How the Earth Was Made: The Most DEADLY & DESTRUCTIVE Natural Disasters *3 Hour Marathon*

Earth a 4.5 billion year old Planet still evolving as continents shift and Clash volcanoes erupt and Glaciers grow and received the Earth's crust is carved in countless fascinating ways leaving a trail of geological Mysteries behind this episode investigates one awesome force that shapes the Earth it's extraterrestrial and it doesn't happen over millions of years but in seconds all right it's a force caused by an immense impact from asteroids giant rocks from space [Music] the investigation of asteroid strikes has given scientists insight into the formation of the universe providing a window in planet Earth's ancient past [Music] there is a giant hole in the Arizona desert 35 miles east of Flagstaff it's huge three quarters of a mile wide and 550 feet deep the Washington Monument could fit inside it the mystery confronting geologists in the late 19th century was how did this happen people agree that only a massive Force could have created such a huge Chasm but what was this Force the most likely theory was that a huge volcanic explosion had ruptured the rugged landscape scientists had discovered similar sized craters in volcanic areas before but Grove Gilbert Chief geologist for the U.S Geological Survey had another idea one that came to him after observing craters on the moon through his telescope he saw similarities between the Moon's craters and the Mysterious hole in the Arizona desert leading him to speculate that the Arizona crater might have been caused by an asteroid impact but this was just a theory at the time no one had proven that any crater on Earth had been caused by an asteroid so in 1892 Gilbert decided to travel to the mysterious Arizona crater wondered if this could have an impact origin or alternatively a volcanic origin and so he had these two competing hypotheses that he wanted to test Gilbert assumed that if the crater was caused by an asteroid he should find a giant alien Rock in the middle of it but there was none but he did see what he thought were signs that a volcano might be the cause when Gilbert arrived he realized that this hole in the ground was associated with some volcanic peaks in the distance you can see them in the background over the rim or beyond the rim of the crater and so immediately I think he was prejudiced if you will towards a volcanic as opposed to a meteoritic origin not far from the mysterious crater Gilbert found another similar giant hole he declared this one as an unusual volcanic crater called a mar he knew that four years before in Japan scientists had witnessed the formation of Amar after a huge underground explosion of steam the resulting crater resembled the giant hole Gilbert came across in the Arizona desert they are produced when basaltic magma rises through the Earth's crust encounters groundwater creating a steam explosion which causes a blast that produces craters like the one over my shoulder intriguingly the two almost identical craters were only 50 miles apart in the same desert one was known to have been caused by an underground steam explosion because of their close proximity Gilbert concluded that the mysterious crater was also caused by volcanic activity in 1896 he published his findings in an influential report and for the wider geological Community the debate was resolved six years after Gilbert's findings American entrepreneur and Mining engineer Daniel Barringer arrived on the same scene he was intrigued by mysterious small iron rocks Shepherds had found around the crater while grazing their herds Barringer was convinced that Gilbert was wrong about the crater's origins I'm holding in my hands a fragment of what started it all it is not the type of material that one finds in any other geologic terrain or created by any terrestrial geologic process iron in rock is usually mixed with other minerals but at the mysterious crater the iron was almost pure and there were large amounts normally not found on the Earth's surface spread over a huge area surrounding the crater believed the pieces found here were meteorites small space rocks that form when big asteroids break apart he had a hunch that this huge hole in the desert was formed by a giant asteroid made largely from iron Barringer immediately saw the commercial opportunities from the crater's size he calculated that the asteroid must have weighed 10 million tons with iron then at eighty dollars a ton Behringer was convinced he could become a rich man from mining the iron so in 1903 Behringer bought the crater site of over 1200 acres and hired Crews to begin digging convinced it was an impact site he named it meteor crater we're in one of the remnants of behringer's mining camp this is a place where his miners lived ate slept well they looked for the buried meteoritic mass that they thought was beneath the floor of the crater for years Behringer and his men found only small fragments of iron undeterred by this they kept digging deeper shafts into the Earth the largest of which the main shaft you can see is a white island of debris in the center of the crater and in fact one of those holes close to me here reached a depth of nearly 1400 feet beneath the surface of the Earth in all of these cases or most of these cases they found Telltale hints of the impacting meteoritic body but no giant mass Behringer did stumble across some Clues however strange and unique rock formations such as fine pulverized rocks spread around the crater he noticed quite rightly that it is so fine it is almost like talcum powder the type of thing that immediately alerted him to something unusual in the geologic processes that shaped the land here to Behringer the pulverized Rock was a major clue that pointed to one thing the violent impact of an asteroid as a geologist if I saw this rock I would say okay this is not something that I see around a volcanic crater there's something going on here and and I need to figure it out [Music] Behringer also discovered other Oddities at the Crater Rim he noted a bed of rocks that were chaotically overturned dramatic energy uplifted the rocks in the Cradle wall behind me originally they were absolutely horizontal and you can see that they are tilted upward and if you look very closely at the very top of the rim they are completely overturned for 27 years Daniel Behringer obsessively sunk mining shafts in search of his giant iron asteroid with no success Behringer died in 1929 having lost 600 000 of his own and investors money 10 million in today's dollars the privately owned crater has remained in his family to this day but his theory about the asteroid impact at meteor crater spurred further investigation based on three Clues he had uncovered the first the pieces of pure iron scattered across the crater next rock that had been crushed into fine powder and finally strange rocks thrown up and flipped over at The crater's Rim interestingly even though Behringer hadn't convinced the geologic Community about the impact origin of this crater he had launched at least a small number of people into an investigation of impact processes proof of behringer's asteroid Theory would get a boost some six decades later from an unexpected source [Music] meteor crater in the Arizona desert was still a mystery to the geological community [Music] the debate on whether it was caused by volcanic activity or an asteroid impact wasn't resolved until 1960. a young geologist Eugene Shoemaker became interested in behringer's research he would take the investigation in a New Direction which turned meteor crater into one of the most investigated crater sites on Earth Shoemaker was working on craters left by nuclear explosions on test sites in Nevada its task was to find out how the explosions transformed the landscape intriguingly at the test sites he found the exact same rock formations Behringer had described at the mysterious meteor crater in Arizona Shoemaker passed away in 1997 but his wife astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker recalls his findings crater with craters that he had been mapping at the Nevada test site at the test site Gene saw overturned beds also near the top of the craters in the rims and that that certainly told him that there was a strong similarity because they were so obvious that meteor crater Shoemaker Came Upon another important clue that linked the Nevada test sites to meteor crater he found samples of this very unusual rock this was once Sandstone but he recognized it had been altered in the craters left by explosions from nuclear bomb testing Shoemaker discovered crystalline structures the same structures found at Arizona's meteor crater today we understand that this is Sandstone glass that is the original Sandstone all of the quartz crystals were melted and put into a frothy bubbly glassy Matrix which we have here they were caused by the incredible energy released in the shock waves of a nuclear blast [Music] for Shoemaker it was conclusive proof that the vast meteor crater was informed by volcanic eruptions instead it was created by a powerful asteroid impact in just a Split Second [Music] the shocked rock also gave scientists a clue about the age of the crater [Music] when an asteroid hits the Earth the energy from the blast is absorbed by the surrounding Rock using a process called thermoluminescence dating scientists are able to measure the amount of energy the rock is giving off in the form of light [Music] a shocked Rock from meteor crater told them that the impact happened 50 000 years ago but for some there remained one problem with this Theory if the Arizona Earth was crushed by a huge asteroid where was the rock that made the impact scientists had a hunch that when it struck the iron meteorite had vaporized inclusive evidence came in 1997 when scientists were able to simulate the impact using Advanced Computer modeling from the size of the crater they calculated that the asteroid must have weighed at least three hundred thousand tons when it struck the data further revealed that it hit Earth at a speed of over 25 000 miles per hour that's 35 times the speed of sound upon impact the asteroid triggered a massive shock wave many times more powerful than a nuclear explosion within a matter of seconds the skin pack crater behind me was excavated and this debris was deposit on the landscape within seconds the shock wave and the very high velocity air blast radiated across the landscape the shock wave traveled back up through the asteroids iron core vaporizing most of it and scattering the rest in small pieces over a wide area up to six miles away the energy that produced this crater ranges somewhere from a few hundred to perhaps a thousand times greater than the energy that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II the investigation has uncovered reasons why there are no big remnants of asteroid Rock in the Arizona crater crystalline structures in the Rock showed evidence of a strong shock wave that followed the impact computer modeling revealed that the speed and size of the asteroid created enough energy for the rock to vaporize when it hit this crater is particularly important because it is the youngest and most pristine impact crater on the surface of the Earth it was also the first recognized impact crater on the surface of the Earth and so it is in some sense the Rosetta Sun it is the Touchstone for Geology it is here that Specialists from around the world come to study and learn about impact cratering as a geologic process since 1960 when Shoemaker proved that meteor crater was an impact site geologists went looking for more armed with this new information and the developments in space and satellite technology they would revolutionize our understanding of how asteroids have shaped the surface of the Earth once the meteor crater in Arizona proved an iron Mass can burst from space and create a monster Chasm scientists began to search for others they question whether some craters they thought of as volcanic were in fact caused by asteroids the investigation turned to Sudbury in Ontario Canada there is no obvious crater but for over 150 years the city has been the center of fabulous mining wealth and a geological mystery three thousand feet below ground in one of sudbury's Mines thick veins of copper and nickel are on view until recently these mining riches were associated with volcanic activity one of the really distinctive features of Sudbury is the fact that it has world-class metal deposits associated with it and originally these were thought to be related to volcano activity volcanic activity and magmas coming from inside the earth bringing Aura metals from the inside out but something didn't add up when scientists investigated the Rocks around the mine they were surprised none of the outcrops were typical of the types of rock created by a volcano to geologists it was a hint that the copper and nickel Treasures below the surface were formed by a different process [Music] they were stumped until they came across Eugene shoemaker's work on meteor crater it made them wonder whether this vast mind could also have been formed by an asteroid impact could the vast reserves of copper and nickel have arrived from space rocks above ground reveal new evidence what we have is a conical type fracture system with these lineations or lines running through them and they they focus down into a point these deformed rocks are called shatter cones spray is convinced that the only Force powerful enough to deform a rock into a shatter cone like this would be an asteroid impact and these are formed due to the shock wave interacting with the target rocks and they compress the Rocks just like compressing a spring and then when the shock wave releases they form these conical-like structures which are beautifully shown here so these are diagnostic of impact we can't form them any other way you can't form them with dynamite you can't even form them with nuclear weapons but shatter Cones were only a hunch another clue came from the composition of the Rock it's a mixture of violently broken pieces fused into melted material so what we have here is made up of the debris from the Earth's crust blasted into millions of pieces and the darker core material May well contain traces of the meteorite left in it in the form of iridium iridium is one of the rarest metals on the surface of the Earth it is a thousand times more abundant asteroids are like space rubble and their composition varies dramatically some are made of rock-like material some from Metals such as iron but they all have one thing in common they all contain comparatively large amounts of iridium so any high amounts of iridium found on Earth becomes a fingerprint of an impact event so what we're going to do is take a sample and analyze it to see if we can find an enriched iridium signature which would tell us that we have a particular class of meteorite to find iridium the lab samples of the crushed rock are heated in a furnace to over a thousand degrees Celsius The Rock melts and metals in the Rocks separate out and form a disc when the disc cools it is analyzed for traces of iridium how's it going metal from the rock is dissolved into liquid it is passed through a mass spectrometer capable of spotting tiny metal parts this incredibly accurate device provides the vital piece of evidence the blue and red lines show there's 10 times more iridium in the Sudbury rocks than in control samples from normal Earth crust this is indisputable proof that Sudbury had once been hit by a huge asteroid but where was the impact crater the landscape here is flat as far as the eye can see scientists believe over millions of years the crater disappeared erosion wore it down until all that is left is the faint outline of ring structures seen on satellite images from space spray and his colleagues have surveyed the area and found that Sudbury is the second biggest impact site on Earth 155 miles in diameter that's three quarters of the size of the world's largest crater at vredafort in South Africa spray calculated almost 2 billion years ago a space Rock the size of Mount Everest must have crashed into Earth here the asteroid hit it produced an instant crater 20 times deeper than the Grand Canyon the energy is so intense with the Shockwave going back up through the projectile the backflows off and you end up fragmenting the projectile the meteorites such that you may even end up with pieces of the Sudbury projectile on the moon and that's highly likely so it actually gets blasted out into space but one question remained where did the valuable reserves of nickel and copper come from that turned Sudbury into a famous mining site the asteroid had vaporized so the large nickel and copper deposits couldn't have come from space when the asteroid hit it penetrated almost 18 miles into the Earth melting a huge cavity into the Rock scientists estimate that this giant hole lasted only a short while within hours it collapsed because of gravity it's just like when you try and dig a hole on the beach in sand with your shovel your spading the sand out and you can only go so big before the side actually collapse in after the cliffs collapsed the crater floor filled up with a deep lake of hot liquid rock the hole had been created in seconds but the hot rock took hundreds of thousands of years to cool during this time heavier metals like copper and nickel naturally present in the liquid rocks sank to the bottom and formed sudbury's deposits of Precious Minerals [Music] the impact that Sudbury had radically changed the geology of a wide region concentrating nickel and copper into awesome mining deposits impact sites were now more than academic interest such Rich mineral deposits potentially meant big business and economic wealth mining companies on the hunt for precious natural resources now use satellite imagery to reveal new craters around the world rings that can be seen from space suggest giant asteroid impacts they know that these impact sites may contain more than just copper and nickel Rich gold mines in South Africa were also thought to have been created by volcanic processes but the discovery of shatter cones in the 1960s and ring structures seen on satellite images revealed what is now thought to be the biggest impact crater on the planet hear the impact concentrated valuable minerals in the rock this time into precious deposits of gold ore and at chick salub Mexico scientists discovered traces of a large asteroid impact that wiped out the entire dinosaur population 65 million years ago but recently scientists have drawn a link between the massive crater at chicksalube and a huge oil reservoir discovered nearby as the asteroid crashed into the Earth's crust it fractured the underground rock making it porous [Music] oil abundant in the deeper layers below rose up and seeped into the porous Rock creating an oil reservoir now scientists could more easily recognize signs of large impact sites shatter Cones were evidence of strong shock waves the presence of the space metal iridium was proof for an asteroid impact and satellite imagery has shown how impact craters can be linked to vast mineral wealth besides the minerals found at different impact sites asteroids have left evidence of massive destruction and this has led scientists to a terrifying conclusion if it has happened in the past there is little doubt it could happen again October 9 1992 Johnstown Pennsylvania thousands of sports fans were watching their local high school football game when a dazzling meteor slashed through the skies in only a few seconds it traveled over Eastern Kentucky North Carolina Maryland and New Jersey it became one of the most filmed Fireballs in history when it landed in Peekskill New York it smashed the trunk of a car luckily no one got hurt November 20th 2008. an asteroid struck Earth again a mighty Fireball streaked over western Canada as it dashed through the Skies of Alberta it broke into thousands of little pieces it is the greatest number of fragments recorded from a single fall each year almost 4 500 small-sized meteorites greater than two pounds each hit Earth over 99 percent of the impacts stay unnoticed and damage is minimal but on rare occasions asteroids can be devastating two thousand years ago the great ice sheets were in Retreat as the last ice age was coming to an end [Music] one of the first human inhabitants of North America the Great Plains alongside giant beasts [Music] archaeologists is investigating the evidence they left in the Sheridan cave in Ohio Southwest of Lake Erie Clovis peoples were hunter-gatherers in other words they hunted Wild game and they gathered wild plant Foods at this time period there were animals we call the mega mammals which included large elephant-like creatures such as the woolly mammoth as well as the American mastodon then suddenly all evidence of the mega mammals and the weapons used by the Clovis people disappeared the same observation was made by geologists at other excavation sites across America Bankers Lee is convinced a catastrophe drove the mammoths to Extinction and it would have happened in a snap of a finger over 30 Genera of Mega mammals went extinct and the Clovis technology disappeared forever Clues to what happened came from another part of the cave it's in a geological formation known as the black matte layer it is a dark line of rock packed with charred debris and it suggests a violent death the black layer which you see in this profile is carbon a high organic content and what we're seeing is the remains of animals which we're living at that time which literally had the flesh burned off their bones in order to do that we're talking about somewhere between 500 and 1200 degrees Fahrenheit the cause of The Inferno has long been a mystery but deep in these Ohio caves tankersley thinks he has found traces for an asteroid impact this is what's known as a magnetic susceptibility meter it looks as if the degree of magnetism of the layers of the sediments if we take a reading in the layer that predates the asteroid or Comet strike and we look at the reading that's somewhere around seven if we compare that at the black matte where we're finding micrometeorites we're looking at 50 times the magnetism of the layer before we have evidence of an asteroid or large common like at meteor crater in Arizona tankersley believes the asteroid brought in large amounts of iron causing a strong magnetic field as the asteroid entered the atmosphere it burst into thousands of smaller micrometeorites believes that the impact annihilated the mega mammals and brought the Clovis people to the edge of Extinction Skeptics within the scientific Community doubt the theory they think the devastation could have been caused by lightning or a wildfire started by the Clovis people themselves but recently further evidence for the destructive power of these killer rocks has been uncovered in March 1994 Carolyn Shoemaker and a team of astronomers made an extraordinary discovery they were observing and recording the night sky when a giant Fireball approached Jupiter here was this fuzzy bar of light and I looked at it and thought what on Earth it looks like a squashed Comet because it was Fuzzy it wasn't quite an asteroid but a comet with a tail now called Shoemaker Levy 9 the comet's mixture of giant space rocks and Ice was heading directly for planet Jupiter very exciting we had already been up on a high and we went up even farther because this was so unusual no one had ever seen actually seen a comet in orbit about Jupiter although we knew they had been there no one had seen a comet impact another body in space for the first time the whole world was watching Rogue pieces of rock hurtling through space towards a planet as they entered Jupiter's atmosphere something incredible happened the Rogue pieces exploded causing giant shock waves they left a series of holes in Jupiter each bigger than the earth itself the impact on Jupiter was Sensational it was very large you could see the dark spots then you you could see the first ring and then you could see this cloud of dust the team had witnessed an air burst as the giant Fireballs approached Jupiter at high speed they were slowed down by the planet's atmosphere the energy of motion was converted into pressure and heat and resulted in a huge explosion a similar air burst over Earth would annihilate all life on the planet [Music] physicist Mark boslow works at the top secret Sandia Research Laboratories in New Mexico he's one of many defense scientists investigating the possibilities of such an Armageddon research suggests we might not be as safe as once thought the investigation leads to a remote region of Siberia on June 30th 1908 upright flash streaked through the skies seconds later the sound of an explosion followed the area of tunguska was hit by an air burst devastating Shockwave uprooted thousands of trees and flattened more than 830 square miles of taiga forest [Music] there is still some evidence there are some of these trees that had all the branches stripped off in 1908 and those trees that have been dead now for 100 years are still standing scientists assumed the destruction must have been caused by an asteroid of at least 100 feet and they also believed asteroids of this size would hit Earth only once every Thousand Years but in 2008 boslo discovered something alarming with Advanced computer simulation he calculated that a small meteorite of only 20 feet across could cause a tunguska-like event the the air burst was actually smaller than people have been thinking for the last 20 years or so and the reason we think it was smaller was because of this neglect of the momentum that continued to carry the energy down what I'm showing here is an asteroid coming from the upper right and it's pushing down into the atmosphere and about seven and a half miles above the surface it explodes but you can see that it continues to push downwards so all that energy is continuing to push downwards and it's driving this shock wave ahead of it the shock wave is a big blast of air hurricane force winds now that's what blows the trees down based on this Theory asteroids able to cause another tunguska could statistically hit our planet every hundred years if such an air burst happened over a populated area the consequences would be devastating well if something like this were to hit or explode over the sky of Los Angeles it would destroy buildings over that same kind of area 800 square miles or so so it could completely wipe out a large portion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area [Music] the investigation has revealed that asteroid strikes can be incredibly destructive the black matte layer of sediment in the Sheridan cave in Ohio is evidence that an asteroid impact might have led to the extinction of the mega mammals an explosion of a giant Fireball in Jupiter's atmosphere showed scientists in real time the destructive power of Air Bursts an air burst over Siberia leads to evidence that a meteorite as small as 20 feet across can cause massive devastation [Music] powerful force of an asteroid is evident but the story doesn't end here the actual asteroid rocks when examined reveal extraordinary secrets about the beginnings of our solar system asteroids plunging from space have transformed the surface of our planet but there was one thing scientists still had to investigate the leftover pieces of the asteroid rocks themselves they contain valuable information about the origins of our solar system and the formation of planet Earth but this presents geologists with a problem most giant asteroids vaporize when they impact Earth destroying much of their hidden evidence geologists had to search for smaller pieces of broken asteroids called meteorites instead [Music] with little weight these rocks survive the fiery plunge through the Earth's atmosphere and land intact on the planet's surface Jeff notkin and his group are hunting meteorites in a dried up riverbed in Arizona they are scanning the ground with metal detectors hoping the signals they are getting lead them to iron meteorites for the most part they find iron dust small magnetic particles from space which stick to the magnetic hammer the estimate is thousands of tons of meteorites fall on the Earth every year but most of those the vast majority are tiny dust-sized particles that collect over the surface of the Earth and are never noticed what notkin is really seeking is not space dust but extremely valuable pieces of rock from outer space he has been hunting meteorites for over 15 years and has built up a collection of over several hundred samples there are three basic types of meteorites the irons which are my favorite which are what most people imagine a meteorite really looks like and they frequently have very attractive aesthetic surface features like this piece caused by melting in the atmosphere the next group of stones and these are fairly similar to at least an appearance to terrestrial rocks although they contain chondrials and iron a nickel from outer space which we don't find in Earth rocks and the third group the Stony irons is the rarest of the three and also the most valuable and the value on something like this would be at least 25 to 30 thousand dollars and if we were to take this piece and cut it open we would reveal this beautiful interior Olivine crystals and they're known popularly as the semi-precious gemstone peridot [Music] monetary value aside to geologists like mini wadwa these meteorites are a window into the Earth's ancient past [Music] at Arizona State University she runs a department analyzing some of the oldest meteorite rocks that landed on Earth [Music] this meteorite right here this carbon Rich chondrite this probably is a close proxy of the kinds of materials that we're bombarding the early Earth and they're called conrites because they've got these tiny little inclusions spherical inclusions in them called chondrules which are amongst some of the earliest solids that formed in our solar system in the beginnings of our solar system there was nothing but gas and dust as it cooled solid asteroid rocks began to form with modern technology scientists have been able to pinpoint their exact age most meteorites are thought to have formed 4.6 years ago but modern techniques have now made it possible for us to actually age date meteorites with much greater precision and we now know by looking at meteorites like this one for example that in fact the solar system was formed 4.567 billion years ago and we know that date within a million years or so so essentially we can very precisely age date the formation of our solar system by looking at meteorites as the meteorite rocks floated in early space they collided and grew into bigger bodies these ancient rocks were the building blocks of planets including early Earth by looking at these types of meteorites we can actually begin to understand how our own Earth might have formed and what kinds of processes might have happened on the early Earth because we actually get to look at the Deep Interiors of small planetary bodies when we're actually looking at some of these meteorites after the planet's formed the rubble which was left accumulated and formed a cloud of dust and rock between Mars and Jupiter this is called the asteroid belt every now and then one of these rocks breaks free and tumbles through space at 25 000 miles an hour when it drops through the atmosphere and lands it delivers Priceless information about conditions on the early Earth perhaps even hints as to how life itself began in the late 1960s a remarkable fall of meteorites hit the town of Murchison in Australia scientists around the world took notice well basically it consists of silicate minerals very much hundreds of pieces fell from space greeting the residents of Murchison with a pungent smell of rotting organic material if you open up this this jar of closed Murchison and smell it it actually smells very strongly of sort of volatile organic Rich compounds that are being degassed from this particular Rock even today professor wadwa and her Department began analyzing the Murchison meteorite incredibly they found it contained organic compounds called amino acids these complex molecules are essential to all life the organic materials in this type of meteorite were actually the building blocks of of Life as we know it today this is the raw material from which life began on our own planet it's possible that the seeds of Life arrived from space flown in by asteroids and meteorites in the case of our own Origins it's not absolutely clear that we need if necessarily originated on Earth the seeds of our life and the Very primitive life forms could have actually come from another planet or even another solar system new insights into asteroid impacts has revolutionized our understanding of how the Earth was made overturned Rock beds around meteor crater were clues for a massive impact Advanced Computer modeling shows how asteroid rocks are vaporized after impact traces of iridium in the rocks in Sudbury were evidence for an asteroid impact that concentrated precious metals from meteorites landing on earth scientists were able to calculate that our solar system formed exactly 4.567 billion years ago and the analysis of these space rocks showed that the organic seeds of Life had perhaps arrived on Earth flown in from space asteroid impacts profoundly shaped the geology of our Earth but as examples from the past have shown they have the power to annihilate our entire planet in an instant Earth a 4.5 billion year old Planet still evolving as continents shift and Clash volcanoes erupt and Glaciers grow and recede the Earth's crust is carved in numerous and fascinating ways leaving a trail of geological Mysteries behind in this episode Iceland the world's largest volcanic island is explored this Barren and alien landscape generates one-third of the world's lava Billows from the ground a boiling water is thrust into the air it's a land of violent extremes where fire meets its Nemesis ice and where Clues to understanding Iceland's formation also provide a window into the formation of the Earth itself in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean lies Iceland a lone Island only 300 miles wide a volcanic hotbed it holds some of the most diverse geological wonders known to mankind to understand how it formed and the dynamic forces that are shaping this land scientists are scouring the strange landscape for Clues and the investigation starts here in the southwest of Iceland lingvalier playing this broad Inland Valley runs through the center of Iceland giant cracks Scar the valley floor leaving this unusual landscape behind geologist Mike Poland believes they're a major clue in the mystery of Iceland's formation I'm standing in a really spectacular place there's evidence for volcanic activity all around this Valley is covered in lava and the plane is being ripped apart everywhere I look there's massive tears in the ground like this one right here [Music] this crack is getting bigger and bigger every year in fact this entire Valley is spreading apart at about the same rate that fingernails grow now imagine the forces that must be involved to rip the land apart like this something powerful is spreading this Valley at a rate of one inch a year a for so immense it's pulling the entire country apart but what force on Earth could have such power in 1912 German climatologist Alfred Wegener found an essential clue browsing through Maps he noticed that the great land masses of the Americas and Eurasia appeared to fit together this observation led Wegener to propose a radical new Theory that these great continents had once been joined together so some unseen Force must have pushed them apart allowing water to rush into the space between them creating the Atlantic Ocean it was inspired detective work and a major step forward in the search for what was pulling Iceland apart but with no method to prove such a force existed Wegener's theory was ignored for the next 40 years then in 1946 new evidence was discovered to support wagoner's ideas the U.S Navy using a technology called sonar Imaging mapped the Atlantic ocean floor for the first time the pictures revealed a 10 000 mile network of underwater mountains separated by a giant tear which passes through the center of the Atlantic scientists call this the Mid-Atlantic Ridge this huge tear through the Earth's crust is the boundary between the American and Eurasian plates and The Tear runs right through the center of Iceland I'm actually standing on what's essentially the ocean floor where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge comes on the land and it splits the North American Plate on this side from the Eurasian plate at this side and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge starts Way South down by Antarctica comes all the way up through the Atlantic and splits this country right into scientists suspected this was pushing the continents and Iceland apart they came up with a theory deep below the ocean convection currents of molten rock tear open the Earth's crust allowing magma to seep up and push the continents apart but there was a problem it was so deep scientists had no way of proving whether magma was seeping through the crust at the center of the ridge until in 1974 Alvin a human-operated submersible was launched by the Woods Hole oceanographic Institute with its ability to withstand deep sea pressures scientists could finally travel down to the depths needed to reach the Mid-Atlantic Ridge it was by examining the tear that runs through the center of this Ridge that they spotted the evidence they'd been looking for hot volcanic gases billowing into the ocean finding this told them that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was highly volcanic and like a giant wedge was capable of spreading great land masses apart Iceland's cracked thing valir Valley is a continuation of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge the same process that's pushing America further away from Europe is happening here on land finally here was a force powerful enough to explain why the cracks are getting wider and Iceland is getting bigger as the the ridge continues to spread it's going to add more and more land to Iceland so in a way Iceland will will start getting longer and longer in in an East-West sense as the plates spread apart from one another so in a way Iceland is not getting torn apart so much as it's getting built the investigation into how Iceland is growing has revealed cracks on the thing villier plane are widening at a rate of one inch a year and hot gases prove that this spreading force is volcanic forming the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which Cuts right through Iceland scientists concluded it's this that's widening the country convection currents of hot rock pull the Mid-Atlantic Ridge apart magma surges up to fill the cracks and as it approaches the surface it cools hardens and forms new land like a conveyor belt it continually pushes Iceland apart but something didn't add up why wasn't Iceland at the bottom of the ocean like the rest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge there's something strange about the amount of volcanic activity on this island this is not a normal section of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge there's a tremendous amount of volcanism that's happening in this part of the ridge as opposed to the ridge that's often the Atlantic Ocean [Music] half off the ocean floor and became the biggest volcanic island in the world [Music] Iceland there are more active volcanoes concentrated here than anywhere else on the planet geologists are searching for what has helped push Iceland off the ocean floor and lights the fiery volcanoes that rage across this Barren land [Music] on the hunt for Clues the investigation heads to one of Iceland's most active volcanoes hekla known locally as the gateway to Hell like all active volcanoes in Iceland hekla sits alongside the Mid-Atlantic Ridge volcanologist Dr Pete La famina is taking a high resolution scan of the volcano to see if its geology hides any clues about its inner workings this is a terrestrial laser scanner and the laser produces a 3D image of the Earth's surface and that allows us to see parts of a Heckler volcano here that we can't see with the naked eye his scan reveals a giant crack or fissure running right through the center of the volcano similar to those found in the thingvelier valley but this Fisher doesn't just span the width of the volcano it extends either side along a five mile tear in the Earth this tear that's key to understanding how Iceland's volcanoes erupt [Music] when Heckler erupted in the year 2000 it wasn't just the volcanic cone that exploded the Earth actually ripped open along the entire Five Mile length of the fissure a weakness created by the stretching along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the geological World these are known as Fisher eruptions forced open by the sheer volume of magma pushing up from below the tear spewed out a terrifying 750 million cubic feet of molten rock an hour flooding the land with lava these Fisher eruptions are so huge they can change the landscape drastically in a matter of days leaving behind mountains like these you can see to the north here where the Earth's surface actually opened up during the fissure eruption and lava erupted out this fissure starts to the north and extends eight kilometers through hekla volcano here the sheer volume of magma produced and be seen very well here at hekla volcano especially with these lava flows that have draped the land surface and to me this is really exciting because you can see very large volumes of erupted material produced over very short amounts of time and heklas is a beautiful place to study that but what is creating the vast quantities of lava that are forced out during these eruptions for many years the answer remained elusive until geologists found incriminating evidence locked inside the rocks the composition of the Rocks here in Iceland is quite different than we see in other places by taking this rock back to the lab we can get a very good idea of under what conditions it Formed whether it Formed deep within the Earth or near the surface this rock was once molten lava which erupted from one of Iceland's volcanoes analysis of the chemicals in the Rock revealed unusually high concentrations of rare Earth elements lanthium and cesium chemicals which are only found in magma with a very deep origin it's the Breakthrough scientists had been searching for it was evidence that another much deeper heat Source was combining with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to power the volcanoes of Iceland the rock evidence suggested this second Force lay hidden from view deep beneath Iceland's surface but it is possible to get a glimpse of what's Happening down there scientists monitor the seismic waves triggered by earthquakes all over the world as the Earth's plates move they release shock waves called seismic waves that pass through the Earth's crust these travel at a steady speed unless they hit a region of hot rock then they slow down now seismic waves arrive in Iceland they're traveling very slowly through the subsurface and this is somewhat unique to Iceland and a few other places in the world it's tells us that there's a very hot column of rock perhaps even some some molten material beneath the surface these massive columns or plumes are known as hot spots and are not unique to Iceland they are found beneath certain volcanic areas in the world like Hawaii and Yellowstone hot spots are these unwavering plumes of of hot material including molten rock magma that stream up to the surface from deep within the Earth the scientists finally had a snapshot of the second force that was helping to create Iceland the hot spot that Lies Beneath the island is almost a hundred miles wide and 400 miles deep it channels Rock slowly upwards at temperatures over 1700 degrees Fahrenheit it pushes against the crust heating the land from below and forcing magma up onto the surface as lava the investigation has identified the two colossal forces that built Iceland the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the deeper Icelandic hot spot millions of years ago the Mid-Atlantic Ridge drifted eastwards creeping towards the fixed Icelandic hot spot finally they met and have been locked together in a deadly partnership ever since the result a truly formidable volcanic Beast capable of creating magma on a Monumental scale as the mid-ocean ridge pulls apart this decompression of the material underneath it and that creates melting decompression is simply removing the pressure from a pile of rock it's much like opening a can of soda or popping the cork off of a champagne bottle the removal of so much pressure makes the rock melt into liquid magma and the hot spot is transporting heat directly from the interior of the Earth to the surface which also creates melting so this combination of decompression of existing rock beneath the surface and the direct transport of heat from the center of the earth create a huge amount of magma this incredible meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Hot Spot began to build the island beneath the waves pushing it upwards and giving birth to Iceland oh scientists updated the Island's emergence to 20 million years ago but could only imagine what this might have looked like but on November 14 1963 off the south coast of Iceland the world watched an action replay of Iceland's spectacular birth a column of rock and Ash blasted out of the ocean eighteen thousand feet into the sky so high it could be seen 70 miles away in Iceland's Capital City Reykjavik a new island was forming right in front of the world's eyes scientists called it certsey after the Norse god of fire surter located 20 miles off the mainland the small island of surtsy is now a magnet for geologists it offers a wealth of forensic evidence for Dr La femina who is investigating how Iceland first formed it's amazing to see deceptive for the first time I've seen pictures I've seen aerial photographs but to actually be here and get a chance to to go out and see it up close and actually look at the geology it's just it's just awe-inspiring foreign this type of eruption that forms Cersei has now been named after certain we call them Cersei and eruptions and they're very very explosive the interaction of hot magma or lava with the ocean causes these very steam-rich and highly explosive eruptions of Ash and water when scientists first stepped foot on the island in the summer of 64. they found it hard to believe that this was an island whose age was measured in months not Millennia in about nine and a half months this whole volcanic cone built up in addition lava flows came out of the volcanic Center here and we're seeing those these nice black cliffs in front of us now geologists had an insight into how early Iceland might have formed in only 20 million years Iceland Grew From a tiny Island into a forty thousand square mile land mass as big as the state of Kentucky the forces that power Iceland's volcanoes have been revealed cracks along Heckler volcano unleash gigantic Fisher eruptions and rare chemicals in the Rock prove that these eruptions were fueled by two separate forces the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the hot spot Iceland grew to become the world's largest volcanic island but volcanism alone doesn't explain how the land of Iceland was formed the investigation will unearth another equally dramatic force that sculpted the distinctive shape of the Iceland we know today a force which would challenge the might of Iceland's volcano if Iceland was formed by fire alone it should look like other volcanic islands such as Hawaii or Tahiti but something else was at work here to transform this island into the distinctive shape it is today its shape is another clue to Iceland's formation an extraordinary force indented Iceland's Northern Coastline burrowing deep fjords which extended far inland but what colossal Force could cause such a dramatic change to Iceland's volcanic landscape there's an obvious suspect that's found scattered across the island ice as its name suggests Iceland has a long history of being covered in ice like this today it covers 10 percent of the island all year round and in the middle of the country lies Europe's biggest ice cap Mighty vacna Yoko over 3 000 square miles in size vatna Yokel is so large it even has its own climatic conditions up to two-thirds of a mile thick it squashes the land like a giant slab of rock and at its edges great tongues of Ice Flow out through deep valleys Glacier expert Dr Matthew Roberts is investigating how ice can gouge out Solid Rock and discover the role it is played in Iceland's past this is a GPS receiver just like in-car satellite navigation it's used here to measure Glacier movement this will be left on the ice surface for a few days and then I'll come back and analyze the data and discover just how far the glacier has moved back to Robert's data reveals that this whole Glacier is sliding forward at an astounding rate of two feet per day this is an amazing ever-changing environment the ice around me is like a icy sea that's been frozen in place the ice flows out of the confines of the valley it expands and spreads to occupy a greater area now as it expands crevasses form and large depressions just like the one here here's a smaller crevasse that's formed occasionally when these creases open they begin to open sounds can be heard also the glacier occasionally makes a groaning sound this is all signs that the glass is alive and moving forward very slowly vatna yoga is one of the largest ice caps in the northern hemisphere flowing Down The Valleys the great mass of Ice Bears down with the weight of 100 tons per square foot Dr Roberts believes this moving giant is a force capable of eroding Solid Rock and he's found crucial evidence to prove it this is an excellent example of the power of glacial erosion this Boulder would have been trapped beneath the base of the ice and as the ice flowed over the surface of it it would have progressively eroded the surface of the boulder to produce these very distinctive marks called striations in its surface we can even tell the direction in which the ice was flowing if I take a rock I can illustrate this imagine this is the base of the of the ice material trapped inside the ice been dragged across as the glacier moved to produce these very distinctive marks in the surface this is just like sandpaper over wood the same erosive effect the erosive process that's happening on this Boulder is the same process that's happening on a much larger scale along the surface of these valleys the glacier is responsible for literally carving the landscape producing very distinctive troughs and basins which were formerly and filled with solid rock this really testifies to the the erosive power of a glacier the ancient fjords on the North Coast are the same deep Basin shape which means they must once have been filled with ice scientists now know that around one and a half million years ago changes in the Earth's orbit and the tilt of its axis began to cool the planet an enormous ice sheet descended from the north and shrouded Iceland in a cloak of ice as the ice Advanced and retreated it carved out deep fjords and indented Iceland's Northern coastline ice was a formidable force in Iceland and many volcanoes lay in tune beneath it Fire and Ice were now locked in a Titanic Battle of Supremacy with the giant ice sheets that carved the fjords put out the fires that created Iceland the first clue lies in this ancient Valley five miles west of the glacier the valley floor is strewn with hundreds of giant Boulders but it's how they got here that interests Dr Roberts these Boulders provide a lot of insight into the how this landscape was formed the boulders are clustered together and interestingly these Boulders are rounded which shows that they've been rolling now the Bowls have been brought together by some dynamical Force you can also see smaller Boulders trapped in the center and it's quite clear that flowing water is the cause of this but this wouldn't have been water in the Stream that we see in the background this would have been water produced by a much larger faster flow that would have inundated this entire Valley Dr Roberts has an extraordinary theory about what happened here in ancient times a cataclysmic flood a hundred feet high cut through this Valley it was so powerful that it rolled these giant Boulders like pebbles in a stream before dumping them on the landscape but what could create such a colossal flow of water Dr Roberts suspects the flood came from the mighty vatnyokal Glacier and is hunting for Clues with such a huge area to cover Dr Roberts takes to the air his investigation leads him to a crucial piece of evidence this strange bowl-like depression on the surface of the ice this is amazing location this giant depression in the in the eyes has been formed as a pocket of waters drained from beneath the face of the ice cap the beautiful concentric crevasses that you see on the ice surface have formed as the ice has slowly crept into the hollow that's been created as the water has drained away beneath the ice a dynamic process is happening hot magma and steam are melting the glacier from underneath the Melt water collects in a huge ice Basin at the top of the volcano the Basin slowly fills but as it does the surrounding ice becomes unstable cracks appear in the ice Basin and as the hot water drains away it forms a tunnel which channels the water to the edge of the glacier this would suggest that volcanic eruptions still happen even under the enormous weight of ice is this process the key to explaining the ancient cataclysmic flood to answer this we must go to one of Iceland's largest volcanoes Grimm's button lying in tune beneath the ice in the heart of vacna Yoku this massive volcano violently erupts every 10 years here Fire and Ice spectacularly collide with Iceland's volcanoes emerging Victorious ice cannot suppress the Invincible power of Iceland's volcanoes which have now found a new way to vent their anger during a huge eruption like this grimswoten can melt enough ice to fill America's largest man-made Reservoir Lake Mead but this vast volume of water cannot be held back by the ice for long and leads inevitably to a massive glacial flood such a force of nature struck Iceland in 1996 with devastating consequences the flood water taking out everything in its path Bridges were torn down and swept away and the highway was submerged underwater the flood itself reached a peak discharge of over 1.8 million cubic feet per second that's a remarkable discharge equivalent to the summertime discharge of the river Amazon imagine that sort of condition over a relatively small area the sheer force of the water carried icebergs the size of four-story buildings it's floods like these that can change the landscape in a matter of days erosive power of the flowing water can result in tremendous amounts of rock being eroded literally being fractured Away by the high water pressure that's been created so literally a landscape can form before your eyes during a very severe glacial flood the story of Iceland's bizarre landscape is taking shape striations on Rock prove that ice is a formidable force that carved out Iceland's unique coastline Boulders strewn in an empty Valley reveal cataclysmic floods of the past and depressions in the ice confirmed that Iceland's volcanoes could not be suppressed but twelve thousand years ago the great ice sheets retreated and Iceland was liberated from their wintry grip now the effects of Iceland's volcanoes would be felt on a global scale for thousands of years Iceland's volcanoes were locked in a Titanic battle with ice but then twelve thousand years ago the giant ice sheets finally retreated this would open a new chapter in Iceland's volcanic history as they were now free to wreak havoc but what effect would this have on Iceland and its surroundings one of the most dramatic effects can be found in the south central region of the island [Music] this alien landscape is known as Larkey a row of strange craters and solidified lava flows that have bubbled up from a huge tear in the Earth a massive fissure eruption it stretches for an astounding 16 miles across the landscape volcanologist Dr Thor thorterson is investigating Larkey the site of one of the greatest eruptions in recent history one which would have devastating effects worldwide the lucky fishes which extend from here in the southwest continue here through the landscape as a row of cones up here through Mount lucky which was split into two during the eruption and continue further to the Northeast all the way to the Martians of the glaciers here eyewitness accounts accurately date the eruption to 1783. this was one of the most disastrous years in Icelandic history Fallout from the eruption caused harvests all over the island to fail 75 percent of the livestock died plunging Iceland into a Great Famine which killed ten thousand people but mysteriously at the same time the rest of the northern hemisphere reported freakishly cold weather averaging 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit below normal the Northern Hemisphere froze over North Sea along the coast of Holland flows so people skated between Villages along the coast there was ice on Mississippi down by New Orleans in that winter for many years it was thought the Larkey eruption and these climatic events were unrelated but advances in geology found it wasn't just a bizarre coincidence comparing eyewitness accounts with the geological remains Dr thorterson has reconstructed what happened he discovered that the eruption started with a bang on the morning of June 8 1783. sent rocks flying high into the air and ripped the Earth open along a one-mile tear but this was just the beginning three days later a second eruption ripped open then a third fourth fifth in total the Earth unzipped along ten vast tears in the crust erupting lava continuously for over eight months the mammoth amounts of lava that poured out of the ground here would have buried Manhattan to a depth of 830 feet but how an eruption on this small remote island could cause climatic chaos thousands of miles away remained a mystery the evidence that would link Larkey with this worldwide catastrophe was locked inside these boulders the story is in the Rocks this rock here is part of the material the magma that came out during the eruption these holes are called bubbles and they form as the magma rises from deep within the ground and approaches the surface and it really starts to boil the gas which is dissolved in the magma at depth goes into the bubbles then it escapes into the atmosphere when this bubble Rock erupted onto the surface it would have poured gas out into the Icelandic atmosphere its gas have caused climatic chaos across the globe the identity of this gas can be found in the microscopic structure of the Rock if you look closely at this rock you can see a lot of white specks these little white specks are crystals who grow in the magma at death sometimes these crystals as they're growing they will then capsulate Christine magma and bring it up to the surface like time capsules the white crystals contain untouched magma from deep in the earth locked away since 1783. Dr thordison has analyzed this magma and found it to contain poisonous sulfur dioxide and because there was so much lava here it would have released enormous amounts a staggering 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas was pumped into the atmosphere but how could gases released from larki cause bitterly cold weather across the globe the answer lay in accounts of a thick red fog reported over Iceland in June 1783. within a few weeks it had been blown over London and Paris and by July it had dispersed across the entire Northern Hemisphere scientists now know that the red fog was caused by the sulfur dioxide which rose High into the air mixing with water it created a sulfuric acid Haze the haze blocked out the sun and it sent temperatures plummeting as a result the Northern Hemisphere endured three bitterly cold Winters which brought spring floods famine and widespread poverty to Europe some historians have long believed that these climatic conditions triggered social and political unrest which led to the French Revolution in 1789 a but scientists now suspect Larkey had ramifications even further afield the cold temperatures in the north changed air currents in the South causing dramatic climate changes India was hit by a terrible drought people to say that more than half a million people died from the drought in India also this change in atmosphere circulation caught a very cold summer in Japan it's cold and wet the rice Harvest failed and the result was the greatest famine in Japanese history it is estimated that larki killed over 2 million people worldwide and was one of the most devastating volcanic eruptions in the history of mankind [Music] evidence has proven that Iceland's recent volcanic history has had a devastating effect on the island and the rest of the world enormous lava Fields revealed that Larkey was a gigantic eruption bubbles in the Rock indicate that huge volumes of gas were released from Larkey the white crystals reveal that this gas was poisonous sulfur dioxide evidence that Iceland's volcanoes caused climatic Mayhem across the globe but eruptions like larki may not be confined to the Past some believe that the balance between Fire and Ice is Shifting and has the potential to propel Iceland into another hell on Earth the evidence is mounting that Iceland has the potential to be the most lethal Island on the planet a fearsome volcanic Force Lies Beneath it creating powerful volcanoes capable of generating gigantic lava flows and altering Global climates yet many of Iceland's volcanoes are covered in glaciers Fire and Ice are held in a delicate balance scientists fear if this balance were tipped in the volcano's favor Iceland could become even deadlier if the remaining ice were to melt what effect would it have on the activity of Iceland's volcanoes the first clue in the investigation lies in these innocuous looking piles of rock and Rubble they're found all over Iceland and yet these rocks don't come from a volcano they're moraines the geological term for rock piles deposited at the mouth of a glacier these deposits are evidence that the Glaciers are shrinking year by year the glacier has melted and retreated back up the valley leaving a Moraine like this behind [Music] Dr Roberts has studied the vatna Yokel Glacier for the last 10 years and has noticed this dramatic trend the glacier has retreated into remarkable rate since I've been visiting the area I've seen tremendous changes the Isis retreated annually at a rate of about 200 feet per year this Lake over here used to be filled with ice I've seen the ice progressively melt this Moraine has formed this whole valley has become almost bare maybe in the next 20 years this whole glassy will disappear in a lake will form in the valley Iceland's Glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate five percent of Iceland's ice caps melting in the last 40 years the question that scientists are Keen to understand is what effect this rapid melting will have on the volcanoes that lie beneath the only other time that glaciers have melted this quickly is when Iceland came out of the last ice age but what can past events tell us about the future geologist Professor Bill McGuire is investigating how volcanic activity changed at the end of the last ice age and he's Unearthed some surprising results around about 11 to 12 000 years ago you you started to see quite rapid melting of glasses in Iceland and elsewhere and that triggered a recognizable increase in volcanic activity because you were removing this large mass of ice very very quickly the rapid melting of ice kickstarts volcanic eruptions beneath volcanic eruptions are triggered by the gas in the magma which expands to form Bubbles and the bubbles Drive the eruption it's rather like taking the cork out of a bottle of champagne now if you have a very heavy weight on top of a a volcano if there's a heavy mass of water or ice that can help suppress eruptive activity but when ice melts quickly this downward pressure is suddenly released that's when the trouble starts as the ice melts so the pressure on the magma underneath is reduced the gas in the magma can form bubbles they can coalesce and they can eventually Drive the magma upwards towards the surface and Trigger either explosive eruptions or effusions of lava that could spread out have a huge distances Iceland's Glaciers are melting rapidly this has led scientists to believe that a devastating eruption on the scale of Larkey could happen again question is when these are things that we have to think about and try to prepare ourselves to deal with if they happen in our lifetime is it possible that we can get another drops like this in Iceland definitely the investigation has revealed how the vast and violent island of Iceland was formed cracks in the thing valir plane and traces of chemicals in the Rocks revealed how the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Hot Spot joined forces to create a colossal volcanic Force massive fissure eruptions rip the Land open hemorrhaging millions of tons of lava Iceland rapidly formed deep Northern fjords were evidence that a giant ice sheet eroded the land and entombed the volcanoes locking Fire and Ice in a Titanic battle Boulders strewn in an ancient Valley revealed how fire emerged Victorious unleashing cataclysmic floods specks of sulfur in the Rocks showed how Iceland's volcanoes have the potential to cause global destruction now glaciers melting above some of the world's most deadly volcanoes are increasing the threat of future eruptions over the last 20 million years Iceland's Almighty volcanic Force has created a vast alien landscape volatile and unpredictable it may one day unleash a massive eruption which could devastate both Iceland and The Wider World Beyond Earth a 4.5 billion year old Planet still evolving as continents shift and Clash volcanoes erupt and Glaciers grow and recede the Earth's crust is carved in countless fascinating ways leaving a trail of geological Mysteries behind in this episode Europe's greatest mountain chain the Alps is explored home to some of Europe's highest peaks longest glaciers and sheerest rock faces the Alps are one of the most dynamic and dangerous mountain ranges on the planet a mysterious land where whole mountains collapse in on themselves where its rocks once lay in tuned at the bottom of the sea scientists have been hunting for Clues hidden inside the Rocks deep within the ice and upon some of the most famous Summits in the world to understand how the Alps formed and continue to evolve Clues which also provide a window into the formation of the Earth itself [Music] with more than 100 Peaks Rising higher than 12 000 feet The Majestic Alps Tower over Europe the mountains are a huge physical barrier 750 miles long 125 miles wide and spanning seven countries the Alps divide northern and southern Europe home of the iconic Matterhorn and Western Europe's tallest mountain Mont Blanc the Alps are one of the world's highest mountain ranges but the majority of these Peaks formed only 30 million years ago making it one of the youngest mountain ranges on Earth and for centuries geologists have poured over these fabulous rock formations to figure out how mountains are made [Music] first person to uncover a crucial clue to the Alps formation was surprisingly a 16th century Renaissance Man Leonardo da Vinci he was not only a great artist he also had a brilliant scientific mind Da Vinci was a natural detective who saw the world around him as a huge mystery waiting to be solved he focused his inquisitive scientific mind on the Alps at a time when most Scholars believed the Earth was flat Da Vinci had heard Tales of an extraordinary Discovery embedded in the rocks and in 1510 he trekked High into the mountains to take a look seven thousand feet he found what he'd been looking for fossils he knew these creatures came from the sea that they could not have lived in the Alps so how did they get there more than 100 miles from the nearest ocean and thousands of feet above sea level the 16th century explanation provided by the powerful Catholic Church decreed that the Marine fossils must have been washed up during the time of Noah 2300 BC the holy scriptures describe how God sickened by the wickedness of mankind inflicted a terrifying Deluge of water upon the Earth all forms of life were annihilated except those Sheltering on Noah's Ark the great torrent of water that flooded the Earth must have washed some of the sea creatures 100 miles inland but Da Vinci did not believe this explanation and continued his investigation as to how the fossils got there thank you in the santis mountains Northern Switzerland 500 years later and seven thousand feet above sea level it's still possible to see the fossilized remains of sea creatures that so Intrigue DaVinci here we have a rock which is almost covered with fossils for example here cross-section of a clam here below we have the skeleton of a coral pouring over the fossils Da Vinci carried out an ingenious piece of detective work found the fossilized remains of two shelled creatures that amazingly still had both halves intact the church's explanation of a cataclysmic flood were true then the torrent of water would have torn these delicate creatures apart Da Vinci proposed that these fossils had formed under the ocean and that some other Force had brought them high into the mountains modern day scientists have identified the species fossilized in these rocks and can accurately pinpoint when they lived the fossils we see here actually left 100 million years ago in a warm tropical sea [Music] this ancient tropical sea teamed with life and Rich coral reefs the sea floor was covered in urchins clams and other species many now extinct just as Da Vinci had imagined when some of these creatures died they were preserved intact their shells then became buried in the sediments at the bottom of the sea and preserved as fossils when the sediment turned to rock but what could these fossils reveal about the formation of the Alps again it was Da Vinci's exceptional powers of observation that helped unravel the mystery he noticed that the spectacular fossil-bearing Rock known as Limestone was laid down in layers several thousand feet deep four hundred years later it was discovered that along with the fossils hidden in the microscopic structure of limestone is an essential clue to solving the mystery of how the Alps formed remains of trillions upon trillions of seashells [Music] Limestone forms as Tiny sea creatures sink to the bottom of the ocean piling on top of one another they compact together under their vast accumulated weight forming layer upon layer of sedimentary rock [Music] the Santa's mountains like large areas of the Alps are made almost entirely of the shells of dead sea creatures beds of limestone here are several thousand feet high evidence of the extraordinary amount of sediment that was laid down on the ancient sea floor we have here a massive package of limestone layer above layer of sea floor and this was brought up in an upright position during the building of the Alpine mountain chain ancient Clues reveal the origin of the Alps Marine fossils are evidence that these rocks were once covered by a tropical sea and rocks made from trillions of microscopic seashells reveal how entire mountains formed from sediments laid down in the ocean Da Vinci suspected that part of the Alps had formed beneath the ocean but how had these originally flat layers been upended Leonardo's explanation was that some kind of force have brought the fossils high up to the mountains but they actually couldn't explain then the driving forces of this movement after Da Vinci it would take scientists another 400 years before that part of the mystery was solved [Music] the Alps this Jagged backbone of Europe was lifted thousands of feet above sea level and 100 miles inland many of the Alpine rocks once lay flat on the sea floor an extraordinary force twisted folded and turn this land upside down but what was this force and how could it move great swathes of solid rock in the 1870s Swiss geologist Arnold Escher and his student Albert Heim were drawn to a strange line etched in the chinglehorn mountain they traced the line for 30 miles [Music] Out Of Reach for most of its range they found one location where this line can be examined in close-up near the village of elm Eastern Switzerland [Music] the dark line can clearly be seen here beneath this strange overhang above it Escher and Heim identified a layer of ancient sedimentary rock but strangely beneath the line they found a layer of much younger rock underneath we have here the fleece these are slates which are about 35 million years old and on top we have the verucano which has formed about 260 270 million years ago Asher and Heim were confused the rock formation simply did not make sense layers were formed by the buildup of sediments how could Alder Rock lie above the younger one [Music] studying the twists and folds in the surrounding mountains Asher and Heim came up with the theory as to how these rocks switched places just imagine we have one big sheet of sediments and one part of the sediment of this sheet is pushed over the others that's the way we get older sediments on younger sediments a gigantic horizontal Force pushed these older rocks a distance of 30 miles over the younger layers the line between them where the Rocks scrape over each other is called an overthrust Escher and heim's Discovery revolutionized our understanding of how mountains are made this outcrop actually it's a close-up of maybe the most famous overtrust in the world the so-called glorious overtrust and there are only a few places where you can go so close to it this site is merely a close-up of a massive geological phenomenon that created the Alps sitting above the Glarus overthrust is a mountain range with Peaks over 11 000 feet high it's a reminder that some awesome power created the Alps a force that can literally move mountains but what has the power to push billions of tons of Rock scientists now know that such a colossal process can only happen when two continents Collide driven by the forces of plate tectonics plate tectonics is the process by which giant plates of the Earth's crust move slowly across the planet's surface propelled by vast currents of molten rock deep within the Earth as this happens over millions of years continents Collide and split apart and oceans form and disappear but if the Alps formed as a result of a massive Collision what continent had crashed into Europe the answer lies entombed in one of the Alps most famous landmarks hidden by clouds it's frequently hard to see there it is finally the matterhorn's unique shape has made it one of the best known mountains in the world at 14 692 feet it's one of the Alps highest peaks [Music] hidden within the body of this mountain is another major overthrust here rocks from the sea floor lie above the European bedrock [Music] taking a closer look at the layers formed Under the Sea Dr helvig finds a green tinged Rock the Rocks we're looking at here are called Green chests [Music] coarse crystals reveal that this rock erupted as lava at the bottom of the ocean 100 million years ago [Music] but in the early 20th century scientists discovered something even stranger an unusual layer of rock caps the mountain this upper layer is a gray rock called nice but when geologists trace the origin of this rock they found it did not come from Europe and was 200 million years older than rocks from the sea floor [Music] this rock belonged to a two billion year old continent 600 miles to the South Africa the upper section of this Alpine sandwich it consists of rock which come from Africa the middle part are the rocks from the oceanic crust and the lower part then are the European rocks [Music] this is evidence that the Alps formed because ancient Africa collided with Europe the result this whole mountain is composed of three rock types [Music] from a geological standpoint it nicely combines the whole Alpine story so it shows all the shows the most important aspects of the Alpine history right there within one mountain but how exactly did rocks from the sea floor get sandwiched between two continents detailed studies and dating of the Alpine rocks have revealed that 90 million years ago Africa pushed towards Europe squashing an ancient sea the tethus ocean that lay between them as Africa plowed into Europe it first destroyed the ocean that lay between them and and piled it up in in thin slices as much as a bulldozer tears up the ground in front of it these these slices were then piled in front of the the bulldozer that makes up Africa so we began to develop this large pile of deformed rock that is what today forms the Alps the ocean floor was crumpled in front of the advancing African continent bending folding and breaking as it went 30 million years ago the Alps were literally pushed up onto Europe Africa was thrust over and above the other layers to form the sandwich of rocks that would become the Matterhorn a jumble of rocks had been folded and molded by violent processes an uplifted 22 000 feet as high as the Himalayas today scientists investigating how the Alps rose up off the ocean floor have uncovered 30 mile line in the Rocks the boundary between older rocks thrust above younger ones [Music] gray nice rocks at the top of the Matterhorn prove that Africa collided with Europe creating the Alps but for the last 30 million years some other Monumental Force has eaten away these great Peaks what has caused this entire mountain range to lose nearly half its height oh 30 million years ago the Alps highest peaks towered 22 000 feet into the air today the tallest Peaks are almost half this height unraveling the mystery of why and how the Alps are disappearing is important to the 14 million people who live in and around them illhorn Mountain an extraordinary peak in the Swiss Alps provides an essential clue this mountain is almost nine thousand feet tall but Hollow at its Center ilhorn is rotten to the Core this massive hole is forming as the mountain collapses in on itself [Music] what Monumental force is pulling this mountain down it's made of a loose unstable mixture of rock and mud that originally came from the ocean floor in winter this mixture of rock is glued together by ice but in the spring thaw it becomes loose [Music] here you can see the back of the rocks are very highly weathered you can easily and back by hand pull them apart you can imagine that uh in winter when the ice when the water goes behind the rocks and freezes that it could actually mechanically loosen the Rocks during the Spring they fall down the whole mountain is composed of these rocks is basically just falling apart [Music] a combination of weak rocks and the natural action of freezing and thawing has resulted in a crumbling Mountain in the last 10 000 years 100 million tons of ilhorn mountain has eroded and in the process hollowed out a vast New Valley the eel grabbing where has all the rock gone Dr McArdle has come to explore a deep seemingly dry riverbed which runs down from the heart of the mountain and into the river Rome the evidence is hidden beneath the village and vegetation a large fan-shaped platform of rubble fifteen hundred feet deep and over one mile Square [Music] the structure is built from the sediment delivered by the illgraven catchment all the sediment that you see has come down from the mountain but this dry riverbed presents a mystery how did vast amounts of debris get transported down from the mountain Swiss Village of susten ground zero for the investigation is in a constant state of alert a few times a year the ground shakes here as if a gigantic freight train is thundering through the village [Music] foreign this dry channel is flooded by a river of Rock of debris flow down from the elhorn mountain anywhere between three and five times a year there's a large wave of sediment moving Downstream at anywhere from 10 to 20 miles an hour with a full depth on the order of up to 10 feet and it moves down the channel rapidly and anyone who's in the channel of course is in danger every time it rains debris Cascades down the Mountainside making this one of the most active debris flow zones on Earth the Alps are basically being washed down from the mountains through the rivers and into the Lakes Into The Valleys further Downstream ilhorn is an extreme case of an entire mountain in the process of Decay resulting in one of the most dangerous mountain terrains on the planet but inherently unstable rocks are found right across the Alps and have created some of the Alps best beauty spots a lake is a mile above sea level and half a mile Square but in theory this Lake shouldn't be here streams that pour off the mountain should run straight down the valley unobstructed [Music] a clue to what created this high altitude Lake can be found one thousand feet up on the surrounding slopes as we look up on the hill slopes we see these very large fans of debris that are coming down off of these unstable slopes where we see this sort of smooth bed rock that's dipping towards us this is prime territory for landslides when these mountains formed flat sheets of sedimentary rock were thrust up to rest at extreme angles the joins between these stressed and fractured Rock layers frequently fail causing huge layers of rock to Shear off the cliff faces much of these open slopes are probably the result of sheets of rock peeling off and forming large landslides epic landslide that caused this Lake to form 15 000 years ago the entire Side of the Mountain sheared off blocking the valley and causing stream water to back up and create one of the Alps most breathtaking landscapes it's all about gravity gravity is what what ultimately brings down mountains Rivers come in debris flows form landslides form and this sort of process is very common throughout the Alps steep slopes and unstable rocks have created a mountain range that is Ever Changing and only a few thousand years gravity will also destroy oshinese Lake as debris flows fill it up [Music] over the last 30 million years the Alps have fallen down on a massive scale in places decreasing in height by ten thousand feet so what has happened to those thousands of feet and billions of tons of missing Rock [Music] a clue can be found in the Rolling Hills a few miles north of the Alps at eckyville this rock out crop contains an extraordinary collection of stones these are large cobbles stones that have come from all over the Alps so if I look at some of these for example this small white and black rock this is a granitic rock that comes from the center of the Alp somewhere very close to the Matterhorn and we see throughout this outcrop rocks that come from different parts of the Alps rocks from hundreds of different scattered locations have traveled over 150 miles before being dumped in this geologic rock graveyard but it's the amount of material here that's mind-boggling these Hills are made entirely of rock debris from the nearby Alps at 100 miles wide and 500 miles long they stretch in an arc round the Alps running through France Switzerland and Germany there's enough material here to cover all of North America in 100 feet of rubble could this be where the thousands of feet of missing Alpine Rock have gone a big mountain range like the Alps is heavy and it waits down the crust forming a depression all the way around the mountain range a multi-trillion ton mass of rock was pushed up on land as Africa collided with Europe creating the Alps the weight of the rock caused the European crust to sink making a huge depression in places over two and a half miles deep the molasse basin now the importance of this depression is it's a trap all the sediment that we see eroding off of the Alps is trapped in this Basin and ends up sitting there dating of these Pebbles has revealed that ever since the Alps were created Rivers have washed Alpine debris hundreds of miles Downstream dumping the rocks in this gigantic basin these rocks that we're looking at here are the debris the detritus that's come off of the Alps over the last 20 30 million years these particular rocks are almost 25 million years old and what we see are cobbles we see little pieces of all the different rocks that we see throughout the Alps for 30 million years the debris eroded from the Alps has been dumped in a 30 000 square mile Bowl creating this rolling chain of Hills to the north of the Alps this is where the missing mountain rock is put it all back together and once again there'd be mountains as high as the Himalayas scientists have discovered how the Alps have almost halved in height and where the missing rocks have disappeared to the clues are inherently unstable mixtures of rock resulting in whole mountains falling apart debris flows on steep Cliffs proof that weakened layers of rock Shear off from the mountainsides and a graveyard of Pebbles from all over the Alps evidence that these mountains have been washed away but then two million years ago the landscape changed dramatically vertical Cliffs were carved into the Alps and giant spikes of rock poked through the clouds another Mighty Force had begun to re-sculpt the Alps over the last two million years a blink in geologic time something has rapidly and radically transformed the Alps gouging giant Peaks and sheer Rock faces the most notorious rock formation being the Iger in southern Switzerland North Face of the Iger is a six thousand foot vertical climb it's a terrifying unrelenting Ascent climbers face gale force winds freezing fog rock falls and Avalanche giving the Iger the reputation as one of the most formidable climbs in the world nicknamed the murder wall since 1935 more than 60 climbers have died here how giant climbing walls like this were formed had been a mystery to geologists until 1837. when Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz noticed similar Cliffs at lower altitudes known to have been made by a colossal Force glaciers over one thousand glaciers wind their way through the Alpine valleys imperceptible to the naked eye these giant rivers of ice slowly flow downhill [Music] this time lapse of the Alex Glacier taken over a period of three years reveals how glaciers can move tens of feet a year and where two glaciers meet a stripe of rocks sits on the surface proof that something extraordinary is happening beneath the ice a force which can transform Jagged rock into a surface as smooth as glass you see here a smooth rock face which was formerly covered by Ice underneath the ice there's this rocks and sand and it carries the ice carries this stuff with it and it acts like sandpaper and Polished this rock but polishing alone cannot account for the formation of the Alps Jagged Peaks and the North Face of the Iger where the sides of entire mountains have been ripped off more evidence of the awesome power of glaciers can be found on these granite slabs deep cracks penetrate the body of The Rock the ice was flowing over this rock face and the eyes could enter this crack melt water forming beneath the glacier seeps into the cracks refreezes and splits open The Rock weakened and fractured huge chunks of stone are ripped from the Bedrock vast amounts of rock are plucked in ground from the mountainsides and dumped in the lower warmer valleys when the ice melts [Music] so here we are at the end the snout of the glacier and here debris water and rock Boulders this has been eroded by the glass here transported and moved to this place and this is the essential process how glaciers formed the landscape but how could glaciers have carved The North Face of the Iger and other Mighty Peaks which rise thousands of feet Out Of Reach of the abrasive ice below Agassiz came up with a radical Theory High Rock faces were scarred and gnarled they had clearly been gouged by ice like The glaciated Valleys he'd found at lower altitudes piecing the evidence together he concluded towering Cliffs like the six thousand foot Iger were the handiwork of ancient gigantic glaciers [Music] but a fagasis was right where did the huge glaciers come from lies locked inside Europe's biggest river of ice the Alex Glacier a massive 14 miles long it covers an area of more than 45 square miles and is up to three thousand feet deep the Alex Glacier in southern Switzerland has helped scientists understand how all alpine glaciers form s of the glacier is high up in the mountains where altitude brings freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall floor how delicate snowfall becomes a giant slab of ice Dr bowder Ventures deep into the heart of the glacier this Frozen passageway 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 60 feet deep offers tourists and scientists a unique window into the formation of a glacier here we can see the inside of a glass here we can see inside the eyes we see here layers of air bubbles and there are different distinct layers visible here here here and they represent individuals years when this eyes has been formed the glacier Grows by the buildup of layer upon layer of snow the newly fallen snow traps pockets of air between the individual snowflakes forming layers of bubbles as more snow settles the flakes beneath become squashed making them stick together to form ice forming over thousands of years the amount of ice contained in a single Glacier can be staggering it's been estimated that the Alex Glacier holds 27 billion tons of water enough to provide every human on earth with two pints of water a day for the next six years [Music] the air bubbles trapped inside the ice thousands of years ago that hold the key to what carved the Alps distinctive shape in the air bubbles air is stored from the time when the air bubbles have been formed so we can analyze the chemical composition inside there and learn about climatic condition at that time when scientists analyzed miniature time capsules like these they found air over 12 000 years old with surprisingly low levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide this meant that more heat was escaping from the Earth's atmosphere causing global temperatures to plummet similar Studies have revealed that for the last two million years the earth has been gripped by a series of ice ages theory was confirmed two million years ago an enormous ice sheet engulfed the Earth's northern hemisphere were buried in ice almost two miles thick it was so deep that only the tips of the mountains poked out above the ocean of ice as the ice moved it whittled lone Peaks and tore steep Rock faces high in the Alps leaving its Legacy on the landscape it was during this time the giant glaciers carved the infamous North Face of the Iger [Music] in their mission to discover how the Iger and other great peaks in the Alps formed scientists have found cracks in Granite Bedrock evidence that glacier's cleave masses of rock from the mountainsides and low levels of carbon dioxide trapped inside ice bubbles prove that giant glaciers once carved immense rock walls and Pinnacles which now Tower over the landscape ten thousand years ago the great ice sheets melted leaving their mark on the Alps but today the Alps are falling down at a phenomenal rate something has propelled them into a new and violent phase of their evolution the Alps are falling down at an accelerated rate millions of tons of rock are crashing to Earth a clue to what strange forces at work here can be found high up in the mountains where the remnants of the last ice age lurk alpine glaciers physically prop up mountains binding The Rock together but these icy rivers are changing shape but what do we see in the background here are glaciers which are separated by rocky surfaces which are looking very fresh because they had been ice covered in the last few hundred uh years if you look across here to teodul Glacier we can see that actually right next to the eyes there is some grayish material next to the brownish material that's exactly the limit up to where the glacier was in 1874 so you see how much of this ice has melted down in these 130 years scientists believe global warming is melting the ice faster than at any other time in the Alps history and as the glaciers shrink they expose steep unsupported Cliffs that are prone to fall down increasing the risks of landslides but scientists have discovered another way melting Glaciers are weakening the Alps when these Frozen reservoirs melt millions of gallons of water gushed downhill feeding the great rivers of Europe like liquid sandpaper this torrent scrapes over the rocks hollowing out the land at an accelerated rate [Music] the dramatic evidence of this Dynamic process can be found in the valley of lauderbrunen going through this Valley is the sound of one of the loudest and most spectacular water features in the Alps trummelback Falls you can just feel feel the pulsing of the water this is the name tremelbach actually means drum sound and this is reflecting this this pulsing throbbing that we can hear and feel from the water flowing down through these caves trumbleback is a spectacular glacial waterfall over 5 000 gallons of melt water a second hurdle down from glaciers on the nearby Iger and Jungfrau mountains over hundreds of years this abrasive jet stream has sliced through the mountain creating a narrow Canyon here from the Swiss Alps alone there's enough rock removed by the glacial melt Waters to create a mountain more than half a mile high troubleback like other Alpine waterfalls is living on borrowed time as milk water Thunders down the waterfalls it cuts into the Rock weakening it over time these steep Cliffs left by the glaciers crumble replaced by ever deepening river valleys today the rivers that are now returning are trying to carve a river valley which has a very different shape and different form changing this landscape all of these processes come in and destroy that high relief that the glaciers have left behind very Dynamic process is very rapid erosion very rapid processes that cannot be sustained over geologic time for the last 150 years global warming and the resulting glacial melt has caused a huge amount of erosion experts warn if this warming Trend continues the Alps will be ice free by the end of the century and fear these great mountain peaks will tumble down even faster weakened rocks and the increased risk of catastrophic landslides could spell disaster for villages and Resorts high up in the Alps but a look back to ancient times reveals that the Alps have been in meltdown before in the Autumn of 218 BC the mighty Hannibal LED an army of fifty thousand men and 40 elephants across the Alps to attack the Romans an arduous 15-day Trek across the most treacherous Terrain in Europe many men fell to their deaths along the perilously narrow tracks but Hannibal's audacious plan paid off his army pushed on through Italy to defeat the Romans today Hannibal's route is virtually impassable blocked by ice and deep snow scientists realized that when Hannibal crossed the Alps the mountain passes must have been ice-free and the glaciers must have retreated further back than they are today [Music] it may have been a bit of a walk through the forest for him at least much of the way and certainly an easier time to travel through the Alps than we would have today for example changes in the earth tilt towards the Sun have caused glaciers to melt and re-freeze in response to a fluctuating climate if history repeats itself glaciers will sometime in the distant future naturally return to the Alps these advances and Retreats of the ice are very important to the overall rate at which the Alps are being eroded it's this natural cycle from glaciers carving Cliffs to Rivers cutting valleys and back again that has created a mountain range that is Ever Changing and it's this natural process that will ultimately destroy the Alps as we know them the Alps are slowly being destroyed we'll probably see more glacial advances and Retreats that will begin to erode them down so if we were to come back in 10 20 maybe 100 million years we would still find a mountain range here today the appellations of eastern U.S for example remain at least a small subdued mountain range and that would be the future of the Alps the Alps will shrink to half its size and become a mountain chain less than six thousand feet high stunted in height no glaciers will cap these mountains nor feed the great rivers of Europe millions of years from now the vast lowlands of France Germany and Eastern Europe could one day be Barren and parched scientists have discovered how the Alps formed and why they're tumbling down Marine fossils and limestone made from trillions of seashells are proof that Alpine rocks formed at the bottom of the sea gray nice rocks at the top of the Matterhorn are evidence that Africa collided with Europe forming the Alps landslides are proof that sedimentary layers and sometimes whole mountains are inherently weak and collapsing gases trapped in ancient ice bubbles reveal that giant glaciers carved out the rugged landmarks of the Alps shrinking glaciers and waterfalls are weakening the Alps creating a Skyline which is constantly changing created the Alps have continued to evolve one of the most varied spectacular and intensely studied mountain ranges on Earth understanding how the Alps were made has unlocked deep secrets of the powerful forces that shape our planet Earth a 4.5 billion year old Planet still evolving as continents shift in Clash volcanoes erupt glaciers grow and recede the Earth's crust is carved in countless fascinating ways leaving a trail of geological Mysteries behind this is the story of Hawaii a mountain chain over 80 million years old and home to the most active volcano in the world in this Exquisite volatile landscape scientists hunt for Clues to the Island's Origins clues that may shed new light on the formation of the Earth itself Hawaii the most isolated group of islands on Earth stretching 1500 miles across the middle of the Pacific Ocean these eight Tropical Islands are one of the youngest geological formations on the planet stunning beaches huge Canyons and the biggest volcanoes on Earth this is where Paradise meets hell the investigation into how Hawaii was formed began in 1934. Dutch geophysicist Felix Maness invented the gravimeter an incredible machine which enabled scientists to accurately measure gravity for the first time with his Cutting Edge technology monesse was able to calculate the gravitational forces at work on the big island and using this data determine its size his results revealed that the big island was like a gigantic Iceberg only its tip was visible above the ocean but drain away the water and its true size is remarkable the island is twice the height of Everest and so massive that Everest could fit inside it 140 times [Music] geologist Mike Poland heads to the top of the mountain Mauna Kea the highest point on the big island to get a sense of its true enormity [Music] we're standing at the top of Mauna Kea volcano which is the tallest mountain in the world it's 13 796 feet above sea level but it goes all the way down to the ocean floor it ends up being about 56 000 feet high [Music] this giant island is the largest in the United States and bigger than all the other Hawaiian Islands put together intrigued scientists set out to discover what could have created such a huge land mass ten thousand feet below the peak of Mauna Kea and 70 miles to the South the prime suspect is plain to see the awesome Kilauea volcano we'd like to call killaway the most active volcano in the world because it's been erupting continuously since 1983. it is going every day almost non-stop since that time since early 2008 it's been even more active because now we have the summit eruption as well so now Kilauea is perhaps by two times the most active volcano in the world but this volcano is not predictable although the Summit is no longer spewing out lava 12 miles down on the south flank of the volcano is an active vent for the last 25 years lava has been gushing out of the side of the volcano from this vent with no signs of stopping homes towns and forests are swallowed up by scorching hot lava with each new flow layer upon layer of black crust builds covering the island in volcanic rock could this huge island have been built entirely by lava experts needed to figure out exactly how much lava Kilauea produces their first clue can be found all over the volcano clinging to the rocks are yellow crystals these are sulfur crystals and tell scientists that Kilauea volcano is releasing vast amounts of sulfur dioxide gas to determine just how much the volcano is producing researchers take regular measurements the amount of sulfur dioxide that ever vesses from the magma is tied directly to the amount of magma that's coming out of the ground the amount of lava that's erupted so by measuring the amount of sulfur dioxide we can use that number to calculate how much lava is being erupted these samples reveal staggering results Kilauea could be producing 100 million cubic yards of lava a year more than any volcano on Earth but there isn't this much lava flowing across the surface so where does the rest of it go geologists ventured below the surface into the guts of the volcano to investigate stretching 400 feet into the dark is a strange tunnel just like a Subway tunnel but it's not a man-made structure it's part of a vast network of tubes that hold the key to how much lava moves around the island we're standing in Thurston lava tube in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and this lava 2 was one of the main conduits for lava that was flowing from kilaue's Summit to the sea in an eruption that occurred about 500 years ago so once this tube system has been established you essentially have an underground river of lava so these tube systems can be very long-lived and very efficient Delivery Systems for lava the lava is so hot it burns a channel into the Rocks beneath it this incredible time lapse footage shows that because the top of the flow is still exposed to the air it cools and crusts over below this crust a tunnel forms through which the lava continues to flow but how much lava can these tubes carry back on the surface Dr Ken Hahn is carefully inspecting the lava fields to find an active tube only inches beneath his feet could be a tunnel full of 2000 degree lava Dr Han is on the lookout for a skylight a window in the ceiling of a tube they can come and go within days and are a sure sign of an active lava tube you can see the lava glowing inside a lava tube this one's about 10 to 15 feet wide and probably about five feet deep and it's about two thousand degrees Fahrenheit and it glows like the sun these hidden tunnels keep the lava insulated and hot preventing it from Cooling and turning into Solid Rock enabling it to travel further and faster than lava on the surface what we're looking at is on the order of about five cubic yards every second going in this lava tube underneath us and that's the equivalent of about a dump truck worth of lava every two seconds so if I was standing on the freeway what you would see is one dump truck after another dump truck after another dump truck go and buy me here transporting a phenomenal amount of material hundreds of these expressways crisscross the island carrying lava underground up to 30 miles until it reaches its inevitable destination the ocean [Music] and when 2000 degree lava meets seawater the results are spectacular [Music] this interaction is key to how the big island was created and is continually growing when the lava hits the ocean it's extremely hot and it shatters into lots of little pieces so what it does is leave a lot of black sand behind it layer upon layer of this black Sandy Rubble slowly piles up on the ocean floor until it forms a new beach do lava on the surface runs across this beach cooling slowly to form a new piece of solid land on Sandy foundations this massive island is built on piles of loose Rubble we're looking right here at the process by which the Hawaiian Islands grow island is the fastest growing piece of land on Earth as lava from Kilauea adds 20 football fields a year to its already colossal size but this just isn't enough is needed to build this huge island so just where is it coming from the clues are in the landscape itself while Kilauea forms only one Peak on the island four other megastructures Tower over the landscape over a million years ago there was no big island of Hawaii it started as a very small island which was the volcano of Kohala which grew out of the ocean over time more volcanoes started to grow Mauna Kea and hualalai came next growing into tremendous mountains Mauna Loa was the next volcano to grow and Kilauea is the youngest of the big Island's volcanoes over a million years lava from these five volcanoes slowly built the Big Island up from the sea floor the biggest island in the United States is one big volcanic rock [Music] the mystery of how Hawaii was made is slowly unraveling as the evidence emerges from its fiery volcanoes experiments in the 1930s revealed that the big island is a vast structure stretching three miles down to the sea floor readings of sulfur dioxide gas show that Kilauea produces more lava than any other volcano on Earth the landscape reveals that lava from five volcanoes built the island foreign the big island of Hawaii is a stunning Wilderness dominated by fire and destruction but what force on Earth could create the most active volcano in the world 2 000 miles from the nearest land in the middle of the Pacific Hawaii is filled with evidence of a volcanic past the eight islands are made up of 15 Mammoth volcanoes boasts two huge mountains the big island is dominated by the giant Mauna Loa and in Honolulu houses are crowded around the now extinct Diamond Head crater geologists had figured out that the big island was created by five volcanoes next they wanted to know how the entire chain had come into existence seven thousand miles away off the coast of Indonesia is the mighty Krakatoa ever since it exploded in 1883 scientists have been trying to understand the forces that create volcanoes experts plotted all the active volcanoes in the world on a map and an extraordinary fact emerged eighty percent lay around the edge of the Pacific Ocean this long line of volcanoes became known as the Ring of Fire 452 giant volcanoes make up the ring and it is thought that eruptions began in this area over 36 million years ago during the 1950s and 60s a theory emerged that finally began to make sense of these fire mountains geologists realized that the Earth's crust was made up of eight major and many minor plates fitting together like a giant jigsaw puzzle they move relative to one another sometimes they intersect sometimes they diverge these plate boundaries are where we see most geologic activity for example along the Pacific Ring of Fire where there's lots of volcanoes and earthquakes that marks plate boundary locations [Music] the theory was called subduction when tectonic plates collide the heavier oceanic plate is forced down into the Earth's intensely hot interior taking water with it the water forces magma to swirl up and push through the plate where it forms volcanoes but when geologists looked at the volcanoes of Hawaii it was clear the theory didn't fit they couldn't have been created as the plates collided because they sit two thousand miles from the nearest boundary here in Hawaii we're in the middle of a plate so we wouldn't expect to see that much activity that's another bit of evidence that there's got to be some anomaly here that's causing all of the melting we see in the middle of this large plate puzzled geologists decided to look at the volcanoes of Hawaii in the hope they might give up their secrets but all they found were more differences most of the world's volcanoes are cone-shaped with steep sides many thousands of feet tall but Hawaii's volcanoes look completely different we call these volcano shield volcanoes because of their shape you're looking behind me at Mauna Loa it's got these very smooth sloping flanks it's like a warrior Shield if it's put on its end [Music] digging deeper geologists decided to test the lava and found that Hawaiian volcanoes produce a distinct type of lava called basalt Basalt lava is made of rocks which have been heated up to 2000 degrees not only is it the hottest lava in the world it's also some of the most fluid and this makes it terrifyingly unpredictable here in Hawaii is very runny runnier than the kind of lavas that are up from places like Mount Rainier or Mount St Helens which is much stickier it's like comparing honey to toothpaste it's this difference in the consistency of the lava that gives Hawaii's volcanoes their dramatically different shape the size of the volcanoes here are gently sloping because those lava flows can just run out as they need to the lava flows at places like Mount Rainier and Mount St Helens being very sticky stay close to the volcano and build up very steep-sided volcanic cars foreign geologists had uncovered crucial evidence but they still did not understand what kind of force could create volcanoes in the middle of a plate 2 000 miles from the nearest boundary but whatever that Force turned out to be would have to be enormous big enough to quite literally move a mountain at the summit of the big Island's Kilauea volcano Dr Mike Poland is using sophisticated global positioning equipment to measure changes in the volcano's size [Music] GPS is a tool for locating yourself anywhere on the surface of the Earth and you may be familiar with this from seeing GPS units in cars this is a different type of GPS it's much more accurate and that allows us to see how the ground is moving in centimeter level scales this Cutting Edge technology is crucial to scientists in their struggle to understand the forces working beneath Hawaii so we've got this GPS set up here we also have a GPS set up on the far side of the Caldera Now by looking at how the distance between those GPS stations is changing we could get an idea of whether or not the volcano is inflating or deflating if it's inflating like a balloon it means that there's magma that's accumulating beneath the surface and if it's deflating it may mean that there's magma that's leaving the subsurface and over the past years actually these stations have gotten farther apart from one another by almost a foot they're kind of force necessary to inflate the volcano to spread the Caldera wider by one foot is tremendous and it's a very good sign of magma that's accumulating beneath the surface and maybe getting ready to erupt evidence was mounted that a huge and unexplained force was at work beneath the chain the volcanoes of Hawaii do not emerge from a plate boundary but rise up right in the middle of the Pacific Plate [Music] Hawaii's lava is dramatically different to that produced by the rest of the volcanoes in the Pacific the islands of Hawaii were a thorn in the side of geology but although they remained an unexplained mystery geologists weren't about to give up and the answers they would find were so incredible that the debate they created still rages to this day the puzzle of what created the islands of Hawaii seemed impossible to solve the mystery only deepened when in the 1950s the U.S Navy mapped the ocean floor with sonar [Music] they revealed a series of underwater mountains known as seamounts that extended far beyond the chain of eight Hawaiian Islands to the Northwest are a whole string of sea mountains we call sea mounts those are sunken volcanic mountains many of them with Reefs on top of them over 80 sea mounts and 19 Islands formed this sequence known as the Hawaiian Emperor seamount chain you're looking at a total distance from the big island of Hawaii out to Midway and all the way up to Russia of about 3 200 miles it's one of the longest mountain chains in the world but very little of it is above sea level foreign 1963 Canadian geologist Jay tuzo Wilson turned his attentions to the Hawaiian Islands [Music] he was struck by the fact that both the Hawaiian islands and seamounts form a straight line that courses through the middle of the Pacific straight lines are incredibly rare in nature they don't occur by accident especially not a line over 3000 miles long Wilson believed that one single Force must have created this vast chain of volcanic islands and sea mounts Wilson also made a very simple and yet incredibly astute deduction the further the islands of Hawaii were from the Big Island The Greener they got and for Wilson Greener meant older he noticed that the landscape on the big island is like a Black Desert a Barren Wilderness with only a few seedlings peeping through the lava fresh lava flows regularly Scorch the Earth killing any plant life but move north along the chain and the islands become increasingly green Wilson believed that on each successive Island more time has passed since the last eruption allowing more plants to grow [Music] two years later using radiometric techniques scientists dated Rock samples from each of the islands their results confirmed Wilson's hunch and proved that the islands increased in age [Music] Dr Poland has been collecting some of these Rock samples and has brought them to the Big Island this rock right here is from the lava flow that we're standing on this is one of the youngest rocks on the island and in fact we can go and pick up some lava that formed yesterday if it weren't too hot [Music] we moved down to the middle of the chain we get this rock here which is from Oahu and this is about three and a half million years old [Music] this rock here is from a lava flow on the island of Kauai it's from the island that's the farthest away from where we are today on the big island you notice how dull it is that's because it is very old it's about 5 million years old [Music] Wilson pulled together evidence from Rock dating and the straight line forged by the islands and came up with a single theory he proposed that Hawaii was created by something called a hot spot an exceptionally hot region beneath the earth's crust that was concentrated under Hawaii's Big Island as the Pacific Plate moved slowly over this hot spot the immense heat punched through the crust to form a chain of volcanic islands hot spot is a constant and stationary source of heat beneath the earth's surface it's like a blow torch pointed up at the surface of the Earth and as the Earth's surface moves over that blowtorch it punches through creating a chain of islands and undersea mountains and that's what we're seeing in Hawaii today this theory was a geological masterstroke it didn't just explain how Hawaii was created it also confirmed one of the most radical theories of the 20th century the theory of plate tectonics here at last was evidence that the vast lumbering plates that made up the Earth were moving uzo Wilson's Hot Spot Theory changed our understanding of our planet forever but it also left behind a controversy that still rages to this day [Music] was The Hot Spot created ever since scientists understood that volcanism in Hawaii was driven by this hot spot the question then became what drives the hot spot what causes the hot spot on the barren slopes of Mauna Kea on the big island Mike Poland has found a clue what here is what we call a xenolith it's basically a foreign piece of rock that's trapped in this lava flow it's where this foreign piece of Rock has come from that's truly startling the green mineral you're seeing in this xenolith here is a mineral called Olivine and it really indicates that this chunk here came from someplace very deep within the Earth foreign is usually found hundreds of miles beneath the surface its presence here is good evidence that the hot spot is powered by something deep within the Earth and in the 1970s American geologists finally came up with a groundbreaking Theory they theorize that below the hot spot lies a plume of hot rock which Rises up through the Earth's interior two or three hundred miles below the surface it starts to spread out forming a huge Dome the very top of this is the hot spot scientists call this phenomenon a mantle plume no one really knows how deep it goes but some scientists have come to the extraordinary conclusion that it may stretch all the way down to the very core of our planet it is possible that the plume extends all the way down to the core metal boundary and frankly that makes good sense to me if you look at the size of the Hawaiian island chain [Music] it's a huge feature it's been around for tens of millions of years to me that's not something that can be explained by something that's that's just near the surface I think it's got to be something quite deep within the Earth suddenly experts realized plumes were the answer to hundreds of geological Mysteries which had long puzzled science such as the existence of Icelandic volcanoes the Galapagos Islands and the vast Yellowstone super volcano an investigation begun in Hawaii transformed scientists understanding not just of the island chain but of the entire planet Rock dating and the unusually straight alignment of the island chain revealed that the Pacific Plate is moving over a stationary hotspot Olivine Rock erupted on Hawaii's Big Island shows this hot spot is powered by a mantle plume originating from the very bowels of the Earth but while the Hawaiian Islands have been created by this very hot spot another equally powerful force is working to destroy them in Hawaii a strange force is at work while the big island is growing by 11 000 square feet a year the islands at the Northern end of the chain are Vanishing into the Pacific at a rate of 2 400 square feet a year these islands disappearing fast geologists were curious about what force could cause them to vanish they found their first clue in early scientific studies 1950s underwater sea mapping produced a wealth of data and these results revealed something completely unexpected heat and pressure from The Hot Spot had forced up the ocean floor creating a bulge 750 miles long 500 feet high the chain is raised by the swell but as the islands move away from the hot spot they slide off the swollen crust sinking further and further eventually as they move northward at about 8 to 10 centimeters that's about three and a half inches per year so and to say another one to two million years this island will probably be as much as three to four thousand feet lower probably have relatively little fresh water on that and not be very inhabitable the hot spot that created the islands also seals their fate but the islands aren't just sinking they're shrinking too erosion is the culprit it's slowly destroying the islands and nowhere is this more apparent than on Kauai the oldest island of Hawaii here along the coastline intense weathering may have produced some of the most breathtaking natural features in the world but it is also evidence of the Island's inherent flaw and erosion isn't just taking place at the coast it's happening all over the island [Music] Waimea Canyon Hawaii's Grand Canyon a 10-mile scar through kauai's green wilderness over three thousand feet deep this Canyon is the most dramatic example of erosion in Hawaii [Music] if you look up to the east you'll see one of the rainiest places in the world mount waialially rain flows from that mountain down into the canyon [Music] Mount waialially receives over 400 inches of rain every year which pours out over the island carving out the canyon [Music] lands are made of Basalt lava one of the hardest rocks on Earth how could water alone be wearing them away the answer lies in the Canyon's spectacular red walls the reddish color is from the oxidation of the mineral iron which makes up about 10 to 12 percent of the Lava Rock here it's very similar to the rust that forms on your car so literally we're looking at a highly rusted landscape if you will which makes it very soft so in a sense it's somewhat rotten exposed to water the high level of iron in this lava causes the rock to rust and crumble it's the Paradox of the Hawaiian Islands they're made of volcanic basalt one of Nature's hardest rocks but it's fatally flawed this A rock which initially was a very dense hard lava you can really break with a hammer we can now actually pull out pieces with our hand combine this crumbling rock with some of the highest rainfall in the world and the result is massive erosion over millions of years but scientists knew that erosion alone couldn't be causing the islands to disappear on the island of Molokai they found evidence that vast tracts of land had disappeared not over millions of years but overnight foreign images revealed that Molokai is not like the other round islands of Hawaii something strange happened to Molokai is quite obvious just by looking at any map it's not a round volcano part of it is missing it's a thin strip of land with sharp Cliff edges shorn away into steep faces at 1700 feet these are the highest sea cliffs in the world all the evidence pointed to a sudden cataclysmic event many theories were put forward but it wasn't until the 1980s that geologists got the evidence they desperately needed after the success of earlier underwater mapping the U.S Navy returned to Hawaii with the world's most advanced sonar system and surveyed the surrounding Waters in incredible detail they discovered the sea bed on the Island's north side was littered with gigantic underwater blocks of land some larger than the island of Manhattan geologists took thousands of samples and measured the blocks what they found was incredible these blocks could be fitted back to the Island's steep Cliffs like a giant jigsaw puzzle finally scientists had enough evidence to put together a picture of what had happened radiometric dating confirmed the age of the blocks and showed that they were the result of an event which had taken place over a million years ago geologists knew there could only be one explanation a massive landslide one and a half million years ago there was a very bad day in the Hawaiian Islands entire North Slope of the island slipped off into the ocean a section 25 miles long and perhaps as much as a mile thick and it did it all at once this huge section of the island crashed into the ocean splitting into massive blocks weighing millions of tons the force with which they crashed into the waves meant they didn't stop dead but continued to move along the ocean floor at an incredible speed it was sudden it was dramatic and we know that because of how far the blocks went they went down into this trough around the Hawaiian islands and then up the other side and eventually stopped about 200 miles away and for them to go that far means they had to be traveling about 150 160 miles an hour really fast and of course it's displacing water while it's doing that so you're creating for the Hawaiian Islands a huge tsunami a tsunami that would have would have reached to the top of the cliffs behind me [Music] a landslide on this scale and at this speed would have produced one of the most awesome and deadly waves ever seen on the planet the main event was over in only five minutes and I'm afraid that if you saw that it would be too late because you could run as hard as you like and and you wouldn't get away from the subsequent the subsequent tsunami but what could have caused such catastrophic land failure geologists look to the youngest Island the big island for answers here the island is still building just as Molokai once did and experts suspect they will find their answer in the Island's foundations as the new land builds out it's building on sand that's deposited in front of the lava flows and so it's very unstable every once in a while this material collapses leaves the lava unsupported and it breaks and it slides down into the ocean it was a disturbing discovery all Hawaii's islands were built rapidly and entirely from lava they are all based on the same weak foundations and that means a landslide could strike anywhere on the south coast of the Big Island there's evidence that another major Landslide could be about to occur a huge tear in the earth points to where a 4 700 square mile chunk of land is breaking away from the Big Island at a rate of four inches a year for its size this is the fastest moving tract of land on the planet geologists have calculated that if it were to fall into the ocean it could trigger an earthquake up to magnitude 7 and unleash a colossal tsunami all the cities of Hawaii would be swept away as a mammoth wave races toward the California coast investigators have discovered why Hawaii is disappearing sonar Maps reveal the islands are sliding off a swollen section of the Earth's crust kawhi's crumbling landscape reveals an inherent flaw in the islands they are made of the hardest rock on Earth but exposed to water they rapidly break down and molokai's dramatic Cliffs shorn away overnight are evidence of catastrophic landslides sinking eroding and crashing into the Pacific eventually even the Big Island will be just another underwater mountain in the long chain hidden beneath the waves but the story of Hawaii is far from over Rumblings from under the sea tell scientists a new monster may be rising from the waves now they must Venture into one of the most hostile environments on Earth where fire meets water of Hawaii is an incredible tale of giant volcanoes unimaginable catastrophe Vanishing Islands but it doesn't end here because only 20 miles off the big Island's beaches something strange is stirring in the depths in the 1950s seafloor surveys revealed that an underwater volcano sat right on the flanks of the Big Island geologists were intrigued by this giant seamount rising up two miles from the ocean floor and named it lowihi scientists were desperate to learn more but it wasn't until 40 years later when the technology became available that they were able to dive down and investigate the seamount scientists were very interested to go down and actually see what the situation was so they took the research submarine Alvin who's the very famous three-person sub that found the Titanic and they went down to the seamount and found that there was a huge pile of volcanic rocks that were all freshly broken and here's a sample this is a very heavy Rock and it's a top of a pillow lava pillow lava was evidence of a very recent eruption [Music] scientists had believed loihi to be an ancient volcano extinct for thousands of years but this discovery called for some radical rethinking could loihi be alive and erupting experts struggled for 11 years to find indisputable proof mapping the seamount extensively and taking thousands of samples until finally they came across the piece of evidence they had been searching for now it wasn't until 1996 that really The Smoking Gun was discovered in October that year there was a huge number of seismic events occurring that the people of the volcano Observatory discovered but they quickly realized that the source of the seismic activity was not on the island here it was offshore they did the best estimates they could and it all pointed to the seamount off the south end of the Big Island this swarm of earthquakes coming from Luigi were the largest number ever recorded from any Hawaiian volcano scientists knew they were on the verge of an incredible discovery desperate to witness the action as it happened scientists rushed to the heart of the activity the trick was to get out there while the eruption was occurring so we went out there there was a tremendous amount of seismic activity from the ship you could actually hear the noise of the earthquake venturing into the unknown a team from the University of Hawaii dived 3000 feet down into this dangerous and unpredictable environment Everywhere You Could See were mounds of broken up Rock and this murky water was this precipice for the top of the seamount had suddenly collapsed to create this pit crater that was hundreds of feet across and hundreds of feet deep and this was the first evidence for really active volcanic activity experts had just missed one of the most violent eruptions Hawaii had ever seen but as the dust settled they were able to survey the aftermath lava had poured out of the volcano draining the summit and causing it to collapse the team finally had proof that Louis he was an active volcano which will continue to erupt and grow until it forms a new island the next in the Hawaiian chain [Music] the Assumption was there had to be another volcano coming up one of these days no one knew whether that was going to happen in her lifetime or not but it's very rewarding for the scientists to realize that now the next volcano in the sequence has been discovered is apparently it as lava continues to spew from its submerged Summit loihi will build until it rises out of the Pacific the Pacific Plate will shift carrying the big island off the hot spot and Luigi will take its place at the head of the Hawaiian chain experts had studied the ancient islands of Hawaii for hundreds of years theorizing about how they were created but they never imagined they would have the opportunity to witness it for themselves provides us with a real unique laboratory it gives us a window back into the past this is our one chance to see how it worked before the islands reached the surface [Music] reviewing all the evidence investigators finally understand how the Hawaiian chain was created gravity readings taken in the 1930s show that the big island is 140 times bigger than Mount Everest further investigation reveals that it is made entirely from Basalt lava from five volcanoes rocks created deep underground are found within the lava and show the Island's volcanoes are fueled by something from deep within the earth a mantle plume but high levels of iron in Hawaii's Basalt lava caused the islands to crumble and the Steep Cliffs of Molokai are evidence of Mega landslides underwater lava is proof that a new volcano is stirring the next island in the chain that will eventually emerge from beneath the waves Hawaii's dramatic cycle of birth and death is more than just a geological Wonder it's transformed geologists understanding of the entire planet on Hawaii we can see for ourselves how the earth is made

Channel: HISTORY

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Keywords: history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, the history channel, documentary history channel, history documentary, documentary, history channel full episodes, documentaries, history channel documentaries, How the Earth Was Made, The Most DEADLY & DESTRUCTIVE Natural Disasters, Natural Disasters, 3 Hour Marathon, marathon, How the Earth Was Made streaming, How the Earth Was Made full episodes, watch How the Earth Was Made online free, terrifying natural phenomenon

Id: mr1WYELpkW8

Length: 179min 24sec (10764 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023