases they assumed that the gas levels would increase prior to the eruption as more and more magma would rise inside the volcano but in 1980 the Assumption proved wrong gas emissions didn't change even though earthquakes were getting stronger and hundreds of small Tremors were recorded there was really no significant variation it was a very low level of sulfur dioxide emissions and there was nothing in those emission rates that really indicated that an eruption was was just around the corner but by late April after 5 weeks of Tremors the mountain gave them another clue to what was brewing inside on the North Face a huge bulge was growing outwards a casual Observer would look at the volcano and say well it's no longer a nice Fuji type shape but in fact the north side now is bulged out and it was obviously deformed in some way and we were trying to understand what could have been causing that deformation [Music] it was the first time scientists were able to monitor the deoration of a mountain on Coldwater Ridge they installed an instrument that uses Laser Technology to get precise measurements as to how fast the Bulge was growing what we were trying to do was to focus a laser beam from this instrument on a reflector in the volcano receive the return reflected signal and then measure that distance the reflectors they use were small mirrors about 3 in across they had fixed on the Bulge as was the case in 1980 before May 18th the north flank of the volcano was moving outward it was bulging outward and so the distance was getting shorter and what we learned is that from Cold Water 2 that distance was getting shorter about 5 ft a day by May 11th the Bulge had expanded outward a staggering 450 ft jishan had a hunt that it was caused by Rising magma of course as volcanologist you always want to know what's going on under the Earth's surface and that's the great challenge because you could never go there you can only observe from the surface we knew that the north flank was deforming we knew that something had to be causing it to deform what could that be well it could be magma forcing its way up into the volcano shoving the north flank aside that was a possibility well what else could be causing it well maybe the earthquakes were simply causing the volcano to become unstable as a result of gravity maybe there was just a slow Landslide going on it it's very difficult to understand or to make a measurement that would tell you the difference the plausible story was that magma was forcing its way up Under the Volcano as the Bulge grew the flank of the mountain became increasingly unstable still scientists had no idea how deadly the eruption would turn out to be so we didn't know for sure until until it happened um but as the Bulge continued to grow we knew we were getting closer to the final outcome we just didn't know what that would be there were other signs that an eruption was imminent earthquakes became more frequent and stronger as time went on authorities feared the worst and zoned off the area around the volcano with limited access for the public in Spring 1980 geologists were dealing with a number of clues that Mount St Helens was building to an eruption earthquakes were an indication that the volcano was waking up despite low and unchanging gas emissions a growing bulge on the North Face suggested that the magma was indeed On The Rise mysteriously after May 14th the volcano quieted down there was hardly any seismic activity and the Bulge grew at a slower rate on May 17th officials gave into pressure and allowed some people with property inside the restricted area to gather up whatever they could another group was scheduled to enter for 10:00 a.m. the next morning but On that Day Disaster struck on the morning of May 18th scientists were about to witness one of the worst volcanic disasters in modern history for more than 2 months a team of volcanologists had been monitoring Mount St Helens that's another reason why may was a surprise cuz basically all of this data we collected before there wasn't anything that that told that you know May 18th was going to be the day David Johnston a young vulcanologist with the US Geological Survey was on duty that day he had spent the night on cold waterer Ridge to carry out measurements of the growing bulge it's interesting that even on the morning of May 18th the measurements that that Dave made indicated that it that bulge was still growing at about the same rate the same morning Dan Miller was on his way to cold waterer Ridge to check on the time-lapse camera they used for filming The North Face I was headed to the north on Interstate 5 out of Vancouver Washington and as I got a few miles north of town There's a Overlook Point as you go down the highway where you can look off to the East and see Mount St Helens and I looked over there and it was a beautiful clear day and there was Mount St Helens with this giant mushroom cloud going up above it at that point I knew something very serious was underway from a safe distance 35 mil away Miller witnessed how the eruption unfolded the first thing I did was went to our radio our Communications radio and I made some calls up to Dave to try to raise him and find out what was happening and not only did I not reach Dave but even our repeater which was on a a mountain peak that was a another few miles to the north of coldw Water 2 did not answer um indicating that it had been destroyed and that was very scary at that point I realized that something bad had probably happened to Dave thick dark smoke was billowing out of the crater obscuring The View within hours daylight turned murky gray and reduced visibility up to 300 Mi Northeast it wasn't until 24 hours ler later that the air was clear enough for scientists to inspect the devastation the entire landscape was almost unrecognizable to those of us who had spent almost two months um before the big explosion on May 18 working up there every day suddenly I realized that that there was complete and utter silence there were no insects uh there were no small animals and there were no colors the only color was Ash Gray for as far as I could see we made our way up along the edge of The Ridge and we found the small Quarry where Dave's trailer and our vehicle had been parked on the morning of May 18th and we could see that it was gone it was it was a ferocious Place coldw Water 2 was on May 18th and nobody had a chance there neither Johnston nor the trailer were ever found a total of 57 people were killed along with thousands of deer elk bears and other Wildlife 230 square miles of forests were destroyed and the eruption had torn a 2,000t wide crater in the summit it was no longer a beautiful Fuji type volcano and in fact we could see that the top of the volcano appeared to be missing or was obscured in the months to come scientists faed the difficult task of finding out what exactly happened on that fateful day they searched the ground for Clues and methodically pieced together the chain of events that had led to the devastation the first important clue was an earthquake measuring 5.2 That Shook Mount St Helens at 8:32 that morning the second piece of evidence came from photographs taken by tourists who flew over the mountain around the same time they looked down and they were able to document by a series of photographs some shaking on the top of the mountain and then right afterwards the whole front of that mountain started to move sideways in a series of still photographs they documented how the Bulge collapsed a magnitude 5.1 earthquake caused the north flank which was greatly weakened by the deformation to break loose in the form of a giant Landslide the volcano just couldn't take it anymore and the north flank became unstable and slid away within seconds 1300 ft of the mountains slid down and destroyed everything in its path what used to be a quiet Mountain Valley with the tole river running through it was now filled with debris up to 600 ft High forming a hilly terrain known as the hummocks from the amount of debris from the landslide scientists calculated that 2/3 of a cubic mile of rock slid down the mountain enough to bury Washington DC under 50 ft of rubble it was one of the biggest landslides ever recorded in history it tore a gaping hole in the side of the mountain almost 2 mi wide and over 2,000 ft deep to scientists it was a mystery why suddenly the entire Northern flank of the volcano collapsed geologists today can still follow the trail of Destruction what we're looking at here is a part of a large debris Avalanche we're looking at one of the hummocks uh and this is a rock outcrop that's actually outcropping in the humics and the coloration that you see first of all is telling you that this has been altered this color provides an important clue to why the landslide became so big instead of the usual black volcanic lava rock it is yellow this is a sign that The Rock came in touch with hot water turning some of the minerals in the Rock yellow geologists found the same Yellow Rock in the crater wall suggesting the discoloration must have happened on the mountain before the eruption so you have rain water or glacial water that seeps down into the mountain gets close to the magma Heats back up and as it comes out of the mountain then it starts to change and chemically alter these rocks and turning them you know into these different colors but the hot water didn't just change the color more importantly it also weakened The Rock so you can see how crumbly these rocks are just uh by kind of digging your Hammer through here uh and the reason they're so crumbly is because when the hot water moves through and Alters them they they sometimes alter to Clay and some really soft materials so if you took any other rock it would be much stronger this yellow crumbly Rock isn't just found here but stretches over 17 Mi throughout the valley suggesting that large parts of the mountain were rotten weakened before the eruption so probably what had been happening over thousands of years is is magma down on the volcano heating up water and this this this acidic water was gradually rotting out the center of the volcano it couldn't be seen anywhere at the surface when the Bulge on the North side finally collapsed it pulled along big parts of the rotten volcano and Left Behind the horseshoe shaped crater St Helens is famous for today this volcano is just a sand pile if you will it had very little internal integrity strength so that when failure did occur literally part of the mountain slid away but more destruction was to come within minutes of the landslide Mount St Helens channeled her Fury into another deadly force the air turned absolutely black so I don't know if you can see anything but a few of these witnesses that managed to survive out in the very edge the ground shook intensely and it they sensed that all the trees were coming down at once even though they couldn't see it the landslide had spread east and west but this Force surged in a Northerly Direction within 3 or 4 minutes it destroyed everything on Cold Water Ridge and ripped out trees in a 230 square mile fan-shaped area so even where we're sitting here 8 miles from the volcano you can see this Ridge behind me this Ridge is 3,000 ft tall and all the texture that you see on this Ridge are the trees the old growth forest trees that were blown down by the surge that went up and over the like it wasn't even there and so for the surge to have gone up and over this it had to have been still been going roughly 300 miles hour uh and then it continued 9 miles further than that before it finally stopped to geologists this was a surprise they had never witnessed a sideways eruption before well most of us had gone to school studying the idea that volcanoes erupt directly up they erupt into the atmosphere and they they go vertically and I think most of us were thinking that that was probably the style of eruption we were going to see here at St Helens eventually cuz that's how volcanoes erupt scientists were intrigued as to what had caused this devastating surge so they began searching the ground for evidence 5 miles Northeast of the crater weight is revisiting the old deposits mixed with burned wood from the shredded trees he also finds Rock to the untrained eye there is nothing unusual about it but not so for the experts it's clearly young rock It's relatively light and um there's lots of little voids in here in other words little bubbles that are frozen in the Rocks so this was the rock that was growing there's a hot hot liquid almost solid liquid that was growing inside Mount St isens and causing a bulge before May 18th this small rock was a crucial piece of evidence for scientists trying to figure out the chain of events [Music] after the landslide tore a gaping hole into the north flank of the mountain it exposed the magma underneath without a cap of Earth to keep it sealed the magma suddenly expanded and surged outwards pulling along Rock from inside the mountain you can Envision it as sort of a colossal sized Ash hurricane it was a cloud of rocks and Ash and hot gases that was maybe several thousand ft thick that was moving across the countryside at speeds of several hundred miles an hour very turbulent uh mixture with blocks as large as 3 or 4 ft in diameter flying through the air uh it was incredibly destructive after the initial surge Mount St Helens turned quiet for half an hour there was calm and Tranquility then the volcano began hurling its Fury skywards an enormous mushroom cloud formed high above the volcano three times as tall as Mount Everest ferocious explosions went on for hours releasing huge amounts of energy equal to 27,000 hirosima sized atomic bombs what happened on May 18th 1980 became a landmark event for scientists it provided them with an unprecedented chance to study a lateral eruption discolored Rock in the valley and in the crater wall were evidence that the mountain was rotten before the eruption gray volcanic rock 9 Mi north of the volcano was evidenced that the landslide Uncorked a massive lateral blast at 5:30 in the evening the volcano began to slow down until it finally quit but there was more impending danger as the eruption had caused another cataclysmic effect on May 18th 1980 Mount St Helens exploded in a type of eruption never witnessed before one of the largest landslides in history triggered a powerful sideways directed blast ferocious explosions followed and formed an immense mushroom cloud out late that afternoon the volcano slowed but more chaos was about to strike as the eruption had triggered another destructive process hot volcanic ash had melted the snow fields on top of Mount St Helens hundreds of tons of melt water mixed with soil and formed a series of mud flows that cascaded down the slopes most people don't realize that this Hazard can affect people living so far Downstream because up to 100 miles from a volcano is can still be a hazard zone for these kind of volcanic mud flows the biggest of the mud flows came down the tle river valley on its way there it reached record speeds of 90 mph and raced over Hills as high as 20 story buildings it destroyed a total of 27 bridges near nearly 200 homes and more than 185 mil of Highway and roads today its remains are still preserved on the banks of the toodle River this deposit is an excellent example of what we scientists call a lar but other people refer to as a mud flow big massive flow of material that's much like wet concrete that was coming down the river as a huge wall of material pushing logs and debris in front of [Music] it at first it was a mystery how this mud flow had become so big but the Rocks provided a clue what we see are rocks of different type that have come down from Mount St Helens some of these are actually from the original cone of the volcano that collapsed as the debris Avalanche geologists could now piece together what caused these destructive mud flows these rocks from high up in the volcano came from the landslide that had been thrown in the valley in the first minutes of the eruption when meltwater mixed with the landslide debris it formed a gigantic mud flow this incredible torrent lasted till late that night and dumped more than 65 cubic miles of mud along the way even 30 years later proof of its destructive power is still in the field these lahars came down and totally buried this Forest we see these standing stumps of trees that are the remains of what is often referred to as a ghost Forest this was buried by this Lahar the trees were killed and we only see them now because of the erosion of the river which has come back in and eroded into the bank and uncovered them so this is a fantastic clue of you know the the power and the destruction of this Lahar which which completely in dated this Lower Valley but one deposit further upstream was causing confusion in the investigation it looked like a lar deposit but instead of volcanic rock it was full of rounded River Pebbles the scientist who first studied this wasn't sure this was a lar deposit because it contained so much of this rounded River Rock which is characteristic of stream bed deposits and not Laars but then he realized that it had this very very hard compact Matrix in it uh and it was not bedded or or layered in any way and came to the conclusion this had to be a huge lar um that was probably something on the order of the flow of the Amazon River scientists were stumped not only did this deposit have rounded river rock it was also much bigger than the deposit from the mud flow that tore through the valley on May 18th if it wasn't part of of the 1980 Lahar where did it come from geologists decided to investigate further and took samples back to the lab radiocarbon dating showed that this deposit swept down the valley 3,000 years ago if we had been standing on this spot about 3,000 years ago we would have first heard a very low Rumble that would have gotten louder and louder and if we hadn't heated that warning we would have seen a huge wall of of broken broken trees and debris coming around the river bend probably at 30 or 40 m an hour that would have been hundreds of feet high and that wall of debris and mud and rock would have then just swept through here like a huge freight train literally wiping the valley clean of anything in its path but where did this ancient monster flood come from the only place that could have stored that amount of water and rounded Rock was Spirit Lake 35 Mi Upstream this discovery was crucial because there was an impending danger that nature would repeat itself not only did the landslide that initiated the 1980 eruption flow West into the toodle Valley it also went East into Spirit Lake and blocked its exit as rivers and meltwater kept flowing in water Rose to dangerous levels it became a very big wakeup call for the hazards Community because if this sort of flood in Lahar had happened in the past it could happen again in the 1980 deposit damned Spirit Lake once again with the same type of weak unstable Dam that had existed in the past authorities had to act quickly within a couple of years Spirit Lake would have filled up again and had it been allowed to overtop it would have caused a catastrophic flood just like the one 3,000 years ago the core of engineers came in they immediately devised a plan which involved pumping water out of the lake to keep the lake level stable uh for the short term their long-term solution was to drill a a boring through a mountain ridge creating a permanent drain so that Spirit Lake could never get above that height and the danger for an over topping flood was then [Music] eliminated scientists now understood what happened on May 18th volcanic rock in mud deposits along the banks of the tole river valley is evidence that gigantic mud flows thundered down Mount St Helens and rounded River pebbles in a 3,000-year-old mud deposit became a warning sign that Spirit Lake was able to spill over and cause an even bigger laar in the summer of 1980 scientists thought the May eruption was their chance of a lifetime because major volcanic eruptions in the Cascades happen only once or twice every hundred years but they were soon to be proven wrong after two decades of inactivity the mountain began to stir again the explosion of Mount St Helens in May 1980 scarred the mountain with a massive crater on its north side but in the summer after the eruption the volcano began to rebuild itself thick magma slowly Rose to the surface and formed a dome inside the crater had the activities continued at the same rate it would have taken about 200 years to rebuild the mountain to its pre1 1980 size but in 1986 magma flows ceased and the volcano died down life returned to normal and adapted to the new landscape plants and trees took hold in the fertile volcanic soil elk and other animals migrated back to the mountain then on September 23rd 2004 the ominous rumbling began again and put volcanologists on a alert the entire Cascade Range in the western US produces on average about two eruptions every Century so you think well that's one eruption per career and St Helens in 1980s was ours and we all assume that that was it um but we got a second chance Mount St Helens was cooking up another mystery small earthquakes became stronger and more frequent GPS measurements detected that the area around the mountain was sinking there was one continuously recording GPS instrument around the volcano and its code name was J1 J1 had not moved in any unusual way right up until the day the earthquake started and then on that very day it started to move it moved toward the volcano and downward as if that entire area of the crust was sagging down toward the volcano the only plausible explanation for the sinking land was that the magma Reservoir deep underground was shrinking in earlier surveys scientists had detected a vast pool of molten rock 8 Miles Under the Volcano if it was getting smaller magma had to be on its way up towards the throat of the volcano the renewed activities caused widespread concern scientists feared another eruption was building up and they were puzzled what kind of eruption it would be in search of an answer scientists turned to St Helen's early days volcanoes are all very individual they have individual types of eruptions and traits and what they've done in the past is what they're going to do in the future the key to past eruptions is ancient volcanic rock Mike Clint has specialized in mapping these old deposits Southwest of St Helens he investigates an area covered with large dark Boulders a close look reveals the type of eruption they formed in we know that this rock came from a lava flow because it has big crystals set in a much finer grain ground mass of little crystals the big crystals grew in the magma chamber while the magma was deep Under the Volcano and the fine grain ground Mass which is Tiny crystals grew when the lava erupted at the surface and froze radiocarbon dating established The Rock was born 2500 years ago the nature of the eruption it formed in was slow and quiet this kind of lava flow erupts from the mountain as a liquid and it flows down the mountain side under Gravity as it flows away from the mountain it cools until it becomes so viscous that it can't flow anymore so that's where it stops and that's what you see here is the end result of implacement of this kind of lava flow so they're not dangerous you can stand and watch it come down at you from deposits like these scientists could tell that Mount St Helens had produced a number of quiet lava outpourings in the last 300,000 years they slowly built up the mountain from a small cluster of rock to a conical-shaped volcano but Northeast of the mountain Clint finds a different deposit which tells a story of a much more dangerous episode in St Helen's past we look at this deposit and there's a couple of characteristics that are important first of all that it's very loose and that it's composed of rock fragments that are all about the same size another important characteristic is that the rock fragments are touching each other there's no material in between them well that tells us that these rock fragments came here by falling out of the air it's a big explosive eruption that sends the material very high into the sky and when the wind dies down they start to fall and they pile up here the rock fragments are very light pmus that formed during a violent eruption similar to the one that produced the huge mushroom cloud in May 1980 but age dating revealed that this deposit was much older this event happened 3500 years ago and compared to the 1980 eruption scientists found evidence that it was much more dangerous and spewed out four times more rock and Ash this is the biggest eruption in Mount St Helen's history and it was about a cubic mile of material that was erupted at this time and we know that because we Trace out the deposit measure its thickness and its distance you add that all up together and you get the volume of the eruption this deposit can be traced all the way to central Canada studying Mount St Helen's past has revealed that she has an unpredictable eruptive nature M and Helen had everything from relatively benign lava flows to quite violent eruptions in the past so it's very hard when a volcano starts acting up to know which of these possibilities is going to happen and of course the various scientists we discuss and argue and all that kind of stuff what we think is going On and nobody truly knows what's going on scientists investigating Mount St Helens have found clues that show different eruptive behaviors in her past large dark Boulders are evidence that she is able to produce slow and quiet eruptions a thick deposit of white pmus is evidence for an ancient dangerous eruption four times larger than the one in 1980 fortunately the events that began in 20 2004 took a lucky turn the magma did reach the surface but it had lost its explosive power it flowed out like toothpaste in a dome building style of eruption as geologists carried on studying Mount St Helens a volcano 4,000 M away began to stir because of their experience in 1980 scientists were convinced a major catastrophe was about to unfold and this time 12,000 lives were at [Music] risk the eruption of Mount St Helens in May 1980 took scientists by surprise it was the first time they witnessed the failure of a massive bulge a huge Landslide and a powerful lateral blast prior to 1980 uh we just we just didn't have the knowledge to make those kinds of specific predictions we started learning in the 1980s at St Helens we've continued to learn at volcanoes around the world and we've we've had some successes forecasting volcanic eruptions is difficult because there is no strict pattern to the buildup but as scientists are getting more experienced in observing volcanic Behavior they are getting better at their predictions in 1995 sufer Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of monserat became Restless it had been quiet for 350 years until earthquakes rumbled it to life again residents were used to a gently steaming mountain and simply hoped it would die down but when the earthquakes got stronger officials called called for help a team of us volcanologists flew to the Caribbean to monitor The Reawakening there developed a situation there where whereby there was a region of high siiz Miss occurred just at St Helens if you went up on the mountain as we did they just about knocked you to your knees they were very strong events strong earthquakes weren't the only warning signs on the South Side of the Mountain they observed how a monstrous bulge began to form there were cracks that were occurring we could see the cracks were moving every day it looked like the whole side could fall apart so we could get a slope collapse there a major slope Collapse by October 1997 the Bulge was growing at a staggering rate of 280 cubic feet per second scientists were alarmed because of their experience on Mount St Helens they knew that a collapse of the Bulge was imminent people living in the proximities of the volcano were in danger so they advised the authorities to evacuate immediately we did recognize we had a a situation analogous to St hens we could get the debris Avalanche we could get a lateral blast there were people in this instance that were living there and they ought to get the heck out 8,000 people had to leave the island over 4,000 were forced to move to a safer location to the north on the 26th of December 1997 the the volcano struck after an intense swarm of earthquakes a huge part of the Bulge broke loose and roared down the valley like at Mount St Helens the sudden removal of rock released the pressure on the magma below a lateral blast surged South and spawned a vertical Ash column 36,000 ft high within 15 minutes the eruption destroyed four square miles of of the island and completely buried the Island's capital Plymouth under 39 ft of mud it wasn't just damaged severely it was eradicated there was a bulldozzer that was carried off into the sea and dumped into the sea as a result of this so the lateral force was just tremendous monat is a prime example where Lessons Learned From a big catastrophe have prevented another one almost everything that occurred at St Helens did occur at moner it replicated St Helens not only in the lateral blasts and so forth but it did everything that St Helens did on a smaller [Music] scale scientists studying the eruption of Mount St Helens on May 18th 1980 have uncovered a sequence of events they had never seen before a growing bulge on the North flank of the mountain was an alarming sign that a pool of magma was building up within the volcano gray volcanic rock from the Bulge 5 miles away was is evidence for a powerful sideways eruption a 3,000-year-old mud deposit became a warning sign that The Valleys around the mountain have been repeatedly swamped by huge mud flows a deposit of White pmus Rock found all the way up to Canada showed that Mount St Helens is able to produce eruptions four times larger than the one in 1980 as the investigation has shown Mount St Helens is full of surprises St Helen's I think of it as a teenager among the Cascade volcanoes it's it's young it's vigorously active it's explosive it's very energetic even though to our eye as we look at it it appears to be sleeping it's it's active it's doing what it's been doing for tens of thousands of years Mount St Helens looks set to continue her erratic and at times violent outbursts her deadly potential is a stark reminder the Earth is never at rest [Music] Earth a unique Planet restless and dynamic continents shift and Clash volcanoes erupt glaciers grow and recede Titanic forces that are constantly at work leaving a trail of geological Mysteries behind this investigation Ventures deep into remote Russia in search of a vast sea of stone called the Siberian traps experts will dig deep into Earth's ancient past to discover how this Rocky Wilderness formed and unearth evidence in surprising places to prove how deadly volcanic eruptions in Siberia wiped out nearly every living thing on Earth the most dramatic episode yet in the story of how the Earth was made the investigation into the cataclysmic event that radically changed planet Earth begins in the Deep Frozen land of [Music] Siberia 50% bigger than the entire United States this land is locked in ice for most of the year temperatures plummet to minus 90° fah and Below but in summer the ice melts and reveals one of the largest and most mysterious geological formations on Earth the Siberian traps nearly 5% of Earth's land mass is covered by this ancient sea of rock deep Canyons expose layers hundreds of feet thick these giant stepped formations are called traps from the Swedish word for stairs they were discovered under unusual circumstances polish geologist Alexander chanowski was exiled to Siberia in 1863 for political crimes against Russia while banished he surveyed the landscape and stumbled upon this unique unexplained expanse of layered Rock today the journey to fully understand how this strange Stone formation was made begins in a swamp I'm not sitting in this swamp just for fun this swamp's actually very characteristic of what Siberia was probably like before the Siberian traps formed this vegetation this shallow stagnant water is very different to the environment we see in Siberia today the clue then enabled scientists to figure out that Siberia was once a swamp came from a particular kind of rock found beneath the traps coal trillions of tons of it this rock here is coal it's very important in Siberia it forms when plant matter trees thick vegetation dies and falls into a swamp and over millions of years of geological time they confessed into a hard rock substance like the one I'm holding in my hand today the age of the coal was determined by dating the plant fossils trapped inside the rock the process revealed that the coal was formed more than 300 million years ago it continued to collect and be compressed over the next 50 million years so was very stable swamps thick vegetation then suddenly 250 million years ago it all stops and you have the Siberian traps lying on top of the coal so something fairly dramatic must have happened at that time so we really need to study this phenomenon to investigate the GE and see what we can find out but investigating the geology of the Siberian traps is no easy task because they're located in one of the most remote and least explored areas of the planet it's an arduous Journey for Howard and his team a 1,000m trek through Siberia over land and water camping out in mosquito infested forests taken is nearly seven days to get to this remote corner of Siberia but this afternoon we finally found the rocks that we were hoping to study these towering Pinnacles of rock Mark the edge of the Siberian traps even from a distance without leaving their boat the geologists can identify this distinctive formation rocks you can see behind me are all basss forming wonderful Towers we stopped and studied these in several locations and what we've seen is only a tiny part of the V covers such a large part of Siberia this evidence unlocks the mystery of how the traps were made bassal is what geologists call ous Rock and that only comes from One Source a volcanic eruption the Siberian traps must once have been a vast RedHot lava field I think the Siberian traps would have been a thousand times more intense than anything I've seen doing my own fieldwork and if I could go in a time machine and watch it all happen it would be really just fantastic to see the scale of it the length of the lava flows and the height of the fire fountains would have been really something to see there are several types of lava rock this basaltic lava is a free flowing liquid when it first erupts from the ground just looking at how fluid this this rock appears gives us some of the clue Clues what it might have been like in Siberia if we could have gone there there would have been really gooey goopy runny lava flowing across the land surface for a thousand miles in all directions this semi liquid lava gives these Rocky Plains their name flood basalts they still are up today in kilaa in Hawaii currently the world's most active volcano after 25 years of constant eruption the bassal lava field has engulfed more than 4 square miles of Hawaii's Big Island but the Siberian traps are bigger 500,000 times bigger each distinct step is laid down by an individual lava flow layer pours out upon layer until the traps are more than a mile Deep In Black hardtop over an area nearly the size of the continental US so imagine the entire United States covered in a lumpy uneven parking lot like asphalt everywhere as far as the eye can see and that is what the Siberian trap looked like when it first formed geologists have discovered how the traps were made the next step is calculating how long this vast Siberian super eruption lasted fortunately volcanic rocks contain little minerals that formed when The Rock crystallize when the Rock cooled and solidified and some of these minerals are radioactive and they Decay over time and so they're like little time clocks they start when the rock cools and then when we measure them the clock stops and we know how much time has passed since that rock formed dating the oldest lava here reveals that the Siberian traps first ripped the landscape apart 250 million years ago and by also dating the youngest lava scientists can figure out exactly how long the eruptions lasted the results are surprising they show that lava carried on pouring out and building up into ever deeper layers for an almost unimaginable 1 million years forging the largest lava flow on land The Next Step In the Journey is to figure out why this vast eruption happened here in Siberia most volcanoes exist at plate boundaries thin spots on Earth's crust where the floating plates that support the continents jostle together as they drift across the face of the Earth yet the Siberian traps are right in the heart of a huge continent so experts have to come up with an explanation this is a mantle plum may not look like it and you have to imagine that this is going on over about 1500 miles rather than a bottle but it's quite a good simulation of how mantle plumes work they're heated from below this candle is the Earth's core supplying heat and this is the bottom of the mantle and the heat is heating up some of the mantle and it rises up as these blobs up towards the Siberian traps which are up at the top here mantle plumes are one of geology's great Mysteries no one knows why they switch on or off but their shape is a crucial clue as to why plume eruptions are so Fierce and so massive that mushroom head in reality can be500 M across and so the volcanic eruptions can cover huge areas hundreds of thousands of square miles and also the the ACT ual head is is a very shortlived phenomenon that probably erupts in hundreds of thousands of years at most a million years evidence has been uncovered to reveal how and when the Siberian traps formed 250 million years ago a vast magma Bubble Burst cracking and slashing open Earth's crust and for life on Earth a new devastating era began two types of rock are proof of very different landscapes in ancient Siberia Cole reveals that before the traps existed this area was a swamp Basalt lava is evidence this era ended with a bang a super volcanic eruption but now geologists have evidence that the Siberian super volcano was about to become earth's greatest ever killer the deadliest million years in Earth's history we're about to begin 300 million years ago Siberia was a swamp but deep underground a plume of hot mantle Rock was Rising 250 million years ago the bulging crust burst open and boiling lava erupted onto the surface the most cataclysmic and destructive million years in Earth's existence was about to begin with every eruption Basalt lava surged across Siberia in rivers and waves terrifying forest fires raged animals were burnt alive a new deadly Earth story was underway one which would have catastrophic consequences for all life on Earth to figure out what chaos this Mega eruption caused for the planet geologists are taking a closer look at siberia's ancient lava rocks this rock is very typical of what you see in flood Basalt provinces and we have many what we call vesicles there are small holes in the Rock and those suggest that gases left this rock they escaped from this rock when this rock started cooling at the surface of the Earth the search for what kind of gas Siberia was producing begins nearly 8,000 Mi away at Mammoth Mountain in California this is an ancient dormant volcano for years it was thought to be harmless but then in 1989 a ranger had a terrifying experience it was winter time and the ranger was just checking on the area and he wanted to take a break from the wind so he crawled in through a hatch that's in the roof of this cabin and uh he became very dizzy inside and didn't feel well and he had the common sense to think that maybe there was some bad air in the cabin and he crawled back up the ladder and got out safely but it always kind of remained a mystery initially then just a few months later the trees here began to die clearly something strange was happening so it required an explanation of what could combine with making a person feel dizzy and uh disoriented and what would also kill trees at the same time Farah's research revealed that a poisonous gas was to blame one that was seeping upwards out of the ground analysis proved that the gas was carbon dioxide a byproduct of volcanic activity it's released when magma rises from deep underground so just like this bottle of soda water the magma beneath us contains dissolved carbon dioxide and when it reaches the surface of the Earth the pressure is released just like this when you open the water the pressure is released and carbon dioxide is coming out of this bottle of soda water and that's the same gas that's coming out here at Mammoth today lava deep beneath Mammoth Mountain pumps out a th000 tons of carbon dioxide every day this suggests to scientists that trillions of tons of gas could have been released into the atmosphere by one of the Earth's largest eruptions in Siberia 250 million years ago and evidence comes from an unlikely Source well this is a gko tree and Geno trees are very special because the genko family has been around for a very long time 270 million years and it's remained fairly unchanged over the course of of Earth's history because the gko changes so little over time it is the ideal specimen for comparing the present with the past the leaf surface is peppered with microscopic pores called stomata plants use these stomata like tiny mouths to breathe in carbon dioxide the number of stamata on the leaves of a Ginko indicates how much carbon dioxide is available to them in the atmosphere when there's a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere they only need to have a few when we look at fossils of gko leaves that formed 250 million years ago we notice that they have very very few stomata to take up carbon dioxide and this means that there was a lot of carbon dioxide available in the atmosphere investigators have studied ancient leaves from locations all over the world world and calculated that there was three times more carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere 250 million years ago than there is today this was a deadly and Global gas disaster and the only culprit capable of producing such substantial quantities of carbon dioxide is volcanic activity on a truly massive scale when you have an eruption the size of something like the Siberian traps you imagine something almost apocalyptic in nature um Ash blocking out the Sun but then you have a kind of double whammy where you also have the release of volcanic gases from the eruptions and these gases trap in the heat so it gets hotter and hotter lava from the traps turns Siberia into a lifeless disaster Zone but carbon dioxide can mingle and mix in in the atmosphere trapping heat inside like a parked car on a hot day 7,000 M away from Siberia is South Africa's Karu Basin here evidence in rocks gives geologists a tip off that carbon dioxide from the eruption provoked a climate disaster that wasn't confined to Siberia an Old River Channel slices through the landscape exposing the layers these rocks have been dated to just before and just after the Siberian traps began to erupt these are mudstones they form on Lake beds from squashed mud so they evidence that just as in Siberia the land was once swamp-like and covered in water but they're also evidence of change these rocks beneath my feet which are green in color are the older rocks here and then these rocks which have got a more red color are the younger rocks and the red color indicates that there's an environmental change that the climate was possibly drying out and becoming warmer the mud is rich in iron when it is shaded by plants or covered by water it stays green when it's exposed to the sun it turns Rusty red so the red stones are evidence that plants and water which shaded the mud had disappeared 250 million years ago as Siberia spewed volcanic gases into the air South Africa was drying out warming up and turning to Desert the Karu Basin is also where the first evidence was discovered that it was not just the plants that were dying well this animal was found in 1934 my aunt who was then a little girl at school she came home from school one day and she said to her father Daddy what is a fossil and my grandfather's response was let's go off into the hills for a picnic and see if we can find one so they went off to the hills and amongst other bones they found this in their own backyard the rubbage family had Unearthed the remains of an animal completely unknown to science this creature is a gorgonopsid it was a carnivorous lizard 10 ft long which roamed South Africa during an era called the peran hundreds of millions of years before even dinosaurs evolved but dating these fossils reveals that as Siberia began to erupt these animals were dying gorgonopsids are the dominant predators of the per period and we find them in all these different layers in the peran Rocks gorgens lived in this area about 260 to about 251 million years ago and then suddenly when you get higher up at this sort of level in the peran sequence they disappear and the gorgonopsids were not alone there are virtually no animal fossils here younger than 250 million years ,000 mil from the Siberian super volcano something caused the land to dry up plants to die and nearly every land animal to go extinct and one critical cause of this Global disaster is carbon dioxide from the lava rocks yet this deadly million-year long chain reaction triggered by Siberian eruptions is only just starting the investig instigation has uncovered how volcanic activity in Siberia created a global catastrophe fossil leaves of the gko tree reveal evidence that the atmosphere was full of volcanic carbon dioxide gorgonopsid skulls show animals were dying out at the same time but worse was to come the catastrophic Siberian eruptions were about to unleash a new murderous nightmare 300 million years ago Siberia was a waterlogged swampy bog 50 million years later Earth's biggest ever volcanic eruption on land was smothering Siberia in layer after layer of solid silvery bassal lava hundreds of feet thick an atmosphere saturated with volcanic carbon dioxide had raised global temperatures by around 10° F light life on land was dying now the Hunt is on to uncover evidence of how siberia's super volcano precipitated a marine catastrophe in all of Earth's oceans but scientists aren't looking for answers in the sea they're climbing 10,000 ft above sea level up into the Dolomite mountains here in the mountains of North nle these rocks give evidence of one of the greatest crises in the history of the Planet crack open the layered rocks and fascinating secrets are revealed mysterious and long extinct sea creatures called trilobites are preserved in their Millions their existence here proves these Peaks were once a seabed the trilobites were trapped in sediment settling on the ocean floor over millions of years geological upheave evils have thrust them 2 miles up in the air The Rock layers here are a perfect record of life in the ancient oceans what we can see is just below the level of my hand there's lots of uh nice fossils a big diversity of things we can find in here then these younger rocks just above just a little bit higher uh basically there's very few fossils in here and the much lower diversity in between the two different layers of life wignall hacks into a black Bang in here there are not just fewer fossils here there are none at all this is what geologists call the extinction Zone it has been dated as 250 million years old worrying evidence that having killed off most of the life on land the Siberian super volcanic disaster was spreading to the Seas this black clay contains microscopic glittering Clues crystals of a mineral called iron pyes its shiny appearance has earned this rock the nickname Fool's Gold it's worth just a few cents but it holds Priceless information about ocean waters where the rock formed 250 million years ago this mineral this iron pares will only form in the absence of oxygen and so therefore it's a nice very direct line of evidence for what going on at this time the presence of Fool's Gold is evidence that the water in which it Formed had no oxygen at all and scientists believe the warming effect of volcanic carbon dioxide from the Siberian eruptions was directly to blame for this lack of oxygen the ocean circulation is driven by the fact that we have a good temperature gradient it's cold at the poles and it's warm at the equator and so the water circulate between the poles and the equator like a conveyor belt but if you make everywhere warm the conveyor belt turns off and the water just sits there and stagnates and no longer has the ability to sort of resupply oxygen the ocean had become as still and warm as bath water and warm water absorbs less oxygen it's possible to recreate these nasty conditions in a fish tank in fact all you need to do with a fish tank is to put it in the window on a bright sunny day the sun will warm the water up and the water will start to lose its oxygen and it'll basically it'll stagnate if you leave it for too long your fish will die and you'll have a sort of mini Recreation of one of the greatest Extinction events of all time as volcanic eruptions tore Siberia apart life was fighting for survival in the oxygen depleted Seas but the Siberian eruptions were about to flood an even more deadly poison into the oceans to find out what happened next researchers hunted for a modern-day location that could recreate life in the Siberian damaged perian ocean unexpectedly they found it in central New York State Green Lake State Park this unusual little lake is extremely salty and nearly 200 ft deep making it a model in miniature of the ancient Seas we get asked why do you go to a lake to study the peran ocean turns out this lake is a lot like the ocean actually it's fairly salty and its circulation system the process that brings oxygen down deep into this lake is shut down just like we think happened to the perian ocean the top layer of the lake is healthy and thriving but deep down the bottom layer is stagnant and still by lowering a water sampler 150 ft down comps diving deep into the past to a Time when the Siberian traps were erupting well we have a couple clues from this water that's telling us about what's going on down there at bottom of the lake one of which is its color and this water is pink because it's loaded with tens of millions of purple bacteria cells in uh each ounce of water and the other is the smell so if I open up the lid here and take a whiff it's very potent smell of rotten eggs and that's a very eristic smell of hydrogen sulfide oxygen is toxic to purple bacteria so stagnant water is a perfect breeding ground these single celled survivalists flourish where other sea life suffocates but they have a nasty side they produce a noxious and pungent poison gas called hydrogen sulfide the tiniest amounts can be fatal the same bacteria live in sewers so workers there must carry gas detectors hyrogen sulfide deprives your body of oxygen it's also a strong neurotoxin so it has that detrimental effect as well and the Really Insidious thing about hydrogen sulfide is that it paralyzes our old factory nerve in other words we can't smell it anymore and that's what's so terrible because right after you stop being able to smell it if the level keeps building up it can become instantly poisonous comps trying to figure out if the same lethal microbes plagued the Seas stripped of oxy by the Siberian eruptions he's searching for proof in rocks from 250 million years ago but bacteria don't leave fossils so instead he's pursuing the chemical traces they leave behind so the clues we're looking for are compounds called biomarkers These are chemical fossils they're fragments of the organism that have been preserved over long periods of geologic time in these rocks and from these fragments from these chemical fossils we can try to identify what organisms might have been involved in this mass extinction like a fragment of bone or shell a chemical fossil is a fingerprint identifying the microorganism which made it and CS struck lucky this is it this is the clue we've been looking for this is the chemical fossil the biomarker that tells us that these organisms were existing at the time of the greatest mass extinction of all time as Siberia erupted the purple bacteria were in Paradise vigorously poisoning the water with hydrogen sulfide the sea became a suffocating toxic cess pool the trilobites and virtually every other species of sea life died out and never returned the evidence is building up as to how massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia wiped out nearly all marine life on Earth Fool's Gold shows the sea lost its oxygen biomarkers show it was also Poisoned With lethal hydrogen sulfide the Earth was choking life could no longer depend on its two most vital resources air and water but a new threat loomed as siberia's underground coal reserves added fuel to the Flames 250 million years ago a sudden violent volcanic eruption began in Siberia the traps erupted over the next million years forging Basalt lava layers thousands of feet thick buried underneath the bassal were 5 trillion tons of coal as Siberia erupted a powerful fuel was about to catch fire for geologists coal is a crucial clue in figuring out how a huge volcano wiped out nearly all life on Earth coal is the remains of dead plant material and when coal burns the volatile materials are released and and these include Gases such as methane and lava from the volcanic eruption was the ultimate source of ignition it was like pouring gasoline on a barbecue now Saltzman is hunting for evidence of how this colossal Coal Fire damaged the planet his search begins in a Barren blacktop Wasteland but this is not Siberia this is a town in Pennsylvania I'm standing standing here in what looks like a war zone it's hard to believe this was the main road into a thriving community of several thousand people these cracks and these gases all around me are a clue not only to what extinguished this town but also provide one of the key Clues into the mystery of the greatest mass extinction of all time in 1962 the mining town of Centralia was a community of 4,000 people but an accidental fire ignited a coal seam and caused an uncontrollable underground Blaze dangerous methane gas began to seep from the ground today the residents have abandoned the town the fire still rages underneath Centralia and methane is still released into the air the situation raises the question of whether the burning of siberia's far greater cold reserves set a light by lava 250 million years ago also released catastrophic levels of methane gas into the air the volcanoes in Siberia would have erupted through the coals to get to the surface on their way they would have cooked these coals and this Burning of coal would have released methane amongst other gases and this methane would have had an extreme effect on the global climate as Siberia continued to erupt temperatures all over the planet Rose by a further 10° it's a climatic change too dramatic to be caused by carbon dioxide alone there must be an additional culprit methane is top of the list because it's over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide today scientists are analyzing rocks for proof that methane from the Siberian Coal Fire was the culprit they've discovered a Telltale chemical clue light carbon it's a fingerprint of methane gas and it has been recorded in every Extinction Zone all over the globe from Antarctica to Italy proof of the eruptions Global reach the levels of light carbon geologists have discovered are so incredibly High it equates to the sudden release of a trillion tons of [Music] gas temperatures surged as the methane from Siberia spread across the globe leaving every part of the planet devastated by climate chaos and mass extinction this would have been a very nasty place to live there would have been less oxygen in the the oceans there would have been much warmer and drier conditions on land there would have been problems with the depletion of the ozone layer as a result of this methane Rich atmosphere uh and so it just would have been a a very very inhospitable place to be but burning coal isn't the only possible source of the methane gas that warmed the world a quarter of a billion years ago at the Brookhaven energy lab scientists are making ice but this is ice that burns methane ice in nature it's buried beneath seabeds and locked into permafrost its Discovery got geologists very excited because there's more energy locked inside methane ice than All Earth's other fossil fuels put together it could be the fuel of the future but it could also be the key to the Past after hundreds of thousands of years of eruption burning coal and melting ice together released enough methane to raise temperatures by some 20° F life on Earth was heading for Total Wipeout finally a million years after the Earth's deadliest eruption began the most catastrophic event in the planet's history is at an end but life on Earth paid a high price over 95% of species have been driven to Extinction the investigation reveals the reach of the volcanic eruption and how planet Earth continued to change light carbon found in rocks is evidence of a methane Rich atmosphere burning coal in Siberia is thought to be the source of this gas the Earth is a different place from just a million years ago from the air to to the land to the Sea the few species that have survived are pioneers in A Brave New World they are about to change the course of history 250 million years ago a volcano erupted into life Paving Siberia with Basalt lava layers a mile and a half thick at the end of the world worst million years in Earth's existence as life teetered on the brink of Total Wipeout the eruptions finally stopped now geologists want to find out whether the volcano died or whether it's simply changed location the place where a mantle plume hits the surface is called a Hots spot the plume's shape is a clue to the hot spot's activity over time the head head is a huge lava bubble which feeds short-lived but massive eruptions when the lava plume head is all used up the mega eruptions stop but the narrow tail can live on like a chimney spouting small eruptions for hundreds of millions of years while earth's tectonic plates are shifting above it here is our mantle plume it could be Siberia it could be Hawaii and here is the plate and the hot spot obviously is stationary but we're going to see that the plate is actually moving above it so the plate is continuously moving Hot Spot staying put and you've got to imagine lots and lots of lavas are erupting out at the same time so I think what we've achieved is actually a rather good representation of a hotspot track at this end the old end that's where the plume head first hit the top of the mantle over time it's left a track that would in reality have been lots of other volcanoes just like the one that we find in the Hawaiian Islands today the Hawaiian chain was forged by a plume as the Pacific Plate passed above it at a speed of 30 m every million years but scientists searching for a plume track in Siberia are left scratching their heads because there's no evidence of a trail the investigation has discovered siberia's hotspot caused a million years of worldwide chaos and destruction but after that the hotspot trail goes cold Siberian traps would have left a line of volcanic land forms that are related to that movement but over such a long period of time the geological processes have hidden the evidence buried it and parts of it may have been subducted back into the Earth's mantle what happened to the Hotpot after it forged the Siberian traps is a that may never be solved the dynamic Earth has wiped away all trace of the evidence one thing is certain Siberia didn't succeed in destroying all life on Earth but it was a very close call this is the worst Extinction of all time and part of a measure of that is just how long it took the planet to recover from this we estimate 8 to 10 million years later there was still only the very beginnings of recovery the increasing diversity of life on Earth coal which open the investigation into the Siberian traps testifies to the volcano's devastating effects no new coal formed for another 25 million years not just in Siberia but around the entire world it's conclusive proof that although tree life survived the mass extinction it could not and did not Thrive for tens of millions of years and the same is true for South Africa's land animals on his family's land rubbage has discovered yet another fossil crucial to the investigation if burrow holes fill up with sand or mud they can themselves become fossils anything trapped inside is fossilized too this is the plug of an ancient burrow but the exciting part about this particular specimen is that it's got a little animal actually curled up preserved in the burrow this animal died here in this burrow about 250 million years ago and that is what he looks like there you can see is the head and you can see there's his little tail over there amazingly this tiny creature plays an enormous role in the last 250 million years of life on this planet this fossil represents the future of life on Earth this burrow has huge significance for our presence here today because this little animal is one of the distant ancestors of mammals this is our ancestor and the reason why he's preserved in a barrow after the extinction event is because this burrow maybe protected him from what was causing other animals to go extinct and so maybe it's thanks to a hole like that that you and I are here today the eruption of the Siberian traps triggered a brutal race for survival over 95% of the competition was eliminated only the well- adapted and the lucky made the Finish Line it was Earth's worst million years but from the perspective of life on Earth today it was the best thing that ever happened this was the greatest crisis that life has ever suffered but if it wasn't for this then Evolution would have taken a different course and humans wouldn't be here today the million-year eruption of the Siberian traps drastically altered the entire Earth from the atmosphere to the ocean depths the planet changed at a rate so rapid Evolution could not keep Pace in this new geologic world life was hopelessly outdated the few animals that survived shaped the future passing adaptations onto their descendants dinosaurs birds mammals and humans the Tree of Life had undergone some drastic pruning but it allowed our Branch to flourish and humans to evolve yet today 250 million years after Siberia erupted life is still fragile still at the mercy of the Ever Changing volatile and unpredictable Earth

Channel: HISTORY

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Id: af7Ma4Wo7yQ

Length: 133min 1sec (7981 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023