YOUR

LIFE AS PLANET EARTH

Advance Praise for

Your Life as Planet Earth

What a fun read! And a lot of great and important conclusions. I hope it finds a
wide audience, because they will love its unique approach to making science interesting
and accessible, yet complete.
Professor Erik Asphaug, University of Arizona,
author of Impact Craters in the Solar System
I highly recommend this engaging book for anyone wanting to learn more about
the planet we live on. Using the clever metaphor of Earths planetary evolution as an
individual passing through the various stages of life, Your Life as Planet Earth tells a
remarkable tale of a planet that has witnessed tumult and turmoil, and experienced the full
range of extremes from icehouse to inferno. Yet the book leaves no doubt that Earth faces
her greatest challenge of all today, confronted with massive and unprecedented human
interference, be it mass extinction, ocean acidification, or perhaps the greatest threat of all
human-caused climate change.
Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor Penn State University,
author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.



YOUR LIFE AS PLANET EARTH
_________
A new way to understand the story of the Earth, its climate
and our origins.

_________

Howard Lee




Copyright 2014 Howard Lee.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
and reviews.
1st Edition e-book version.
ISBN: 978-0-9766137-1-8
ylape.com
Cover designed by Howard Lee using images by NASA.






Dedicated to Scouts everywhere.
Keep leaving the world better than you find it.






The keys to the future of our species
and our planet
have always lain in the deep past
Richard Fortey, FRS

Contents
PREFACE
PART 1: YOUR LIFE AS PLANET EARTH
Abbreviations

1. TRAUMATIC CHILDHOOD
Your near-death experience
Your first memories

2. TROUBLED TEEN
A bad case of acne
Youre a teen parent!

3. MID-LIFE CRISES
Maturing into your 30s
Its a gas!

4. RETIREMENT
Feeling cold in your 80s - Slushball Earth #2
At 86 - Getting a complex
At 88 To protect and to prey

5. OLD AGE AND HEART ATTACKS

At 90 Heart attack!
Jaws
At 91 - The invention of walking
At 92 A double heart attack
Age 92 to 93 - Swamps and giant bugs
At 93 The invention of the eggshell

6. THE DAY YOU SET YOURSELF ON FIRE

Age 94 - Dawn of the dinosaurs
Back to the burn unit
95 to 96 Jurassic giants

7. AN OVERAGED HIPPIE!
At 98 grass and chalk

8. HOT FLASHES
Atlantic fizz
Train wreck

9. YOUR LAST YEAR - A CHILLER

Central heating failure
Seas of grass
Volcanoes and instant diamonds
The day the sea dries up
Of ice and man

10. YOUR 100TH BIRTHDAY!

Your long goodnight

11. BOTTOM LINE

PART 2: TECHNIQUES OF TIME TRAVEL

1. ORIGIN
Cosmic sediments
Moon formation
The lost elements clues to Earths childhood

2. THE TERRA FIRMA ILLUSION

Drifting continents
The plumbing of Hades
Did the Earth move for you too?
Bottom line:

3. PROOF OF LIFE
Evolution before our eyes
Not your grandfathers fossils
Missing links found!
Breadcrumbs of evolution
Bottom Line:

4. THE CLOCKS IN ROCKS

Sands of time
Radiation-free proofs of an old Earth
Radioactive rock-clocks
Dating humans
Dating fossils with SHRIMP
Ages of lavas and granites
Dating sediments
Cooking time dating metamorphic rocks
Antiquity of meteorites and impacts
The ups and downs of mountains
Bottom line:

5. DIPPING A TOE IN ANCIENT SEAS, BREATHING THE AIR OF LOST

WORLDS
Thermometers for times past
Ice cores
Barometers for old atmospheres
A brief history of space weather
Fossil raindrops and packrat urine
Rock-solid evidence of ancient climates
Bottom line:

6. THE FUTURE ACCORDING TO THE PAST

The power of humans
We are the cause
Uncertainty in climate change
Signposts from the past
Why care? - Prognosis
What to do about it
Bottom line:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

SOURCES

Illustrations
1. The Infant Earth and the newly-ignited Sun
2. Moon-forming impact
3. Pre-teen Earth
4. Stromatolites under pink methane skies in your late 30s
5. Supercontinent Rodinia breaks apart.
6. Slushball Earth a planet frozen ito the tropics in your 80s
7. Protect and Prey - life in the Cambrian oceans. Anomalocaris about to pounce on a
Marrella
8. Early land plants: Aglaophyton bristle across the land
9. The world 450 million years ago, showing the Hirnantian glaciation
10. Carboniferous swamp forest
11. The world 300 million years ago, with glaciation
12. The world 200 million years ago, at the birth of the Atlantic Ocean
13. The world 100 million years ago
14. The first cook: Homo erectus
15. Embryonic solar systems: Hubble Space Telescope image of the Orion Nebula
showing 5 young stars surrounded by gas and dust disks that may go on to develop
planets
16. The Big Splat collision of 2 moons to create our present single moon with remnants
of the smaller moon forming the mountainous far side
17. GPS measurements show tectonic movement
18. Seismic tomography revealing a mantle plume beneath Yellowstone
19. A Large Igneous Province (LIP) eruption compared to the worlds largest active
volcano today
20. Jason and Tuzo superimposed on the Geoid (Earths shape). Color scale shows
how the actual Shape of the globe differs from a slightly flattened sphere (in meters)
21. Human selection causing evolution in farm animals: Historical Yields per Animal in
Britain and Holland
22. A diversity of forams from a single beach in Burma. The photo is just 5.2 mm (2/10 in)
across
23. 525 million-year-old worm burrows in the Tapeats Sandtone, Grand Canyon
24. Human Evolution Family Tree
25. Annually-layered rock clocks: coral bands, lake varves and a stalagmite layers

26. Atomic race track: how a mass spectrometer detects atoms of different mass.
27. Bubbles of past atmospheres: the tiny specks in the photo are air bubbles trapped in
ice. They can be sampled to tell scientists the levels of gasses in atmospheres up to
800,000 years ago
28. 400 million years of CO2 levels from proxies
29. Sunspot cycles observed back to the 1600s and can be used to calculate variations in
the Suns brightness (Total Solar Irradiance)
30. Jurassic desert dunes in Zion Canyon, Utah
31. Building energy: radiative forcing by greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, relative to
1750 levels
32. How changes in seawater chemistry process CO2 emissions
33. Some feedbacks are slower than others: The time frames of inputs (forcings) compared
to climate feedbacks
34. Compounding uncertainties when predicting climate change (left) is a bit like
compounding uncertainty predicting a hurricane path (right)
35. A gear lever as a simplified analogy for climate sensitivity
36. Rising fast: world energy consumption
37. No let-up in fossil fuel use for electricity generation
38. Shifting climate: the state of New Hampshire could experience a summer climate
formerly associated with South Carolina by end-century, if business-as-usual
emissions continue

Preface
I first became aware of how much we are at the mercy of climate while growing up
in East Africa. I was on safari in Tsavo National Park hoping to see herds of bush
elephant, but instead all I found was barren red dirt littered with bleached bones. Drought
had always stalked East Africa but this time the adults around me were calling it
unprecedented and were muttering about deforestation as the cause - nobody spoke of
global climate change in those days. We almost ran out of water before the rains came.
Schooled on the rim of the Great Rift Valley, I learned that the valleys lakes
Magadi, Naivasha, Elementaita, Nakuru, Hannington, Baringo and Rudolph (as they were
known then) had once been much larger, and that our Homo habilis ancestors, who made
the stone tools scattered at my feet, had done so at the shores of lakes now reduced and
distant. Dormant volcanoes came alive in legends of neighbors stealing each others flame,
and fiery devils dancing. It was in Kenya I now realize that I fell in love with geology
and all it tells us of our planets past.
I have split Your Life as Planet Earth into two parts.
The first is a fast-paced and lighthearted telling of the twists and setbacks of our
planets evolution, using the metaphor of a human lifetime to make the story of our world
and its climate more easily relatable. I show how the strands of climate, evolution,
tectonics and cosmic events tangled through time to drive changes in life and climate.
Similar causes today must, logically, cause similar results.
In the second part, I explain the scientific evidence behind the story in plain
English. I directly address some common myths that prevent many people from accepting
human-caused climate change and evolution, and I explore what the science tells us about
our future as far as we can tell from what we know of Earths past.
We cant make sense of our future until we make sense of our past.

Part 1: Your Life as Planet Earth

To understand how we came to be, we must start at the beginning. To understand
where we are headed, we must retrace the planets odyssey of tectonic upheavals, lifes
adaptations, climate changes and cosmic chances, to the origin of it all Earth, air, water,
life.
The Earth made life, and once begotten life began to mold the Earth
fundamentally: chemically, physically and climatically. Earth shaped climate and climate
winnowed life, repeatedly rewarding innovation, repeatedly wiping out the established and
the maladapted. To understand our future we must learn from those times. We are far from
the first inhabitants of the planet to have experienced climate change, but we are the first
capable of understanding it, and the first to have choices in how we respond.
I want to show you how we got here by tracing the tangled threads of life, climate
and Earth through deep time to today.
But deep time is very hard to grasp. Just like the vastness of deep space, it is so
much beyond what we humans evolved to reckon intuitively. Instead I will tell the story of
us, our climate and our Earth on the scale of a human lifetime. For simplicity I will make
that life 100 years long, and to make it relatable I will ask you to imagine that YOU are
planet Earth. After all, as you will see, your life and that of the planet have been uncannily
similar.

Abbreviations
km kilometers
mi miles
C degrees Celsius
F degrees Fahrenheit
cm centimeters
in inches
CO2 carbon dioxide

1. Traumatic Childhood

A gentle smack brings you into existence - a mere speck among specks, swaddled
in soot and bathed in the soft glow of the Milky Way. An orphan of old stars who died an
explosive death, you are dust within dust in a vast cloud of their ashes. Your midwife is a
nearby supernova, her shock wave the smack that awakened you. It nudged you into the
dust around you, and gentle gravity now gathers dust to grains, grains to clumps.
You are not alone. Your siblings are all around you, specks and clumps like you,
floating in dark dusty space. One clump of specks is growing faster than you and all your
siblings. Being heavier, its gravity draws in ever more gas and dust in runaway growth
which begins to form the Sun. The weight of all that junk compresses it tighter and tighter
into a ball and heats it to an ember, a crimson night light for your inter-stellar nursery.
Around this glow, the immense nebula of dust and gas with you in it starts to spiral
inwards towards the new Sun, and this motion flattens the nebula into a disk that rotates
around the Sun at its center. It is this rotation your orbit - that protects you from falling
to an infant death in the hearth at the center of the Solar System. Over your first 3 weeks
of existence (3 million years in real time) you run a fever heat from the decay of shortlived radioactive leftovers from the supernova. This heat and the warmth of the early Sun
melts specks into mineral beads call chondrules and sticks them together in sooty rocks
as you grow. Some of your siblings stop growing at this stage, doomed to remain forever
as asteroids. But you go on growing at their expense, consuming any that stray near you!
1

You grow fast. As you put on weight, you gather up ever more rock and dust until
the pressure deep inside you builds to melting point, and heavy metals like iron and nickel
gravitate to your core. By the time you are cutting your first tooth you are already almost
as large as you are today.
2

A little after your first birthday (50 million years after your birth ), the battle
between gravity and nuclear forces in the proto-Sun reaches the point when it crushes
atoms of hydrogen together, igniting the nuclear fusion reaction that makes the Sun shine.
A flash of insipid sunlight now illuminates myriad embryonic planets and asteroids in the
Solar System for the first time.
3

1 The Infant Earth and the newly-ignited Sun ( Walter Myers)

By now these space rocks are travelling at sizzling speeds (20-40 km per second
or 45,000 to 90,000 mph). They zing around the Solar System in curly oval orbits, nudged
subtly in new directions each time they pass a planet or the Sun. With so many flying
around they inevitably hit things. You are zapped and battered countless times by asteroids
and comets of all sizes, adding their material to you. They bring rocky minerals, metals,
carbon, sulfur and water in the form of ice, as well as water chemically combined in
asteroid minerals.
5

Each time they smash into you, they sear your surface and melt you. The bigger
the rock, the larger and deeper the area that melts, but as each crater cools and solidifies,
steam and other gasses are driven out into the atmosphere, rejected by the crystallization
process, until over time a thick, humid atmosphere builds up.
7

Your near-death experience

When you are aged somewhere between 18 months and 2 years old (70-100
million years after the formation of the Solar System ) you nearly die.
8

In your neighborhood there is an immature planet called Theia. Even though

shes only about a tenth the size of you, shes destructive and headed right for you. She
slams into you with enough force to rip a hole through your deep mantle (halfway to your
center), obliterating an entire hemisphere, and knocking you off your axis so that your
North Pole tilts away from the Sun in northern winters and towards the Sun in northern
summers even today.
6

Wreckage and molten rock from the impact are flung out into space, and the
intense heat liquefies the outer half of our world into a shimmering, yellow ball of magma.
The temperature on the surface rises to around 6,000C (around 11,000F), hot enough to
9

vaporize rock and drive away the gasses of our first atmosphere into space forever.
Glowing drops of magma orbiting the Earth coalesce in a few decades (in real time) and
either fall back to the Earth or combine into two balls of molten rock in orbit around you your new siblings, better known as your moons. Yes, in your infancy you have a pair of
moons!

10

10

As the Earth gradually cools over around

a thousand real years, it rains lava! The surface resembles crme brle, as black rock
crusts over an orange ocean of seething magma. During the next 5 months of your life (20
million years) the rock veneer is flooded repeatedly with fresh lava that solidifies to form
a thickening crust punctuated by volcanoes.
11

11

12

Twin moons now rise invisible over hellish skies, the larger glowing molten red in
its shadows, the smaller a third as big and already a frozen, inert space rock.
10

Gradually your magma ocean begins to solidify, with mushy partly-melted patches
here and there. The iron from Theias core trickles to your core, whose churning molten
metals generate a powerful magnetic field to protect you from solar wind. The orbiting
moons add their own protection by stabilizing the tilt of the Earth. As the planet solidifies,
the crystallization of minerals expels water and other volatile elements, driving steam,
nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, replenishing the
gasses that were lost in the impact. This is supplemented by a cosmic hailstorm of icy
comets, adding their water to your steaming atmosphere when they vaporize.
12

13

14 15

2 Moon-forming impact. Redrawn from computer simulations by Canup

(2008) with 2-moon idea by Jutzi and Ausphaug 2011
At this point there is still no oxygen in the atmosphere to breathe, and no life
capable of breathing it. Water vapor, hydrogen, nitrogen and methane (from chemical
reactions rather than from life) and the CO2 in this primitive atmosphere form a thick
blanket to trap the Suns warmth (the greenhouse effect) leading to a warm climate
despite sunlight that is 30% weaker than it is today.
4 11 13

In another year or two of your life (tens of millions to 100 million real years) the
smaller of your two moons becomes unstable in its orbit and slowly crumples into its still
partly-molten bigger sibling, adding 10 km (6 mi) to its circumference and creating
enormous expansion cracks filled with lava. The resulting rubbly debris forms the
mountainous far side of the moon today.
16

17 18

10 19

Around this time your atmosphere cools to the point when it rains. How it rains! It
rains and pours an oceans worth, submerging your hot crust under a global ocean with
26% more water than todays oceans. Water and rock begin an intimate relationship as
ocean water penetrates the fractured crust and reacts with hot minerals to produce
methane, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and organic chemicals as it jets back into the
ocean at submarine vents. But this is no tranquil seascape - it is a raging ocean, pulled
around the globe in 480 kph (300 mph) tsunami tides twice every 12-hour day, by our
moon which is much closer, and looms much larger in the sky than in modern times.
7

20 7

21

22 23 24

Its also an ocean capable of incubating life.

Your first memories

How many of us can remember anything from when we were younger than 4 years
old? So it is with our Earth.
Rocks and minerals from the first traumatic years of your life have since been
erased, or are yet to be found. Your earliest memory is from when you were 4 years old
(4.4 billion years ago). It is in the form of tiny, purplish and very durable crystals called
zircons, found at Jack Hills in Western Australia.
25

These zircons are our earliest surviving record of primitive continents, a glimpse of
ancient magma that cooled and crystallized in the presence of groundwater. The tiny
grains are only about 1/10th of a millimeter (about 4/1,000th of an inch), and yet they
contain even smaller fragments of other minerals, including microscopic diamonds.
These pre-school memories are mere flecks today, worn from their original rocks when
you are much older, washed away and tumbled along with pebbles and sand to form
sandstones and gravels when you are in your 30s. Yet these specks recall the conditions
in the crust of our pre-school Earth, when the planet was still somewhat alien to our
current conditions, full of childish energy and a good deal hotter inside (by 300C or
570F) than today.
26 27

28

29

30

It is hotter because ever since you solidified after your Moon-forming impact,
natural radioactive elements, mainly uranium-235, have been decaying and building up
heat throughout your interior. The solid planet couldnt churn to let the heat escape, so it
just got hotter and hotter. Now its hot enough to melt again, and some of this melt escapes
through volcanoes. The Earth is now studded with massive volcanoes supported by a
thick, deep-rooted crust rather like Jupiters moon Io is today. These volcanoes inject
CO2 and water vapor into the atmosphere, but at the same time hot lava reacts chemically
with the humid atmosphere, capturing some CO2. As the crust cools, it is buried by more
lava until it sinks back into the soft, hot mantle, taking the captured CO2 with it.
4

28

30 12

11

30 12

In this way, by gradually reducing CO2, the climate becomes a little more
hospitable.
11

Asteroids and icy comets still occasionally smash into you, sometimes with
enough force to boil the ocean, but thankfully never again on the scale of the impact that
created the Moon, and much less frequently than in your first two years of life. They
continue to add water, organic chemicals and rocky materials to you.
Things are hazy until your next oldest memories, which are from when you are 8
(4.2 billion years ago) and then again at around 13 years old (4 billion years ago). These
are not the tiny flecks of the Jack Hills zircons; these are fully-formed rocks. The oldest
rocks on Earth that have been found to date are in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt
by Hudson Bay in Canada, and the slightly more recent Acasta Gneiss in northwestern
Canada.
11

25

Its a wonder these ancient fragments exist at all, considering what a rough time
you had as a teenager.

3 Pre-teen Earth (by the author based on NASA images of Io and Earth)

2. Troubled Teen

For humans adolescence can be an awkward, traumatic time. Hormones seethe,

driving you towards maturity, and profound behavioral and physical changes leave you
almost unrecognizable. The teen years for our Earth are the same, and yet they leave you
fertile.

A bad case of acne

By the time you are 13 the interior of the

Earth has cooled sufficiently that areas of continental crust can remain stable, and some of
these cratons survive within our continents today in northern Canada, Scandinavia and
Australia, for instance. But its still too hot, and the rocks consequently are too weak and
flaccid, to engage in plate tectonics. In other words, you are still immature.
30

31

Many teens suffer from acne, and our Earth is no exception. When you are 14 (3.9
billion years ago) distant changes in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn knock a host of
asteroids and comets out of their previously stable orbits. Many fall towards the Sun,
colliding with anything in their way, including the Earth and the Moon, as well as Mars,
Venus and Mercury.
11 32 15

From age 14 to around age 17 (3.92 to around 3.8 billion years ago) your face is
hideously pockmarked by large impacts over 17 thousand of them! This event is
known as the Late Heavy Bombardment and it may sound like a pelting, but spread
across that timeframe it averages around 1 impact every 7,000 years. They are more
frequent to start with and some were probably large enough to boil an ocean and fill the
sky with rock vapor for a while. Through this adolescence you gain some weight.
Roughly 200,000 trillion tonnes (about 0.003% of the present mass of the Earth) is added
to the Earth by these asteroids and comets, including water, carbon-based, and nitrogen32 5

32

32

15

based chemicals needed for life, They also replenish some precious metals in the
crust, like gold and platinum, which had sunk to the core after the impact that formed the
Moon. If you are wearing a wedding ring, some of its gold probably arrived on Earth
from space at this time.
5 33 34

35

The Moon is also lit up with spectacular fireworks and its cratered face today is
largely the result of the Late Heavy Bombardment. It remains permanently scarred to this
day, but even though you suffer from huge recurring impacts into your early 20s, your
complexion will recover through the strong exfoliation of erosion by rain and rivers, and
(later) by the action of plate tectonics.
36

And even though the Late Heavy Bombardment is traumatic, it doesnt prevent the
development of life on Earth. In fact it probably made you fertile.
5

Youre a teen parent!

Congratulations its a slime!
The first evidence that you are in fact a parent shows up when you are 19 (3.7
billion years ago), but you must have been harboring life for a while before then. The
birth of LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is shrouded in mystery. Some say
she was carried to Earth, stork-like, on one of those asteroids during the Late Heavy
Bombardment but that just begs the question of how life started wherever the asteroid
came from. It seems more likely that LUCA was born on Earth around your underwater
hot springs.
37

38

In the beginning life is rock, and rock is life.

39

Ever since the first ocean appeared, water seeping through fractures and pores in
the hot ocean crust has been reacting with basalt minerals to form a greenish-brownish,
scaly-looking mineral called serpentine, creating methane, hydrogen and organic
chemicals, as by-products in submarine vents. And it is in these vents that life starts.
But its the bombardment of asteroids that supplies the essential phosphorous required to
make the genetic chemical RNA, the energy-storing chemical ATP, and cell membranes.
21 40

41 42

The blistered encrustations that form at the

vents of submarine hot springs are porous, creating natural, tiny, mineral cells. Hot fluids
meeting the oxygen-less ocean water are transformed by iron, sulfur and nickel minerals

into RNA (using phosphorous leached from asteroids), organic molecules essential in the
Krebs Cycle (the basic chemistry for metabolism), and a chemiosmotic membrane
(again essential for metabolism) coating the inside of each pore. Eventually these cells
use their RNA to copy themselves as life escapes its rocky womb, birthing into the global
ocean, protected by asteroid-forged cell membranes, sometime in your teens.
39

43 44 41 42

All life on modern Earth is made of cells inherited from LUCA, and these cells
contain the special molecules RNA or DNA (DNA is essentially double RNA) to transfer
their genes to their offspring. LUCA had the simplest of these - 16S rRNA - which all
life on Earth has inherited in some form, along with the Krebs Cycle, chemiosmosis, and
phosphorous-based membranes.
45

39 42

For now life is basically slime.

Where there are patches of slime on the seafloor, flecks of silt and sand stick to it,
making that patch thicker. Over years this leads to hummocks and mounds about the size
of a small turnip (rutabaga) to a large pumpkin, called stromatolites. Many stromatolite
fossils have been preserved to the present day, and some of the oldest are 3.4 billion years
old and are from Western Australia. Tiny fossil microbes from this time have also been
found in Australia, along with chemical traces indicating that these bacteria were
extracting energy from sulfur chemicals in the water. Other fossil hints of microbes have
been found that are 3.5 billion years old in South Africa. These formed in seas around
the early continent called Ur which includes bits of Antarctica and India.
46

47

48

49

Purple life
It doesnt take long before some bacteria evolve that can use sunlight to get energy.
By your late twenties (3.3 billion years ago) they are using sunlight to extract energy from
sulfur compounds dissolved in water. This early photosynthesis is based on more
primitive chemistry than modern plants (it uses purple retinal rather than green
chlorophyll) and it does not generate oxygen. So in this oxygen-less world, purple slimelife is the most advanced life on the planet and it reigns supreme for a billion years (from
your 20s to your 40s)!
50

51

 In some ways our young adult

Earth is beginning to resemble the modern Earth. Oceans with tides, rivers with deltas, and
erosion of higher ground are all operating much like today, depositing sand and gravel into
the oceans. Those oceans have cooled to tropical temperatures by modern standards - the
30sC (90sF), or less than 10C warmer than our modern warmest values. Tides and
ocean currents help regulate the temperature of the planet, toning down the extremes of
hot and cold. Rivers, erosion and volcanoes regulate the chemistry of the atmosphere and
oceans, and the giant magnet in the Earths core deflects harmful solar wind particles
around you as in modern times.
29

52 53 20

But in the same way as a college student isnt fully mature (despite what they
think), neither are you at this age. The Sun is still only about 75% as bright as the modern
Sun, and the Moon is some 15 % closer to Earth than today, and a day only lasts about 17
hours compared to our modern 24 hour day, and a year is 514 days long. Your
protective magnetic field is only about 2/3 the strength that it is today, exposing the Earth
to higher doses of cosmic rays and high energy solar particles, generating spectacular
auroras even in the mid-latitudes.
23

24

54

If a human were to land on the surface of the young adult Earth they would be
asphyxiated immediately as there is no oxygen in the air. If a modern fish were to be
plopped into the ocean it would suffer the same fate, as even the waters are devoid of
oxygen. Instead the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, hydrogen, CO2 and small amounts of
methane. In this oxygen-free world, molecules of hydrogen and nitrogen interact to keep
you warm by trapping heat, as does CO2.
24

13

3. Mid-Life Crises

Maturing into your 30s

When you turn 30 (3.2 billion years ago)
in the way many thirty-somethings do.

55 56 57

you mature and settle into adult life

Until now, thick blobs of continental crust called Cratons have been sitting like
spoonfuls of clotted cream floating on a warm, treacly mantle. Theyre more like big
islands than continents, really, barely poking out from the global ocean. Beneath that
ocean, the remainder of the crust has been a malleable, flaccid skin capping the mantle.
But now the Earth has cooled sufficiently that the skin has stiffened to a global, peanutbrittle-like slab. The churning mantle beneath rents cracks through it and slowly,
powerfully, drags the pieces into each other, drowning one under another (a process called
subduction), and forcing mountains skyward in the process. The drowned slabs plunge
into the hot mantle where they are smelted and recycled into magma which fills the cracks
between the slabs, creating fresh crust. We call this The Wilson Cycle and it all happens
at the pace of a fingernail growing, but over time it obliterates old crust, recycles it, and
replaces it with fresh new crust.
31 12

This is the beginning of Plate Tectonics on Earth.

Plate Tectonics may sound geeky, but without it our Earth wouldnt have
mountains or the rivers that drain from them, or the flow of nutrients from land to sustain
life in the oceans, or the explosive volcanoes that pump CO2 and steam into the
atmosphere. Its the process that manufactures the continental crust we live on. Its the
process that exposes fresh rock to react with CO2 in the atmosphere, and plunges that
carbon into the mantle, keeping our greenhouse gasses in balance (until now), and the
climate livable. Plate Tectonics is fundamental to our landscape, climate and life today.
By your late thirties, crustal recycling has already generated much of your
continental crust by a process called fractionation, which is a bit like cream rising to
the surface of whole milk. It is responsible for separating the asteroid-like rock mixture
Earth started with, into the kinds of rocks that continents are made from (granites and their
like, which have a high proportion of silica in them), and the low-silica residue that
remains in the mantle. As a side-effect it also drives water and gasses into the atmosphere.
25

Its now fair to say at this point you are mature: You are a parent of life, you have
settled into your job of constructing continents, and destroying them through subduction at
about the same rate. What could possibly go wrong?

Its a gas!

The big 4-0 is a major milestone for us, often triggering mid-life crises and resetting our direction in life. For Earth it is the same.

The first ice age

In your late thirties some microbes learn the trick of methanogenesis
combining hydrogen with CO2 to make methane and water. Their invention enables them
to extract energy from their environment, but they begin to use up hydrogen and CO2 from
the atmosphere, cooling the climate, and triggering the planets first ice age when you are
36 (2.9 billion years ago), leaving tell-tale traces in the rocks of Southern Africa. The ice
age is temporary as this extra methane soon replaces the greenhouse warmth that you had
been getting before from the hydrogen-nitrogen atmosphere, and the climate warms again
under pink skies of methane haze.
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58 13

4 Stromatolites under pink methane skies in your late 30s ( Walter Myers)
But that extra methane leaks into the upper atmosphere, where sunlight splits off
its hydrogen, which escapes into space. Losing hydrogen is like losing water (H2O), so life
is now, very slowly, drying out your oceans.
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 When you are around 41 (2.7 billion years

ago) the first traces of a totally new kind of life begin to show up. Life up to now has
comprised just 2 broad types of microscopic germs - bacteria and archaea - collectively
called prokaryotes. These are 2 of the 3 recognized domains of all life on Earth today
(as I write this, science may have recognized a 4th domain of life containing giant viruses
but this is still debated). These lowly, single-celled organisms have dominated life on
Earth for the last billion years despite their simplicity.
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But now theres a fundamental innovation in cells.

39

In a fateful encounter, an archaeon cell engulfs a bacterial cell, forming a new

hybrid creature. Over succeeding generations the trapped bacterium simplifies to form
mitochondria, which generate energy for the cell. For now these new life forms are still
single-celled creatures different from their prokaryote cousins more on the inside than
the outside (except they are typically much bigger). Yet their new more-energetic
metabolism, their invention of a nucleus to house their DNA, a shuffled genome, and their
larger size sets them up for the incredible revolutions of life to come. The descendants of
this hybrid cell today make up the 3rd domain of life: the eukarya or eukaryotes,
which include fungi, plants and animals - including you and me.
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Oxygen
Its also around this time that some photosynthesizing bacteria switch from using
sunlight for processing sulfur chemicals, to using sunlight to make carbohydrate food by
combining water with CO2. This is a neat innovation for the cyanobacteria that managed
it, but the process has a waste product.
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Oxygen.
At first these little blue-green cells are minor players on the stage of life. They
coexist with sulfur processing bacteria in shallow water stromatolites, exuding whiffs of
oxygen here and there. But even these small amounts are enough to begin to change the
planet. They are sufficient to allow a kind of air-breathing (well, absorbing really)
bacteria to begin to form skins and crusts on land sediments and in freshwater pools,
leaching nutrients from rocks. Their action increases the rate of weathering of rocks,
sending unprecedented levels of dissolved metals and sulfur-chemicals into rivers and
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oceans.

65 66

Next, cyanobacteria evolve new strains that can tolerate saltier water, with bigger
cells and filaments that enable them to make their own stromatolites. They begin to
dominate estuaries and coastal seas all over the world when you are about 46 (2.5 billion
years ago) giving off oxygen wherever they go.
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63 63 58 67

Each tiny cell is insignificant, but the combined oxygen emissions of billions of
individuals transform the entire planet forever. They are terra-forming our Earth - an
episode called the Great Oxidation Event.

At first, most of the oxygen is

consumed by chemical reactions in water, air and rock. It begins to rust the geosphere (the
rocks of the Earth), creating a host of minerals and ores that have not been possible until
now. In the oceans oxygen reacts with dissolved iron creating a slow underwater snow of
rust, lasting millennia, creating vast iron ore deposits known today as Banded Iron
Formations.
24

Eventually the cyanobacterial production of oxygen overwhelms the oceans

ability to absorb it, and oxygen becomes pervasive in the air. As oxygen seeps into the
stratosphere it becomes ozone (O2 becomes O3) which acts as a sunscreen, filtering out
harmful UV rays that would damage life on land.
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This doesnt mean a human could breathe on the Earth at this time. Oxygen levels
in the air are only a measly 5% - 18% of the present level - not enough for us, or
animals like us.
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Life saves your oceans

As the oxygen in the atmosphere builds up it reacts with methane causing the sky
to flip-flop every few million years between a pinkish methane-dominated haze, and clear
blue CO2-dominated skies. This chemical reaction saves your oceans! Up to now
sunlight has been destroying methane in the atmosphere, allowing hydrogen to escape into
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space forever. Since water is made from hydrogen, losing hydrogen has reduced your
oceans by about 1/5 since they first formed. But now, instead of escaping into space, that
hydrogen reacts with newly-minted oxygen to make water (H2O), trapping it on Earth and
halting the loss of our oceans.
20

But there is a downside to those atmospheric reactions. Methane is a potent

greenhouse gas, so reacting it with oxygen removes a cozy atmospheric blanket.
So the Earth freezes.

Slushball Earth #1
We are not talking the ice age of wooly mammoths and animated films here that
wont happen until you are 99 years old! We are talking here about something much more
extreme ice covering most of the planet, even into the tropics. You may have heard of
Snowball Earth but that too comes much later.
24

This deep freeze involves 3 separate severe ice ages spread through the Great
Oxidation Event; from your age 46 to 52 (spread over 200 million years ). This isnt a
hard freeze of the entire planet, so its more of a slushball than a snowball, and it
coincides with the assembly of a new continent called Kenorland from separate bits of
crust that were pushed together by plate tectonics. Kenorland includes parts of modern
Canada and Wyoming.
24

You dont stay frozen forever because you keep producing gas your volcanoes
continuously inject CO2 into the atmosphere, which slowly builds up, trapping more of the
Suns energy through the greenhouse effect. A precarious balancing act sets up between
removal of methane by oxygen on one hand, and addition of CO2 by volcanoes on the
other hand. Like a circus high wire act, the climate lurches one way then the other,
threatening disaster at each swing, but it ends safely as the climate emerges into warmer
climes and blue skies once more.

Stand by me cells make friends.

By the time you reach the age of 52 (2.2 billion years ago) life undergoes its next
fundamental revolution. Some cells give up the solitary life of fending for themselves, and
instead join together and cooperate as a single organism. Soon, on the cool, rain-drenched
land of what will one day be South Africa, millimeter-sized, urn-shaped life forms appear
in the soil, which may be the first fungi. They are followed by marine creatures in the
form of inch-size blobs with crenellated edges, which appear in the seas offshore what will
eventually become the African nation of Gabon.
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These earliest multicellular creatures are the dawn of complex life - our ancestors
- showing up just as the continent of Kenorland is breaking apart.
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But youre still not immune from huge meteor impacts. Just after your 56th
birthday (2.02 billion years ago) you get slammed by an asteroid in a place called
Vredefort in South Africa. This impact is far more devastating than the one that will wipe
out the dinosaurs in your 90s! As if that werent enough, it happens again when you are
59 (1.85 billion years ago), this time at Sudbury in Canada. Coincidentally, and for
reasons that arent clear, oxygen levels reduce again to a fraction of what they were in the
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Great Oxidation Event, and stay that way until you are 78 (a billion years ago).

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Going critical the worlds first nuclear reactor.

No Im not making this up! When you are 57 (1.95 billion years ago) a bizarre
quirk of nature comes to pass in Oklo, Gabon, where uranium ore is forming naturally in
waterlogged sandstones. Ore formation is all about nature concentrating metals - like
uranium - together in one place. Well, nature at Oklo is very effective at this, so much so
that a nuclear fission reactor sets up naturally. In fact it sets itself up in 16 different places,
generating enough heat to boil away groundwater. This process continues in on-off pulses
for hundreds of thousands of years!
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The climate for the next few years of your life flirts with freezing again and
another ice age occurs when you are around 60 years old (1.8 billion years ago). This
coincides with the formation of Nuna, a supercontinent made by joining several separate
smaller continents together. Nuna includes a large chunk of modern North America, and
parts of Siberia, Scandinavia, West and South Africa, and South America. Incidentally the
rocks in the deepest part of the Grand Canyon in Arizona date from this time.
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After the drop in oxygen levels, large parts of the

ocean are still like the old times before oxygen. Microbes there still generate methane that
steadily seeps into the atmosphere, warming the planet.
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Life continues to evolve strange evolutionary experiments such as the spiral

strands known as Grypania spiralis and sulfate-reducing bacteria in the deep oceans
which begin creating new minerals like iron pyrite (fools gold). These are probably
responsible for the worldwide disappearance of Banded Iron formations and they exude
hydrogen sulfide gas, giving you the faint stench of sewage.
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The origin of plants

It is around this time that an ambitious eukaryote microbe eats something it cant
digest. The microbe is swimming through the water, twitching its pair of hairs to propel
itself, when it bumps into a cyanobacterium. The eukaryote tries to eat the cynobacterium
and engulfs it, but fails to digest it, and a long, fruitful symbiosis ensues. The
cynobacterium carries on photosynthesizing, feeding sugar to its eukaryote host, freeing it
from the need to go around engulfing prey. This tiny new chimera is the ancestor of algae,
and (eventually) land plants. The cynobacterium is passed on from generation to
generation as a chloroplast the photosynthesizing part of plant cells.
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By the time you are 74 (1.2 billion years ago) more weird but simple life forms
have evolved, including something that resembles a pearl necklace called Horodyskia
and a stalk-like red algae called Bangiomorpha. These live in the seas surrounding a
new supercontinent called Rodinia, which is assembling at this time. Inland, Rodinias
lakes and rivers also support multicellular life in the form of tiny, enigmatic balls and
disks.
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As individual continents collide to form Rodinia, they create an impressive

mountain chain known as the Grenville Mountains, the roots of which can still be seen
today in the rocks of New Yorks Adirondacks and the bedrock in New York City.
Rodinia comprises much of todays North America, Scandinavia, Siberia, eastern
Antarctica, India, the Congo and the Kalahari, Madagascar, and parts of China and South
America.

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4. Retirement

Yes thats right, you are in your 70s and yet we still havent seen the emergence of
sea shells, fish, land plants or animals, let alone people. The most advanced life form is a
kind of red algae. In fact theres still too little oxygen for fish or land animals to survive,
yet.
At this point in your life we have reached a numerical milestone. We are no longer
talking billions of years ago, now we are talking millions of years ago.

Feeling cold in your 80s - Slushball Earth #2

At the closing of your 70s, something extraordinary starts to happen. Complex life
boldly goes where none but a few bacteria dared to before out of the water and onto dry
land.
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Greening the land

By the time you are around 78 (1,000 million years ago) life in the form of a range
of fungi, lichen, microbes, and algae begins to colonize the equatorial supercontinent of
Rodinia. 69 80 81 78 It takes a while to take hold, but when you are around 83 (780 million
years ago) Rodinia begins to rift apart. The northern part, which includes Australia, India,
Arabia, China, Antarctica and parts of Africa drifts northwards, and the southern part,
which includes much of North America and Europe, Brazil, West Africa and Siberia drifts
slowly in the other direction. This warm, moist tropical landscape is ideal for early land
life, and the result is a dramatic greening of the land.
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5 Supercontinent Rodinia breaks apart. Redrawn from Scotese Geol.

Soc. Spec. Pub. 326, 2009.

This greening has two huge

effects on Earth. The first is to increase the area of the planet that is given over to
photosynthesis, which makes more oxygen. Of course, as we experienced before, this
oxygen reacts with the methane that had built up since the Great Oxidation Event,
making Earth cooler again, helped by the fact that the Sun is still only around 90% of
present brightness.
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69 24

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But this time something else turns down the thermostat too. Life on land, as simple

as it is, breaks down minerals to make soil. This boosts weathering rates of rock, which
sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere, making the Earth colder still! Now as if that isnt
enough, rivers wash the soil nutrients into the oceans, where they are a tonic for more
oxygen-producing life in the oceans. And to further chill the planet, the southern
continent of former Rodinia begins to drift over the South Pole, where higher elevations
collect ice caps as the Earth cools further exacerbating the cooling.
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69 80

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Freezing the land

As a result, the Earth freezes again, and the more it freezes, the more ice covers the
land, which reflects the Suns warmth back into space, making the climate colder and
colder, until much of the planet is gripped by ice. Sea levels fall and glaciers march from
the mountains to the sea even in the tropics, where soils freeze and thaw with the seasons,
and average temperatures are around 6-7C (42-45F). Ice-ground rock turns to clay, and
then to dust when the ice recedes each summer. Wind whips it away in terrible dust
storms, to deposit thick coatings of it in places like Australia. Only land at the equator
stays ice-free, with Siberia and Antarctica being, ironically, two of the warmest places on
the planet at the time.
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82

83

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Covering most of the land with ice and dust largely reverses the greening, so
volcanic CO2 builds up again and it is this, probably in conjunction with orbital changes in
the distribution and intensity of sunlight the Earth gets, that warms the planet again, only
to see a repeat of the cycle. The result is a climate that see-saws between ice age and
warmth at least 3 times, with major ice ages when you are 84 (720-700 million years ago),
again when you are 85 (650-630 million years ago) and briefly when you are 87 (580
million years ago).
84

This time has been called Snowball Earth but it is really more of a slushball,
because large areas of open ocean and equatorial land stay ice-free.
69 85 83 82 79

6 Slushball Earth a planet frozen ito the tropics in your 80s. Modified
with permission from: Scotese, Geol. Soc. Spec. Pub. 326, 2009

At 86 - Getting a complex
The continents have continued wandering throughout the slushball age, and have
now amalgamated into a supercontinent called Pannotia, which has much of Europe,
North and South America clustered around the South Pole. The collisions have thrown up
a huge new mountain chain across Arabia, Africa, southern India and parts of Antarctica,
called the Pan-African Mountain Chain.
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Now, as ice recedes from the post-slushball Earth, resurgent land life retakes lost
ground, greening the newly-uncovered rock and generating oxygen. Rain, glaciers and
rivers erode the Himalayan-like Pan-African Mountains, flushing huge quantities of
nutrients into the oceans, causing plankton to flourish once more, giving the atmosphere
another boost of oxygen. The rain of dead plankton adds to deep water muds, eventually
forming one of the oldest petroleum deposits in the world in Siberia. The atmosphere
slowly stabilizes at higher levels of oxygen (somewhere around 15% of present levels )
in your late 80s.
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87

88

89 90

This oxygen boost triggers another revolution in complex life. A strange new
menagerie known as the Ediacaran Fauna appears, with scant resemblance to modern
life.
Animals the prototypes
With neither a shell nor a bone between them, and most of them unable to move

about on their own, they nonetheless include the ancestors of many kinds of life today.
There is Dickinsonia a 10cm (4 in) pleated disk; theres a feathery frond that grew as tall
as a man called Charnia; and Kimberella, which resembles an elongate limpet with a
tent, which seems to be a kind of mollusk. We have Marywadea (named after
palaeontologist Mary Wade) a possible ancestor for crabs, scorpions, insects and spiders
(arthropods), and Spriggina, a many-segmented thing with a crescent-shaped head that
grows to 3cm (just over an inch) is possibly the ancestor to trilobites. We see
Parvancorina, shaped like 2 cm (1 inch) slice of pizza with a slice of mushroom on top,
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and Arkarua,
which is a blob that may be the
ancestral sea urchin. The ancestral jellyfish is there, before it evolves into sea anemones,
corals and jelly fish, and floating in the sea are tiny spiky balls around mm big (1/50th
of an inch) called Acritarchs. There are also sponges, already resembling their modern
counterparts. Several of these early creatures already have the biochemical tools to
detect light a prerequisite for developing eyes.
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93 94

95

At around this time, a medium-sized asteroid slams into a place called Acraman,
Australia, blasting a 90 kilometer wide (56 mi) crater and affecting the regional
environment for around 20 million years.
96 97

Among the early experiments in animal body plans, the revolutionary idea of
separating mouth from anus leads to a much more sanitary arrangement that we
(thankfully) inherited. This separation of ends inevitably leads to animals having a front
with sensory organs, a nerve cord and a brain. These creatures also develop muscles, and
its this new bilateran body plan that will overtake the Ediacaran Fauna.
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At 88 To protect and to prey

The end of the Ediacarans is heralded by a huge volcanic eruption at Volyn in the
Ukraine, which disrupts the global climate. This is an age of global warming, despite the
Sun still being only 95% of its current brightness. Global sea levels rise dramatically by
10 to 70 meters (33 to 230 feet), drowning parts of Pannotia and burying already ancient
hills and valleys under marine sands, as more and more of the world becomes covered by
shallow, fertile seas. The buried landscape is known as the Great Unconformity and
can be seen in the Grand Canyon today.
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But it is life, and the multiplied effect of millions of insignificant individuals, that
transforms the planet once again.
Worm power unexpected chemistry
The Ediacaran creatures have been living on a luxury wall-to-wall carpet of slime
a so-called microbial mat. But 3 months after your 88th birthday (541 million
years ago) some enterprising worms (bilaterans) begin venturing into the sediments
beneath the mat, churning them up and destroying the microbial shagpile. That seemingly
unremarkable vandalism at a stroke turns the 2-dimensional sea bottom into a 3dimensional world, circulating oxygen through a volume of detritus that hadnt been
exposed to oxygen before.
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100

Perhaps they are motivated by all the nutrients from newly-drowned terrestrial
soils, or maybe burrowing is a way to hide from predators. Whatever their motivation,
their action triggers a chemical change in seawater, allowing quantities of sulfate and
phosphate, to be recycled into the oceans at the same time as there is a surge in
calcium levels turning ocean water alkaline.
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104 105

106 107

Changing the alkalinity or

acidity of ocean water (changing its pH) has a large effect on the biochemistry of animals
that live in it. Suddenly calcium carbonate, which used to be dissolved in their body
fluids, wants to precipitate out as solids something that could kill them! So life across a
broad range of animal species now has to find biochemical ways to deal with this
unexpected chemistry. Some solve this problem by depositing the unwanted calcium
carbonate as shells, which turn out to be quite useful. Other creatures respond to the new
ocean chemistry by making a new protein called collagen. Collagen is a vital component
of cartilage and bone and therefore a vital component of you and me. Skeletons with
muscles allow movement, the ability to go after prey and the ability to escape, either into
sediments or into the water above.
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39

Now we have a predatory arms race, with some creatures hunting and others

hiding in sediments, in protective shells, or swimming away. At first the shells are
simple and tiny around 1mm (1/16th inch), but over the next 5 months of your life (20
million years) a cascade of new ecological niches and the expansion of food webs enables a huge increase in the number and size of shelly and soft-bodied, species an
event known as the Cambrian Explosion.
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100 110

Marine life bursts into new shapes and ways of life, resulting in swimmers,
crawlers and burrowers, predators and prey, swift and stationary, large and tiny, hiding in a
marine forest of sponges and sea lilies. The first fish, and in that way your ancestor and
mine, Haikouichthys appears at this time. Sea snails (gastropods) and other mollusks
slither across the silt, recoiling from the attentions of crawling trilobites (marine creatures
resembling the modern woodlouse). Dashing through the water are jet-propelled squid-like
creatures called Nectocaris. With just 2 tentacles they are nonetheless the ancestor of
squids, ammonites, and nautiloids. The weird and spiky Hallucigena defied
classification for years but is now considered a relative of modern velvet worms. The
monster of the day is Anomalocaris, a meter-long (3 foot) bug-eyed squid-like creature
with prey-snatching arms, while the weirdo of the day is Opabinia, a 6 centimeter (2
inch) creature with 5 eyes on stalks, a segmented body and a spiky mouth on the end of an
elephantine trunk!
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7 Protect and Prey - life in the Cambrian oceans. Anomalocaris about

to pounce on a Marrella. John Sibbick
Fire and ice

The explosive evolution of new species to exploit new ecological niches happens
alongside equally explosive geological changes, making this a turbulent and unforgiving
environment. As life proliferates it uses up a lot of carbon, causing a drop in CO2
levels and there is an ice age around 517 million years ago known as the MICE event
along with sea level falls. But the supercontinent of Pannotia is being dismembered by
continental drift, and as it rifts apart violent volcanic eruptions let rip across a third of
Australia 510.0 million years ago, forming basalts you can still find today at Kalkarindji.
Underground magma there bakes the oily remains of plankton to give off huge quantities
of natural gas (methane) and CO2, reversing the cooling with strong, greenhouse gas
emissions and global warming that turns oceans into oxygen-starved dead zones with
global sea level rises.
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The nascent Cambrian Explosion is stopped dead in its tracks by this climate
change, as around 45% of genera (species groups) go extinct in the Mid-Cambrian
Extinction. You will recognize these global warming symptoms as they recur many
times as you age, often with similarly deadly consequences.
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A new ocean the Iapetus floods the gaps between the dismembered bits of
Pannotia. Widening tears in the ocean crust power an uptick in the activity of black
smokers - underwater hot springs that inject iron and other nutrients into the oceans, as
life begins to recover from the Mid-Cambrian Extinction. The new pieces of the
continental puzzle are now Gondwana (a continent comprising the Amazon region,
much of Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica), which lies near the South Pole, and
Laurentia (much of modern Canada and northeastern USA today), Baltica (modern
Scandinavia) and Siberia. Most land is in the Southern hemisphere.
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Invasion of the land plants

As you reach your 89th birthday, life on land prepares the ground literally for
big changes to come. Its around this time that freshwater pond-weed algae evolve into
liverworts, which begin to show up in Gondwana around 510 million years ago.
Not long after they appear, the Earth gets another sharp boost in oxygen levels, raising
them from around 15% to about 25% of present levels. Soon after the liverworts appear,
there is also a jump in the diversity of plankton taking advantage of higher oxygen
levels.
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89

89

And its this invasion of land by more advanced plants, coupled with that boost in
oxygen, which sets off another step-change in diversity of life, and its knock-on effects on
your global climate.

5. Old Age and Heart Attacks

At 90 Heart attack!

As you approach your 90s, you

may be a little unsteady but you have not lost your appetite for drama. The stage is set for
your next act when Laurentia and Baltica converge. Volcanic islands emerge like sentinels
ahead of their armies, signaling the impending clash of continents by spewing
incandescent clouds of volcanic ash far and wide. Elsewhere in the world - near Siberia
there are some especially large volcanic outpourings, and it may be those that inject such
an excess of CO2 into the atmosphere that the climate warms again, and global sea levels
rise, creating oxygen-less ocean dead zones across the globe, and depositing dead
plankton in stinking black mud on the sea bottom. This causes a mass extinction,
including the loss many trilobite species, and a disruption to the global carbon cycle
recognized in rocks around the world as the SPICE event. You recover in a few
million years, and life continues to evolve.
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89

The invention of coral reefs

Your warm, more oxygen-rich seas now support a resumption in the explosion of
life that started in the Cambrian. This second phase is known as the Great Ordovician
Biodiversification Event, (mercifully shortened to GOBE) because life diversifies into
the remaining ecological niches that are still occupied today. The open ocean is now
123

colonized by a brand new food web of swimmers feeding on plankton and each other,
including swimming trilobites, armored fish that havent yet evolved jaws
(ostracoderms), caryocaridids (shrimp-like crustaceans), and the top predators:
nautiloids (squids in shells). Sea-scorpions prowl the depths, as fronds of graptolites
tiny colonies of filter-feeders living in cascading cups drift in currents or are rooted to
the sea bed. Trilobites evolve a wide range of sizes and shapes, including hedonistic
giants about 1 meter (3 feet) long that reproduce in mass orgies! Now even the deepest
ocean floor is colonized and churned up by animals for the first time.
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Its also the time that coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine species today,
and nurseries for ocean-going life, first appear. They begin as modest mounds maybe 1m
(3 feet) tall, dominated by algae and microbes, but by the time you turn 90 (458 million
years ago), much larger reefs are being built by corals, sponges and coral-like bryozoans.
They provide a home for a host of sea shells, sea urchins, trilobites, and a complex
network of suspension feeders.

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The invention of wood

Like a pensioner fending off a gang of

hooligans, you receive a nuisance-battering from a string of small asteroids a little before
you turn 90 (470 Million years ago during the Ordovician Period) which leave a series
of impacts scattered from Sweden to Estonia to Iowa. But these wounds are dwarfed
by tumultuous tectonic transformations. As Laurentia (North America) and Baltica
(Scandinavia) gradually collide, volcanic islands and sediments of the Iapetus Ocean
between them are squished upwards, creating the spine of a mountain chain that can be
recognized today in the Appalachian Mountains, from Georgia through West Virginia and
New Jersey, to New England through Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and on through the
Irish hills of Donegal and the Caledonian Highlands of Scotland, all the way to the
Norwegian Alps.
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On the banks and lakeshores of great rivers that wash from these new mountains,
land plants invent something that will change the planet forever, around your 90th birthday
(460 million years ago).
81 129

They invent wood.

81

The woody tubes of vascular plants allow them to transport water up their stems,
and give stems the strength to stand upright. Suddenly plants are set free to colonize areas
of land that they couldnt survive on before. They can grow taller to get more sunlight and
to disperse their spores over a wider area. Vascular plants are better adapted to living on
dry land than anything before, and so they explode across the landscape.
This new plant era begins, again, to make a significant dent in atmospheric CO2.
You might think that one plant is much like another when it comes to impacting CO2, so
why the difference? Well, the difference is because woody plants have more carbon in
them than other plants, so when they die and get buried they are more efficient at locking
away carbon, reducing CO2 and cooling the planet by reducing the greenhouse effect.
More importantly, these new vascular plants break down rock into soluble nutrients up to
10 times faster than plant-free rock. These chemicals fertilize further plant growth,
which sucks up more CO2 from the atmosphere.
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We are still a long way from trees. The earliest woody plants are modest
specimens, reaching an unimpressive height of a few centimeters (a couple of inches).
Still, the land bristles with a designer stubble of simple branching plants like Cooksonia
and Aglaophyton in suitably moist soils, because they have not yet evolved roots or
leaves. The tallest thing on land is actually a giant fungus called Prototaxites that makes
spires rising 8 meters (26 feet) high.
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8 Early land plants: Aglaophyton bristle across the land Walter Myers
But even these early vascular plants are effective enough at locking away
atmospheric CO2 to cause another ice age beginning just after you turn 90 (458 million
years ago).
129

This Hirnantian Ice Age, is preceded by another pulse of warming and ocean
dead zones possibly due to eruptions in South Korea. But as rock weathering, plants
99 130

and plankton lock away carbon over the course of 15 million years, CO2 levels drop and
this cools the planet. A huge sheet of ice begins in the polar mountains of Gondwana
(Africa, South America, Arabia, India, Australia and Antarctica combined), which
happens to occupy the South Pole at this time. As the ice cap thickens, it spreads to an
area much larger than modern Antarctica, locking up more and more water. This causes
a big drop in global sea level which leaves reefs high and dry, triggering the Earths
equivalent of a heart attack a huge mass extinction that wipes out 86% of all species.
Around of sea-snail, mollusk, sea urchin, coral and bryozoan species disappear from
our planet forever, and reefs disappear for several million years.
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9 The world 450 million years ago, showing the Hirnantian glaciation.
Redrawn from Torsvik et al, Earth-Science Reviews (2012), Modern
coastlines for reference. Hirnantian glaciation from Nutz et al, J.
Sedimentary Res. 2013.

Jaws
The continuing collision of Laurentia (North America) and Baltica (Scandinavia)
creates a new continent called Laurussia and intense volcanic eruptions. These, along
with eruptions near Siberia and Mongolia, ensure that over the course of the next 25
million years (in the Silurian Period) you endure at least 8 bouts of volcanic-warmed
fever accompanied by sea level rises, interspersed with ice-age chills with sea level falls.
The periods of global warming cause extinctions in many groups of creatures including
conodonts (eel-like creatures), graptolites, polychaete worms, brachiopods (seashells) and
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acritarchs (microscopic spiky balls).

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The stresses of climate fluctuations drive

the survival of the fittest, so life innovates and elaborates on land and in the sea.
Reefs eventually recover, and land plants take-off in a big way, developing more
complex branching stems and raising oxygen levels even higher. As the higher level of
oxygen dissolves in the oceans, it inspires the evolution of big fish as if an evolutionary
hand-brake is released. These new kings of the food web have a new weapon jaws.
They also have evolved something else that we inherited from them live birth.
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The Silurian ocean is now a distinctly scary place: placoderms large armored fish
with faces like vampire turtles stalk great expanses of coral reef, hunting jawless
ostracoderm fish, nautiloids, and pretty much anything else. By the end of your 91st year
the first sharks have appeared but to this day they still have not evolved bones. A
separate group of truly bony fishes again, your ancestors and mine - appears on the
scene around the same time in the late Silurian (about 420 million years ago).
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At 91 - The invention of walking

Plants have now found ways to nurture and protect their spores (seeds havent been
invented yet), so they can now colonize dryer areas. To complement this they develop
roots to extract water from dryer soils, and this allows plants to mold the planet, again.
Rooted plants now stabilize river banks, leading to the first meandering rivers with muddy
floodplains. Roots get down deep and physical with rocks, helping to break them down
into deeper, nutrient-rich soil, causing another step-change in the rate of rock weathering
which draws down atmospheric CO2. Plants suck water up through those roots and
transpire water vapor into the air through newly-invented leaves, promoting more
continental cloud formation and rain, diverting water that would previously have run off to
the ocean.
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The diminutive Cooksonia plant has now been joined by these more advanced
plants with leaves, such as Baragwanathia which can grow 25cm (10 in) tall. 10 inches
may not seem like much, but its 5 times bigger than Cooksonia, converting the land from
a 2-dimensional photosynthesizing surface to a 3-dimensional photosynthesizing volume.
Together the land plants have now elevated oxygen levels in the atmosphere to near
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present day levels by the time you are 91 (about 400 million years ago - during the
Devonian Period). You could say that the terra-forming project started by
cyanobacteria 37 years ago when you were 54 (1.7 billion years before this time) is now
complete.
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First fires
Now that oxygen levels are at near present-day levels and the land is covered in
combustible plant material, its inevitable that you experience your first wildfires at this
time (around 418 million years ago). But this new oxygen-rich world also allows life to
get even bigger and more energetic, and in your 91st year evolution takes several steps
forward literally.
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Fish evolve fins on stubby stalks, like the Coelacanth, the fossil fish Kenichthys,
and lungfish. They continue to evolve increasingly land-adapted characteristics and
reduce their fishy features in steps through Gogonasus, Eusthenopteron, Tinirau,
Panderichthys, Tiktaalik, and other species. Fins become feet, tails lengthen and lose
their fins, gill covers are lost, ears develop and snouts get longer, until animals like
Tiktaalik vaguely resemble a 3-9 feet long (1-3 meters) crocodile, with both gills and
lungs. But its stubby toe-less legs still limit Tiktaalik to spending most of its life in shallow
rivers and ponds, avoiding giant 3 to 4 meter (9 to 12 foot) predatory fish that lurk in
deeper river channels.
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Soon creatures like these evolve into tetrapods (4footed creatures) such as the salamander-like Acanthostega or the crocodile-like, 7-toed
Ichthyostega even if they cant really walk so much as shuffle. By the middle of the
Devonian Period, however, tetrapods improve their legs and pelvis, enabling them actually
to walk on land, leaving their tracks in Polish mud halfway through your 92nd year
(around 390 million years ago).
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What advantage could there be in this move to dry land? Well, by now theres a
whole menu of land critters to eat. Insects, spiders, millipedes, centipedes and scorpions
are crawling in a monsoonal jungle of 10 meter high (33 foot) fern-fronded Archaeopteris
trees rooted in rich soil with an understory of shrubs and bushes. But the climate isnt
always so hospitable and becomes semi-arid every hundred thousand years or so, due to
variations in Earths orbit, so tetrapods also thrive on tidal flats where a feast is
guaranteed twice daily from creatures stranded by the tides, and where tetrapods fear no
predators. It is a free lunch every day!
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At 92 A double heart attack

Economists talk about disruptive innovation being good for the economy, but when
we are caught up in those changes it doesnt feel that way. It works in a similar way in
Earths evolution. The plant innovations and volcanic eruptions when you are 91 (in the
Devonian period) create their own disruption.
The arrival of the first forests allows peat deposits to form, creating reserves of
carbon (coal) locked away in continents. The spread of trees means the spread of root
systems which liberate phosphorous that eventually finds its way to the sea, fertilizing the
oceans, where the resulting fecundity of shelly creatures locks yet more CO2 away in
limestone. The combined effect reduces CO2 levels to something like present day levels.
As CO2 reduces, plant leaves evolve more pores (stomata) on their leaves, allowing
them to cool more effectively and therefore allowing them to get much bigger locking
away yet more carbon.
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At the same time, an archipelago that constitutes the advanced guard of the
continent of Gondwana (Africa and South America combined) begins its slow smear into
Laurussia (North America, Britain, Scandinavia and Russia combined) to form what will
become southern Europe. Enormous volcanic eruptions occur in Russia, eastern Siberia
and elsewhere knocking the climate out-of-whack, triggering big fluctuations in sea
level and causing widespread, stinking dead-zones in the oceans with acid, shelldissolving water. The fluctuating climate stresses you to the point that you suffer a major
double heart-attack, a 1-2 punch of mass extinction at 372 and then 359 million years ago
as the Devonian period ends.
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In the oceans, the fronded-graptolites that had been so prevalent all but die out.
Placoderms, those bone-plated vampire-faced fish, vanish as 50% of vertebrate diversity is
lost. On land Archaeopteris trees disappear as do so many other species in this, one of
the 5 biggest mass-extinctions in all your life. Oxygen levels plummet to about 15%,
which is equivalent to living at an altitude of 3,000 m (10,000 feet) today, a level not seen
since before the Cambrian Explosion.
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But its not bad news for the survivors who inherit the Earth. In the oceans rayfinned fish and sharks do very well after the mass extinction, and ammonites (squid-like
animals in spiral shells) evolve from nautiloids to navigate the seas until you are 98.
New seed-plant forests rapidly diversify into the plains and uplands vacated by
Archaeopteris as a bewildering variety of trees and shrubs claim every available niche
of land. The extinction also sets up the deck of vertebrates that is in play to this day, and
the surviving tetrapods standardize on 5 toes, paving the way for reptiles.
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Age 92 to 93 - Swamps and giant bugs

The Carboniferous period (359-299 million years ago) is so called because of all
the carbon fuel (coal) that forms at this time across Europe, America and China. Great
rivers meander from the Appalachian Caledonian Mountains into sluggish, denselyforested swamps and deltas. The buzzing of flying insects emanates from the canopies of
scaly-barked lycopsid trees (relatives of modern club-mosses) as tall as 35 meters (115
feet) high, that tower over bottle-brush-like Calamites trees (relatives of modern
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horsetails), in vast expanses of Everglades-like wetlands. Amphibians and reptiles

hunt insects, while millipedes and snails crawl over rotting tree stumps. As each tree
dies, it splashes into the stinking swamp where its wood slowly blackens to coal, locking
atmospheric CO2 away in the ground until humans dig it up and burn it in hundreds of
millions of years time.
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10 Carboniferous swamp forest Walter Myers

Inland, early conifer forests are dominated by 25 meter (80 foot) tall Walchia trees
that resemble modern pine trees, and by giant 45 meter (150 foot) Cordaites trees with
long strap-like leaves. An undergrowth of ferns and palm-like cycads spreads across the
dryer hinterland.
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With more and more of the worlds land dedicated

to forests, oxygen production bumps up several notches, rising to about 35% of the
atmosphere in your 93rd year (its about 21% today). Freakishly large insects evolve to
take advantage. Scorpions the size of a Labrador retriever (Pulmonoscorpius) cower from
giant 2.6 meter (9 foot) long millipedes (Arthropleura) while dragonflies the size of an
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albatross (Meganeura monyi) buzz through the air. Oxygen promotes fire, so these forests
are susceptible to conflagrations that leave behind quantities of charcoal that we find to
this day.
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Offshore in the tropics, where North America and Europe are at this time, warm
seas support sea-lily-, sponge-, and coral-reefs frequented by spiral ammonites, sharks and
other fish. The Grand Canyons famous Redwall Limestone is forming at this time.
The world is not all tropical, however. Africa, South America, Arabia, India and
Antarctica are still welded together as the Gondwana supercontinent, centered near the
South Pole. Coal formation drops CO2 levels to roughly half modern values (to around
220ppm) and this combined with the fact that there is a huge continent sitting at the
South Pole, again triggers global cooling. Ice caps take hold in mountains and plateaus all
across Gondwana, waxing and waning in cycles due to variations in Earths orbit around
the Sun. With each cold era, ice caps near the South Pole expand, the tropical
hinterland dries and the wetlands shrink as sea levels fall, giving up territory to conifer
forests. In each warm and wet phase ice melts, sea levels rise, wetland forests expand, and
another seam of coal forms.
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At 93 The invention of the eggshell

America and Europe have now encroached on Africa, so New Jersey and Morocco
are now joined as one, sacrificing the Jersey Shore to create the supercontinent called
Pangea. Any islands in the way are smeared into the ever-expanding Appalachian
Mountains.
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Tetrapods are having a field day.

They diversify into an amazing diversity of creatures

adapted to all the permutations from wet to dry habitats. One branch of tetrapods has
invented the shelled egg, as in a durable reproduction capsule that can survive on dry land.
Amphibians and primitive tetrapods are tied to the water to reproduce the way fish do, but
the shelled-egg sets the newly-evolved reptiles free to reproduce on dry land. In effect the
egg is a portable pond - a distinct advantage in this capricious climate. Just after you
turn 93 (315 million years ago), reptiles like Hylonomus are running about, chasing
insects and leaving their distinctive tracks in the muds of seasonally dry riverbanks.
Already we see 2 distinct lineages of reptile, the Synapsids, which will eventually give rise
to mammals, and the Sauropsids which will later give rise to dinosaurs and birds.
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Out of the blue, a random space rock threatens to annihilate all this.

At some point when you are 93 (roughly 305 million years ago) an asteroid bigger
than 10km (6mi) wide slams into Australia, creating an enormous 200km wide crater.
For comparison thats the same size as the impact that will wipe out the dinosaurs later in
your life. Shock waves send violent earthquakes across the planet as a vast amount of rock
is vaporized and sent around the world to block out the Sun. It may be this that tips the
climate into a severe ice age that lasts 4 months of your life (until 290 million years ago)
at the close of the Carboniferous and into the Permian Period.
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As more of Earths water is locked away in ice, and as shallow seas are annihilated
by continental drift, we see a progressive drying of Europe and America and a collapse of
the rainforests, isolating land animals in shrinking islands of forest. This has a
devastating effect on amphibians, many of which become extinct. But reptiles with their
durable eggs survive the more arid conditions, and evolve new feeding strategies (some
become predators as others specialize as herbivores). Conifer forests take over the
drying continent, while tropical coal-forming rainforests persevere in the islands that will
eventually become China, central Asia and Siberia. The loss of vegetation causes
oxygen levels to fall to modern levels, leading to the disappearance of those giant bugs.
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11 The world 300 million years ago, with glaciation. Redrawn from Torsvik et
al, Earth-Science Reviews (2012), Modern coastlines for reference. Glaciation from Isbell
et al, Gondwana Research (2012).

6. The Day You Set Yourself On Fire

In Your Life as Planet Earth you are now in your mid-90s, and lets just say you
arent as reliable as you once were. Its only to be expected, since many people your age
suffer from dementia. At 94, your self-inflicted accident is your closest brush with death
since the formation of the Moon in your infancy.
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The omens in the early Permian are not good. You are assaulted by a pair of
asteroids in a double-impact at Clearwater in Canada that leaves two wounds tens of
kilometers wide. Meanwhile the ocean that separated Europe from central Asia and
Siberia is shrinking to extinction, and you must still endure chills when ice takes hold on
the mountains of Australia which is not far from the South Pole and expands to ice
caps 3 times (each smaller than the last) during the Permian.
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Just as ones skin dries in old age, so does the Earths at this time. The great drying
of Pangea causes deserts to spread across vast swathes of land where once there were
tropical rainforests. Desert Dunes blow across western America and parts of Europe, while
extremely salty seas build up thick salt deposits in northern Europe and southern America.
In cooler climes, forests of conifers and Glossopteris trees fringe polar regions.
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The Early Permian top dogs are

synapsid reptiles, with a sprawling komodo-dragon-like gait. The 3 meter (10 foot) long
Dimetrodon, for example, has a fearsome array of teeth and a bizarre sail on its back for
warming its cold blood in the mornings.
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Eventually by the late Permian, we see herds of pig-like Pelanomodon roaming the

dusty plains, crushing and grinding plants with their bony beak-like jaws, while small
Diictodon burrow for shelter like modern groundhogs. Nearby, herds of thick-skulled
Moschops, also plant eaters, give Scutosaurus, with its medieval-looking studded armor, a
wide berth, while the cat-sized Robertia scurries around the herds looking for roots of its
own to eat. These are collectively called dicynodonts, which evolve into cynodonts
(such as Procynosuchus) who are beginning to develop the higher metabolic rate of their
mammal descendants, and they becoming furry. These early mammal ancestors are
everywhere, but their rule is about to be rudely cut short.
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As Siberia and central Asia finally crumple into Europe, the sediments that
occupied the gap between them get pinched into the peaks of the Ural Mountains. At the
same time, northern China attaches itself to Siberia. There is now a single colossal
continent Pangea which straddles the globe from the South Pole to the North Pole,
leaving only the remote islands of Southeast Asia, parts of the Middle East and Tibet
unattached.
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Catastrophic fire
The first warning signs of the catastrophe start in South China hundreds of miles
across the ocean from Northern China at the time. A plume of hot magma from deep in the
Earths mantle surges to the surface 262 million years ago, inundating the area of
Emeishan with deep lakes of glowing, churning basalt lava covering an area of nearly
1,000 km diameter (600 mi). The gasses and ash from these eruptions cause climate
change, which results in some plant and marine extinctions. This Chinese burn is serious
enough, but the next is life-threatening.
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Very nearly the end the Great Dying

Halfway through your 94th year, a medium-sized asteroid smashes into southern
Brazil, 254.7 million years ago. Its 40 km (25 mi) crater isnt especially large, but landing
in oil shales it ignites a large amount of carbon into the air. Powerful earthquakes from the
impact shake the ground, fracking the oil shale and liberating a large amount of
atmosphere-warming methane that was trapped there.
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That would be bad enough, but it gets much, much worse.

At around the same time, a searing slug of magma rises from the core-mantle
boundary until it meets the ancient craton roots of Siberia. Burning its way towards the
surface, the poisonous plume impregnates any sediments it encounters with many
subterranean sheets of magma that spread across more than 1.6 million square kilometers
(618,000 square miles), and which swell to hundreds of meters thick. But these arent
ordinary sediments. These contain petroleum reserves created in Ediacaran times, salt
deposits created in Cambrian times, and Carboniferous coal.
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Like a heating element in an electric kettle, the magma bakes the sediments, the
oil, the salt and the coal, generating a noxious cocktail of CO2, methane, sulfur dioxide,
hydrochloric acid and halocarbons. These gasses burst to the surface through hundreds of
underground chimneys to vent into the atmosphere, billowing vast quantities of coal flyash and smoke like William Blakes dark satanic mills, 251.9 million years ago.
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Boiling lava now vomits into the Siberian landscape deluging an area over 4,000

km (2,500 mi) in diameter an area the size of Europe in fuming, seething, molten rock,
eventually building to 3 km (2 mi) thick.
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The explosion in greenhouse gas levels

over perhaps as little as 2,100 years
rapid global warming with average
temperatures jumping by more than 15C (27F), which bakes the planet to the point that
equatorial and tropical regions become lethal for most life on land and in the sea.
Equatorial ocean temperatures reach 40C (over 100F), while land temperatures
considerably exceed that too hot for plants to photosynthesize, and hot enough to cause
protein damage in animals (i.e. to cook them).
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causes

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But that is not all, not nearly.

The halocarbons destroy the planets ozone layer, exposing land life to damaging
levels of UV radiation, even as sulfuric acid rain burns plants and leaches away soil
nutrients.
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We call it The Great Dying. In the ensuing 61,000 years, more than 90% of
species go extinct. Woodlands are devastated, as half of all plant species die out.
96% of invertebrates and over 60% of reptile and amphibian species are lost. Gone are
the trilobites, some corals, eurypterid sea scorpions, 5 entire orders of insect, and
Glossopteris forests. Its a massacre of species, the worst in your life.

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Age 94 - Dawn of the dinosaurs

You begin the Triassic on your hospital bed, a comatose world baking in a
sweltering hothouse. Complex life is all but absent in the equatorial and tropical regions
for hundreds of thousands of years. Once-vibrant coral reefs are covered in morbid
bacterial slime, once-fecund forests lie desiccated and deserted, and wide areas of
oceans are oxygen-starved dead zones. The loss of plants causes oxygen levels to drop
back down to 15% (compared with todays 21%) - a level not seen since the Devonian
Mass Extinction. Low oxygen and lack of vegetation mean that wildfires no longer
occur.
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It takes some 10 million years for you to recover.

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And even when you do, for the most part Pangea is a hot and arid land. The

exceptions are the polar regions, now ice-free, which begin to support temperate coalproducing forests after a gap of several million years, while the islands that make up
modern Turkey, Iran and Tibet are monsoonal tropics. Gradually through your 95th year
the climate cools to the point that a tropical monsoonal climate can spread to mainland
Pangea, greening Europe, and boosting oxygen levels again.
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In the sea, modern corals evolve and simple ammonites are replaced by ones with
fancier shells. Already a few species of reptiles have returned from land to the water.
Some have developed a dolphin-like shape as Ichthyosaurs, some are the ancestors of
turtles (but with only the lower half or their shell), and some have elongated necks and
tails like Lariosaurus and Tanystropheus.
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Triassic land life on Pangea must be adapted to arid conditions to survive.

The first dinosaur, a 2-footed creature called

Nyasasaurus, appears halfway through your 95th year (around 247 million years ago) in
the near-polar south, scampering across the plains of Tanzania. Dinosaurs will have
their day, but for now they are minor players compared to crocodile-like crurotarsan
reptiles. Primitive plants hanging on from the Permian lose ground to seed plants like
Dicroidium trees and newly-evolved Gynkos. The few groups of mammal-like reptiles that
survived the Permian extinction (such as the pig-like Lystrosaurus), still dominate at first,
but they are gradually out-competed by the swifter bipedal dinosaurs. Mammal-like
cynodonts evolve to the point that they are now almost mammals, such as the dog-like
Cynognathus and the mouse-like Morganucodon.
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By the time you are 95 (215 million years ago) the first true mammals such as the
rat-like Eozostrodon appear but they are dwarfed by giant reptiles like the vicioustoothed carnivore Postosuchus, and bulky herbivores like Plateosaurus. The sky has now
been conquered by reptiles pterosaurs like Eudimorphodon - leaving reptiles the
masters of land, sea and air.
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The unified continent gives evolution a boost, because any land animal that
evolves in one location can radiate to all areas of the globe without being obstructed by
ocean. This way reptiles and primitive mammals get to spread across the planet to take
over ecological niches where they can specialize.

Back to the burn unit

But trouble is, once more, afoot. Around 228 million years ago a profound but
short-lived change in the weather drenches a wide area of the northern hemisphere with
megamonsoon torrents. The culprit is a huge flood of basalt erupting in Alaska and the
Yukon which causes another CO2 spike and global warming.
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At the end of this bizarre climatic blip the weather returns to its regular aridity, but
we now begin to see those tiny chalk-forming algae with a giant name,
Coccolithophores, which make their skeletons from calcium carbonate. They start a
subtle but fundamental change in ocean chemistry by raining their carbon-rich skeletons
into the deep abyss of oceans when they die. This gradually exports carbon to the deep
oceans as a calcareous ooze, which will eventually serve as buffer against extreme global
warming events like the Permian Great Dying in the future.
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Suddenly you are slammed by another asteroid. It gouges out a huge crater 100 km
(60 mi) wide at Manicouagan in Quebec, Canada, 214 million years ago, that can be seen
from space even today. Devastating as it is, it is still just a foretaste of worse to come.

12 The world 200 million years ago, at the birth of the Atlantic Ocean.
Red patches are large provinces of volcanic and igneous activity that
occurred at about the same time (The Toarcian eruptions are 20 million
years later). Redrawn from Torsvik et al, Earth-Science Reviews (2012),
with magmatic provinces added. Modern coastlines for reference.
The real trouble is that the enormous supercontinent of Pangea just cant hold
together for long, and now it begins a slow self-dismemberment. Cracks begin to spread

between Europe and North America. The cracks become rifts that fill with algae-choked
lakes surrounded by vegetation, which get continually buried, building ever-thicker
deposits of oily, organic-rich sediments like the black shales of the Lockatong Formation
of New Jersey.
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The messy birth of the Atlantic Ocean

As the rift dilates, fissures tear deep

through the crust to the mantle, where they gash into molten rock. Red magma sears
through the tears, injecting itself between layers of sediment before gushing out enormous
lakes of lava all along the eastern edge of North America, Western Europe, West Africa,
and into Brazil. At least four hemorrhages of magma spew through hundreds of deeprooted fissures over 600,000 years, each releasing massive amounts of CO2 and resulting
in some 2 million cubic kilometers (480,000 cubic miles) of basalt lava, forming the
Central Atlantic Magmatic Province. This is the messy birth of the Atlantic Ocean.
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In a similar process to what happened in the Permian Great Dying, oily lake
sediments get baked and belch out massive quantities of methane and other pollution
into the air, including sulfur dioxide and toxic chemicals. The extra greenhouse
gasses cause a 10C (18F) jump in sea temperatures and rapid sea level rise.
Lava
flows ignite all vegetation they touch, and even far from the lava, dead vegetation fuels
huge wildfires. Seas are starved of oxygen, clogged with algae and stink of rotten
eggs.
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And, to add insult to injury, you are mugged by another asteroid that hits shallow
seas in Rochechouart, France, leaving an impact crater 23 km (14 mi) wide and sending a
tsunami into Britain 201 million years ago.
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Not surprisingly all of this triggers another mass extinction at the end of the
Triassic, one of the 5 biggest in Your Life as Planet Earth.
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Around half of marine biodiversity is lost, including a number of ammonite and

clam species. Many land vertebrates including large amphibians are gone. So are most of
the previously dominant crurotarsans, except crocodylomorphs that will later give rise to
crocodiles and alligators. Forests collapse and are replaced by ferns causing oxygen
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levels, which were improving in the Triassic, to fall back to 15%.

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Its disaster for those extinct species, but its just the break others need.

95 to 96 Jurassic giants
Freed from domination by the crocodile-like crurotarsans, the dinosaurs we have
grown to love from the movies now inherit the Jurassic Earth.
A bewildering array of land and marine reptiles, including dinosaurs, now
colonizes every niche of the recovering Jurassic planet. In this warm and humid climate,
coal-forming conifer forests return to polar latitudes and palm-fronded benetitalian plants
shade the tropics. As they proliferate, oxygen levels begin to recover to levels that we find
today.
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But the dismantling of Pangea continues to cause disruption.

When you have just turned 96

(180 million years ago - in the Toarcian stage of the Jurassic) the restless mantle begins
to pull South Africa apart from Antarctica and South America, sending floods of lava from
southern Africa as far as South America, and across central Antarctica, even to
Australia. In a repeat of the end-Triassic events, CO2 and methane from cooked organic
sediments get released into the atmosphere. The climate changes gradually over a hundred
thousand years but then warms suddenly in as little as 650 years, and stays hot with sea
surface temperatures rising by around 10C (18F) for around 300,000 years. Reefs
dissolve as the ocean acidifies and sea creatures have trouble growing shells. Ocean
depths become oxygen-less dead zones again, devoid of the usual benthic fauna, and on
land chemical weathering of rock increases due to the heat and acid rain.
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Many marine species die out but on land it seems to promote a turnover in
animal and plant species. Giant sauropod dinosaurs take off after this event, and so do
ornithischian dinosaurs the group that includes armored, beaked and horned herbivores,
including iconic species like Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Monkey-puzzles and cypress
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trees also seem to profit from the experience.

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As the fragments of Pangea spread apart, the gaps between them form an extensive
network of shallow seas teeming with marine life. The island chain that includes Turkey,
Iran and Tibet has now begun to scrape off onto Asia, while India and Madagascar are just
beginning to break away from Africa.
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The world is not all dinosaur. The largest fish that ever lived, Leedsicthys, cruises
the oceans feeding on plankton. It grows to 22 meters (over 70 feet) long the size of a
large luxury yacht - and shares the ocean with a range of reptilian monsters and a chunky
shark thats been around since the Permian, called Hybodus. The marine reptile
Lipleurodon stretches to 10 meters (30 feet) with jaws as big as a man and 30 centimeter
(1 foot) long teeth. Curly ammonites diversify rapidly and sea urchins and corals thrive in
the warm shallow seas, as do a host of other mollusks and crustaceans.
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After an asteroid blasts an 80km (50mile) wide hole into the rocks at PuchezhKatunki in Russia 167 million years ago, just 7 million years later the Earth undergoes a
big decline in dinosaur diversity as a number of species go extinct, possibly as a result of
more eruptions in South America.
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But after that the world of dinosaurs becomes even more spectacular. It is a time of
giants and staggering statistics. Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus grow to lengths of 25
meters (over 80 feet). Allosaurus is a hunter that grows to 12 meters (40 feet) and
resembles a T-Rex with exaggerated eyebrows. Barely noticeable in comparison,
mammals like the tiny mouse-like Megazostrodon, and Sinoconodon, which resembles a
miniature weasel, scurry and burrow in the Jurassic undergrowth.
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On the origin of feathers

While all this is going on, the first bird Aurornis has evolved, around 160
million years ago. Feathers are a dinosaur innovation early in their development, and a
number of different groups of dinosaur already had primitive feathers by the early
Jurassic, long before birds.
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By now the 2 main branches of dinosaurs both have species that possess either
feather-like filaments (such as Tianyulong, which had a Mohawk) or they have actual
(albeit primitive and flightless) feathers such as the pheasant-like Epidexipteryx. Some
dinos have a fuzz of filaments when young, and then grow wings when they mature to
impress potential mates, while other, small dinosaurs use downy feathers to keep warm.
Over millions of years feathers become fluffier and more complex, and eventually in
some species actual flight feathers. At this point in Your Life as Planet Earth, bird
ancestors are living in trees and using their wings to glide from tree to tree, or as a kind of
parachute to break their fall to the ground. Others may use their wings as a speed-boost
for running. Feathers next evolve into airfoils through the development of tiny barbs and
barbules that help the feather keep its shape against the air, enabling birds to fly.
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Early birds like Aurornis and Microraptor are still transitional creatures, not fully
birds. They have feathered legs that function as hind-wings so they fly like biplanes.
Many still have claws on their fore-wings and teeth rather than beaks. By the end of your
97th year (around 150 million years ago) creatures like Xiaotingia and Archaeopterix,
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with fully recognizable feathered wings and larger tails have evolved, and theyre
already beginning to lose their leg feathers.
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Dino crisis

As you approach your

97th birthday in the latter portion of the Jurassic Period (around 160 million years ago),
Europe and America experience big 3 to 4 million year swings between warm-humid
spells and cold snaps in an increasingly cold-arid climate, with corresponding changes in
global sea level. In global warming periods, coral reefs disappear from equatorial
latitudes where sea temperatures are too hot for them, and spread north to latitudes where
we find Nova Scotia, Brittany and Vladivostok today. In cold snaps CO2 drops and
seasonal ice can be found in the poles.
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The causes of these fluctuations are uncertain but the ongoing separation of
continents provides plenty of volcanic suspects through this time period, from Sweden and
the North Sea to Japan, Western Australia and the western Pacific.
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A crash in dinosaur diversity ensues as several sauropod species (a group which

includes many giant dinosaurs) and stegosaurs die out at the end of the Jurassic, probably
because food plants are affected by these climate shifts.
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The final punctuation mark to the Jurassic is an errant space rock that slams into
you, blasting a huge 70 kilometer (43 mile) crater at Morokweng in the Kalahari of
southern Africa followed soon after by pair of smaller asteroid impacts, one in the
Barents Sea near Norway, and another in central Australia at Gosses Bluff.
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You end the Jurassic shivering in an arid ice-house.

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7. An Overaged Hippie!

You might think that at your ripe old age of 97 you would be too old for flower
power and grass, but in Your Life as Planet Earth this is the year you go hippie. The age of
T-Rex cant exactly be called the time of peace, love and understanding, but just as the
optimism of the sixties ended in violence, so will yours.
It takes 4 to 5 months of your life (15 to 20 million years) for the climate to warm
and dinosaur diversity to recover from the extinctions at the end of the Jurassic, and how
it recovers! This is the era of the movie stars of dinosaurs: the feathered Velociraptor, the
massive-jawed Tyrannosaurus Rex, the sail-backed Spinosaurus and the horned
Triceratops. Hundreds of other kinds of dinosaurs of all shapes, sizes and fluffiness fill
every niche, some active by night, some by day, and some grazing both day and night.
Pterosaurs the size of aircraft cruise the skies above migrating herds of Iguanodon each
the size of a schoolbus. Ammonites (the spiral-shelled relatives of squid) and belemnites
(a kind of squid with a bullet-shaped internal shell) dart through the oceans.
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Coexisting with this exotic menagerie are creatures we would recognize today.
Birds come into their own and take to the skies. Sharks, turtles and fish cruise coral reefs
while sea urchins creep across sandy sea beds, dodging crabs and mollusks.
Falling Apart
In this Cretaceous period, South America and Africa turn their trial separation
into a full divorce as the southern Atlantic Ocean widens. North America and Africa have
already drifted far apart, and southern Europe loses touch with Newfoundland by 112
million years ago. As North America bulldozes its way across the Pacific, it
encounters volcanic archipelagos which scrape off and accumulate as mountains on its
western edge.
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Northern Europe, however, maintains a lingering attachment to Canada through

Greenland, and India and Madagascar are inseparable as they start their estrangement
with Antarctica, even as cracks emerge between Antarctica and Australia.
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You are finally enjoying a stable, steamy climate. Tropical sea temperatures are
around 32C (90F), which compares with current Caribbean Sea temperatures of
around 27C (80F). Even northern and southern extremes like the southern tip of South
America are pleasantly warm with sea temperatures to match the modern Caribbean. The
poles are ice-free and Antarctica is forested, supporting a healthy population of dinosaurs.
Oxygen levels, which were already healthy at the end of the Jurassic, rise steadily to
25% (todays are 21%).
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13 The world 100 million years ago. Redrawn from Torsvik et al, Earth-Science
Reviews (2012). Modern coastlines for reference.
Flowering plants appear right after your 97th birthday (130 million years ago)
and by 3 months of your life later (125 million years ago) they have already diversified
widely into landscapes previously been dominated by conifers, ferns, horsetails, cycads
and palm-like bennettitaleans. Now flowers like magnolias bloom color into the
monotonous greenscape as deciduous trees and palms take over. Today over 250,000
different flowering plant species dominate most terrestrial ecosystems.
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This era is known as the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution because animals

undergo a rapid increase in diversity, probably in response to the explosion in flowering
plant diversity. We see the rise of social insects like ants, termites and bees, and the first
snakes evolve from burrowing lizards. Birds lose their wing-claws and leg feathers and
develop beaks so that they look like birds today, exploiting varied habitats, from the
seagull-like Icthyornis (which still had teeth in its beak), to the goose-like Vegavis, to the
diving Hesperornis.
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New dinosaurs also evolve (armored ankylosaurs, hadrosaurs and

paracephalosaurs) but its not clear that this has anything to do with the emergence of
flowering plants.
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Mammals, who have clung doggedly to existence since you were 95 (the Triassic),
also diversify. By 6 months after your 97th birthday (115 million years ago) the first
monotremes egg laying mammals like the modern platypus appear. Most mammals
are small, furry rat-like creatures (actually rodents are yet to evolve) but some are
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different. Volaticotherium climbs trees and glides just like a flying squirrel, and
Repenomamus is a dog-sized devourer of young dinosaurs.
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The first sign of trouble starts 4 months after you turn 97.
A brief period of cooling, complete with ephemeral ice in the poles, is sharply
reversed by a major spike in volcanic activity coinciding in the southern Indian Ocean and
western Pacific which injects a whole lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere, causing
another period of global warming known as the Aptian Anoxic Event. Oceans warm
and turn mildly acidic, leading to extinctions and the spread of cyanobacteria and algae
where corals had thrived. The warming oceans expand causing sea levels to rise, and
reducing their oxygen content - turning large areas into dead zones once again.
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After some 5 million years, weathering of rock and burial of sediments brings the
CO2 and global temperatures down again, returning you to the cooler climes that you felt
before the Aptian Anoxic Event, and sea levels fall by 50 meters (160 feet). This new
normal of relatively low CO2, temperatures and sea levels lasts another 5 million years
before things go wrong again as you approach your 98th birthday (94 million years ago).
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This time the cause is a massive burst of volcanism as Madagascar and India rip
apart, along with giant eruptions in the Caribbean and the Arctic. In a carboncopy (pun intended) of the Aptian event, this Cenomanian/Turonian Anoxic Event sees
a spike in atmospheric CO2 and corresponding jump in global temperatures, leading to a
die-off and a lack of oxygen in the oceans. Sea levels rise to about as high as they have
ever been in the entire history of the planet, and for 450,000 years the previously healthy
oceans turn sluggish and stagnant, depositing black muds that will eventually become one
of the worlds most important sources for oil.
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At 98 grass and chalk

As the world recovers and you turn 98, the Cretaceous oceans are alive with spiral
and uncurled ammonites, giant 50 foot long (15 meters) reptiles called mosasaurs and
long-necked plesiosaurs almost as big. The warm seas are the perfect environment for
Coccolithophores. Their cell walls comprise plates of pure white calcium carbonate and
when they die they sink to the sea floor to make chalk, which gives its name to the
Cretaceous. Eventually great thicknesses of their skeletons are deposited, some of which
will eventually be exposed in the White Cliffs of Dover in England.
On land, the first grasses have evolved in India as minor vegetation in forest
clearings and are being grazed by dinosaurs and mammals alike. In fact mammals
seem to have come out from the Cenomanian/Turonian Anoxic Event better off than most.
Their success tracks the proliferation of flowering plants that they eat, and its these
adaptations that set our ancestors up to survive the rapidly approaching catastrophe for the
dinosaurs.
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But this idyllic image of rural grazing is about to end. The world begins a period of
pronounced cooling and a drop in rainfall 2 months after your 98th birthday (82 million
years ago), apparently due to changes in ocean circulation brought about by drifting
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continents. Sea levels fall, exposing the sea bed to weathering which reduces CO2 levels
further, and so on in a slow feedback loop of increased cooling. Temperatures in the
Arctic also decline because of the closure of the Western Interior Seaway a broad
shallow sea that had up to now connected the Arctic to the Atlantic through the American
Mid-West.
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Despite the relative cooling, the Cretaceous climate remains much warmer than
today. Even the Arctic stays wet and humid, with summer temperatures averaging around
14C (57F), and winter temperatures dipping only to around -2C (28F), a climate not
unlike Portland, Maine today. The Arctic margins of North America and Russia are
forested and populated with dinosaurs, and the Arctic Ocean remains largely unfrozen
even in winter, as a persistent cover of cloud keeps North Pole temperatures from getting
too cold during the 5 months of winter darkness.
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Meanwhile, in a premonition of the calamity that is about to befall the planet, an

asteroid blasts a 120 kilometer wide (75 mile) hole at Kara in Russia.
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The violent death of the dinosaurs

The tragic chain of events just 6 months after you turn 98 is like a serious car
crash.
The blow-out

Indias breakneck race

northwards takes its toll on the subcontinent. A few degrees south of the equator it
passes over a hot plume of magma in the mantle, 68 million years ago. Fissures hundreds
of kilometers long open up, spewing fuming lava over an area 1200 km (750 mi) wide.
Just as we have seen so many times in your life before, this expels vast quantities of CO2,
with profound effects on the global environment, raising average global temperatures by
around 5C (9F). The eruptions continue over the next 3 million years, building up 1.3
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million cubic kilometers (312,000 cubic miles) of lava to a height over 3 km (2 mi)
thick. Thats like burying the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico in
fuming, molten rock, to a height of 8 stacked Empire State Buildings! Each individual
eruption may have lasted a decade or more, sending fountains of fire high into the
atmosphere. The resulting rugged landscape in India is known today as the Deccan
Traps.
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Temperatures cool a little before the next, most intense phase of eruptions starts
just 2 days in your life (around 300 thousand years) before the dinosaurs are wiped out.
This extra pulse of CO2 sends global temperatures soaring another 7C (13F) and
begins to kill off many species 150,000 years before the end of the dinosaurs.
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But the Indian eruptions arent the kill-shot for the dinosaurs.

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sideswipe
An asteroid hits Boltysh in the Ukraine half an hour in your life (2,000 years)
before their demise, but even that isnt the fatal blow.
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head-on collision
The coup-de-grace comes in the form of a much larger asteroid that crosses the
orbit of the Earth 66 million years ago. At 10 km wide (6 mi) its about the size of
Manhattan, and much too large to burn up in the atmosphere. Travelling at cosmic speeds,
it barely registers the atmosphere before it vaporizes on contact with the Caribbean
coast of Mexico.
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The shock wave excavates a vast hole 200 km (120mi) wide in the limestone
seabed, generating earthquakes at least a thousand times stronger than the magnitude 9
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Thuku earthquake that hit Japan in

2011. An air-blast levels forests for thousands of miles and a cataclysmic tsunami
sweeps across the Atlantic Ocean, engulfing all low-lying land, leaving it strewn with
death and debris. The rebound from the shock wave ejects rock vapor and rubble at speeds
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faster than 11 km per second (7 miles per second) into space and the upper extremes of the
atmosphere, where it spreads around the planet, raining hot cinders.
This hot fallout makes the sky across much of the world glow red-hot for an hour
or two, enough to broil a good portion of land life and set light to dry vegetation, so
wildfires rage across the planet.
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Around 500 billion tonnes of sulfur is instantly sucked into the atmosphere, along
with fine dust and soot. This causes acid rain which acidifies the ocean surface and inland
waters. It also plunges the world into darkness, which quickly cools the planet surface by
10C (18F). It stays cold for years.
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Already stressed by global warming, this is the final straw for many species.
All the dinosaurs, all the marine reptiles (except turtles and crocodiles), and all the
flying reptiles (pterosaurs) and 83% of snakes and lizard species die out. The
ammonites, belemnites and rudist mollusks vanish, along with nearly half of all
invertebrate species. 98 % of northern nanoplankton and 73% of southern nanoplankton
species at the base of the marine food chain die out, so marine creatures all the way up
the food web starve. On land, forests choked by ash and darkness molder and decay as
60% of plant species go extinct. Most animals starve to death.
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You are in intensive care for 2 days of your life (300,000 years).
Creatures that can burrow (like some mammals) and those that live off detritus
survive. As the dust settles and shafts of sunlight once more dapple the moldering ground,
ferns take over the landscape and life begins to renew itself. The ocean depths hold
enough heat to be minimally affected by the cooling and they warm the planet up again in
a few years, but it still takes 300,000 years for marine ecosystems to recover.
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You slowly heal, but to this day you still have a scar from this wound at Chicxulub
in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.

8. Hot Flashes

You hobble out of hospital on crutches into a strange new dinosaur-free world. The
steady cooling trend of the Cretaceous has been completely reversed by the CO2 released
by the Deccan Traps eruptions in India, so the climate is hot and humid once more.
India is on a collision course with Asia, and already the seabed sediments in
between are being crumpled into islands that begin to emerge from the sea. Australia and
Papua are starting to separate from Antarctica, while the Rocky Mountains rise in North
America. South America retains a narrow attachment to Antarctica, and Central America
is still just an island chain, allowing the waters of the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans to
mix. Much of Central Asia is a shallow sea connecting the Arctic Ocean to the
Mediterranean and a waterlogged North Africa. Most of Europe is a tropical archipelago.
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Just 20,000 years after the impact, mammals begin to recover, indeed some
groups are remarkably unaffected. Seizing their head start, they proliferate now that
their erstwhile predators and competitors have been wiped out. Within 400,000 years of
the impact the first mammal with a placenta in its womb our ancestor has evolved. Its
a small insect-eating, shrew-like thing. By 5 million years after the impact, large
flightless birds like Diatryma have already taken over the role of king hunters from the
dinosaurs. Early anteaters, shrews and moles, and even the distant ancestor of elephants,
have now evolved.
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As the world recovers, it cools, and as it cools it begins to lock away reserves of
carbon in peat, permafrost, and methane hydrates.
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Atlantic fizz
The North Atlantic Ocean is tearing open as far as the Arctic, triggering a heated
divorce of Europe from Greenland. As the tear develops, cracks rip deep into the crust all
the way to the mantle, where they puncture a magma artery a mantle plume which will
later fuel the volcanoes of Iceland. Like blood rushing into an open wound, lava erupts
into the tears, clotting as basalt over large areas including the Faroe Islands, Northern
Ireland, western Scotland and offshore Norway, emitting large quantities of CO2. The
basalt landscapes of Northern Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides, including Giants
Causeway and Fingals Cave, originate in these eruptions.
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This is enough to turn the climate from cooling to warming again, and as it does so
those reserves of carbon from peat, permafrost and methane hydrates are liberated back
into the atmosphere to amplify the global warming.
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Now some more magma spreads, bruise-like, deep inside the North Atlantic

marine sediments. More and more magma bleeds internally, swelling these subterranean
abscesses to almost 100 meters (300 feet) thick, forcing its way through more than 85,000
square kilometers (33,000 square miles) of seabed near Norway. The heat bakes oilrich Cretaceous sediments, generating thousands of billions of tonnes of carbon gasses,
mostly methane. 3 months before you turn 99 (56 million years ago), that gas bursts
through the Atlantic sea bed, erupting from more than 700 craters, some as much as 12 km
(7 mi) across and the north Atlantic Ocean fizzes like soda.
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Methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2,

so the
injection of thousands of billions of tonnes of it into the atmosphere cant help but trigger
more global warming. The result is a pronounced warming of the climate, known as the
Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum or PETM, that lasts about 170,000 years.
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It is the biggest global warming event until

the age of humans. Global average temperatures rise by 6 C (11F) and in what is now a
familiar pattern of symptoms, oceans develop dead zones and global sea levels rise.
Oceans acidify and coral reefs decline. Wet climates become monsoonal and dry areas
get dryer. Wildfires are common as rainfall becomes more seasonal, eroding the land
and choking rivers with sediments. Global ecosystems are profoundly affected as in
some places 20% of land plants go extinct and plant diversity drops by more than a third,
and there is also a significant extinction of marine creatures. Even though there is no
vertebrate mass extinction, mammals respond to the environmental stress by getting
smaller.
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Jungle planet - the first primates

You recover, cool a little, and adjust to a hot and humid world on average 10C
(18F) warmer than today. Palm trees fringe the Arctic, lowland Antarctica is warm
and covered in near-tropical vegetation, and London is a mangrove swamp as
rainforests spread across much of the planet. But you experience repeated hot flashes
called hyperthermals as you approach the last year of your life.
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These hot flashes are caused by variations in your orbit, which alter the intensity of
sunlight at high latitudes, and are regularly paced at 100,000 year and 405,000 year
cycles. As these orbital cycles bring more high-latitude solar warmth, even more carbon
is released from reserves in permafrost, peat, methane hydrates, and from the oceans,
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exacerbating global warming. As your orbit cycles bring less intense sunlight at the
poles, your climate cools a little, until the next warm cycle, over and over again. Your hot
flashes are probably made worse by occasional CO2 additions from ongoing North
Atlantic volcanic activity.
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The jungle planet spurs the evolution of new species. On the shores of India, early
whale species like Ambulocetus a 3 meter (9 foot) long, walking, furry, web-footed
creature, adapted to underwater hearing - show up. Primitive horses graze in the
undergrowth: the tiny Protohippus, which is hardly 40 cm (15 in) tall, evolves into several
versions of Mesohippus, a knee-high horse with toes rather than hooves. Early versions
of elephants and rabbits have appeared, while bats flit through the night air and dugongs
nose along sandy sea beds. Multi-horned rhinos with tusks (Uintatherium), face off
against hyena-like predators bigger than a modern lion (Andrewsarchus), while small
deer-like ruminants called Leptomeryx gingerly pick their way through the undergrowth the ancestors of modern cows, deer and camels.
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Many modern birds can now be found flitting through the rainforest canopy,
including songbirds, parrots, swifts, and woodpeckers. Flowers are becoming
increasingly adapted to pollination by bees, while fruits and seeds are getting larger to
tempt birds and mammals into spreading their seeds for them.
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Crucially for us, the sultry forests provide ideal habitats for small tree-scampering
mammals, and by 55 million years ago the first primates have evolved in Asia, including
Archicebus, a mouse-sized, long-tailed insectivore, which is very closely related to our
ancestor.
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Train wreck
1 month before you turn 99 (50 million years ago ) India finally crumples into
southern Asia, but it doesnt just slide under Asia and disappear quietly into the mantle.
Instead it rams into the larger continent, forcing great slabs of Asian rock to ride up and
over the collision zone like carriages in a train wreck, squeezing millions of years worth
of sediments and bedrock into lofty peaks that we call the Himalayas. The rising range
of mountains is ravaged by erosion which, as we saw before, slowly depletes atmospheric
CO2. This process will intensify over the coming 20 million years (5 months of your life)
and it continues to the present day.
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At around the same time there is a series of minor asteroid impacts, at Montagnais
in Nova Scotia, and a double impact at Kamensk and Gusev in Russia but these dont
seem to have had much effect on biodiversity.
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9. Your Last Year - A Chiller

You turn 99 in the middle of the muggy Eocene epoch. Well pretend that your
birthday is at midnight on New Years Eve, so that we can count the months off towards
your century. Anyway, happy birthday! You dont know it yet but it will be your last

Central heating failure

As people age, we find it harder to regulate body temperature, and our average
temperature progressively decreases. The Earth has the same trouble.
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Lush swamp forests, inhabited by turtles, alligators, primates, tapirs, and the
hippo-like Coryphodon, now inhabit your Arctic shores. The Arctic Ocean is raindrenched and almost land-locked, to the extent that its practically a freshwater lake. These
are perfect conditions for a kind of bright-green floating fern called Azolla, which
practically chokes the ocean surface. Over about 800,000 years this Azolla bloom captures
CO2 from the atmosphere, locking it away in sediments as the ferns die and sink. They
are so prolific that they make a significant dent in global CO2 levels, which together
with the cooling caused by the eroding Himalayas, cools the global climate enough for
glaciers to advance on higher elevations of Antarctica a week before your 99th birthday
(49 million years ago).
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Out of Asia
Africas northward drift has brought it tantalizingly close to the archipelago of
Europe, and to Asia through Arabia (which is still part of Africa). The climate cooling
causes sea levels to drop just enough to allow the first land connections between Asia and
Africa since they broke apart in the Jurassic. Many kinds of lizards and mammals
emigrate from Asia to Africa, including mole rats, porcupines, and anthracotheres a
group related to hippos.
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This is also the time when Africa imports primates from Asia our distant
ancestors.
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The fecund forests of Africa are now home to a diverse collection of new primates
including tarsiers (big-eyed nocturnal tree climbers with long-fingered hands),
Parapithecus (resembling a monkey) and Oligopithecidae (small insectivorous primates).
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But the days of the jungle planet are numbered.

Heating breakdown
It all starts when your central heating system fails

Ever since you were 93 (in the Triassic), land bridges have connected Antarctica to
South America and Australia. These have blocked ocean currents, forcing north-south
circulation of oceans, which carries tropical heat to polar areas, keeping them almost as
warm as the tropics in just the same way that a central heating system carries heat from
a furnace to rooms in a house.
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South America and Australia continue to drift

north, placing unbearable strain on their connections with Antarctica. The world keeps
cooling, and now seasonal ice rafts appear in the Arctic Ocean by the end of February (38
million years ago). In early April (33.5 million years ago) the link between Tasmania
and Antarctica is breached like a broken levee, spilling cold currents from the Indian
Ocean into the Pacific, and precipitating a steep drop in global temperatures and
atmospheric CO2. Soon after, in early May (30 million years ago), the Drake Passage
between South America and Antarctica finally breaks, opening the floodgates for South
Pacific water to surge into the South Atlantic. Antarctica is finally marooned in the
Southern Ocean.
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Antarcticas isolation is like a breakdown of your heating system, starting your

fitful descent into an ice-house, caused by a perfect storm of tectonic and climactic
coincidences.
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First, chill gales blasting the Southern Ocean drive a new and powerful current that
encircles Antarctica, isolating it from tropical warmth and plunging the southern continent
into cold. This new current, which persists today, is known as the Antarctic
Circumpolar Current or ACC, and it is the only current that extends from the surface
all the way to the abyssal depths. Being so deep and powerful, it is like a blender that
mixes surface and deep waters, increasing the nutrient supply to plankton that consume
CO2. Colder water also dissolves more atmospheric CO2 than warmer water,
increasing the oceans capacity to reduce atmospheric CO2, further cooling the climate.
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Second, the Tethys Ocean, which up to now had allowed Indian Ocean water to
flow through the Mediterranean region into the Atlantic, closes as Arabia begins to
bulldoze into Turkey and Iran. This action reboots global ocean currents, enhancing the
effect of the Antarctic current. It also closes off the large Central Asian Sea called the
Paratethys. Isolated, this stagnant sea now accumulates black, carbon-rich muds that
will form Caspian Sea oil, to be extracted later by humans.
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Third, the Himalayas undergo intense uplift, almost matched by powerful

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erosion and weathering that absorbs even more CO2 from the atmosphere, further
cooling you.
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Consequently, like a room in winter whose heater has broken, Antarctica begins to
freeze. As the CO2 levels drop, the South Pole first develops isolated ice sheets at higher
elevations, which coalesce into a large ice cap in early April (33.7 million years ago).
Antarctic forests recede and are replaced by mosses and ferns as the ice-free portions of
Antarctica turn to tundra. The first persistent glaciers develop on upland Greenland at
the same time. As more and more water gets locked up as ice, sea levels around the
globe drop by 50 to 60 meters (160-200 feet).
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The fourth driver in this cooling trend is the ice itself. Like a shiny bald head, it
reflects what little sunlight reaches the polar ground back into space, where previously
rock and vegetation would have absorbed it and warmed up. This albedo effect
exacerbates the cooling further, contributing to a feedback loop of cooling and CO2
reduction.
The result is plunging global temperatures - average air temperatures in mid
latitudes drop by 4-6C (7-11F), as do ocean temperatures.
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Seas of grass
Its hard to imagine a world without grass. Today grass dominates much of the
world, from the lush lawns of England to the brassy stalks of the Serengeti, from the
billowing prairies to the Pampas of South America, to the sea of grass on the Asian
Steppes that gave Genghis Kahn his name. Around 20% of the modern land surface is
covered in grass and the staples of human diet across the globe: corn (maize), wheat,
barley, rice, sorghum, millet, rye and oats are all grasses.
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Up to this point in Your Life as Planet Earth, grasses have been shy, retiring plants
in forest clearings. But in the new colder and dryer climate of unreliable rainfall, the
rainforests recede. Clearings enlarge into patches of open grassland, growing ever larger
as time passes and the climate dries further.
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In the new dry, lower-CO2 environment, shallow-rooted grasses have a problem.

To get the CO2 they need for photosynthesis they must open up more pores in their leaves,
because CO2 levels in the air are lower. But more open pores mean more water-loss,
risking desiccation and death. At this point some grasses invent new kind of
photosynthesis that solves this problem. Called C4 photosynthesis, it appears by the
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end of February in your 100th year (35 million years ago), and is much more efficient in
hot, sunny conditions than the older C3 photosynthesis, and it also allows the new C4
grasses to conserve water. In other words, its a great adaptation for sunbaked, dry
grasslands.
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Grasslands also bring with them a new kind of soil known as mollisols, which
have a deep organic rich layer where CO2 is buried. Its possible that the spread of C4
grasses has a side effect of locking away even more CO2.
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It takes a while, but C4 grasses come to dominate increasingly arid grassland

habitats while C3 grasses remain prevalent in more temperate climates. Open grasslands
had already appeared in South America in mid-February (around 40 million years ago),
and now they spread to North America, Asia and Africa and eventually Australia. The
new savannahs, prairies and chaparrals favor new creatures: giraffes, pigs, gazelles and
goats all appear at this time. Small horses like Merychippus roam the plains.
Elephantine creatures like Deinotherium (with tusks curving from its lower jaw) or
Gomphotherium (with tusks on both jaws) compete with giant hornless rhinoceroses like
Paraceratherium and Teloceras, or their miniature cousins Menoceras. Feeding on these
herbivores is the marsupial saber-toothed cat Thylacosmilus.

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But before you get used to this idyllic scene of grazers and grasses, the world
changes explosively!

Volcanoes and instant diamonds

On the spring equinox of your 100th year (35.7 million years ago) an asteroid
collides with Earth at a place called Popigai in Russia, leaving a crater 100 km (62 mi)
wide, instantly transforming natural graphite in the rocks into diamonds! Then, just 3
days in your life later (35.3 million years ago), there is a double asteroid impact on the
east coast of America at Chesapeake Bay and offshore New Jersey. The Chesapeake Bay
impact blasts a crater nearly twice the size of the state of Rhode Island, and nearly as deep
as the Grand Canyon, sending a giant tsunami clear over the 3,500 foot high (1,000
meters) Blue Ridge Mountains. The crater affects the shape of the bay and the
distribution of aquifers there to the present day.
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April to June (around 33-23 million years ago) sees Africa pushing further into
Europe and the Middle East, squashing the old Tethys marine sediments into Alpine and
Pyrenees peaks. But now Arabia starts to fracture from Africa. The split releases floods
of basalt lava across Ethiopia and the Yemen around 30 million years ago. By chance,
unusually violent eruptions are burying a large area of Mexico in ash and lava at the same
time. Consequently the atmosphere sees a spike in CO2 and a corresponding global
warming by about 2C.
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With CO2 at roughly present day levels of around 400ppm (parts per million),
the Antarctic ice sheet is now very sensitive to such shifts in climate, and it partially
thaws, leading to sea level rise. Going forward, your climate is so finely balanced that
variations in solar warmth caused by Earths orbital wobbles trigger many large advances
and retreats of the Antarctic ice, with corresponding large (around 20 meters or 66 feet)
seesaws of global sea level every few tens of thousands of years.
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The first apes

 Like the slow unzipping of a dress,

East Africa begins to part from the rest of the continent, and the Great Rift Valley
develops progressively from Ethiopia into Kenya and into Tanzania, and the eastern
edge of the Congo, in June of your last year (25 million years ago). The rift zone is
buoyed up by hot mantle and rises thousands of feet in altitude, raising savannah to
plateaus susceptible to the occasional night frost, altering the local climate to the present
day. This divides formerly continuous habitats and also puts the area east of the rift into
a rain shadow.
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As a result, apes (our ancestors) begin to evolve separately from monkeys, and so
we owe our ancestry to this geological marvel. The oldest ape is called Rukwapithecus
and it is soon joined by other ape species like the waist-high Proconsul.
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Yellowstone blow-torch
Meanwhile mountains are also rising at the western edges of the Americas, as the
seabed of the ever-shrinking Pacific Ocean is consumed under them, melting into gassy
magmas that fuel violent volcanoes. In Colorado, magma works its way through old flaws
in the crust left by the welding together of ancient continents back in your youth, causing
huge explosive eruptions that bury the surrounding land in volcanic ash. One eruption
alone in the San Juan area 28 million years ago sprays out 5,000 cubic kilometers (1,200
cubic miles) of ash. The Mexican eruptions set off again around 24 million years ago,
and over time there are many such eruptions all around the Pacific, a situation that
continues to modern times.
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 North America is drifting westwards at a rate

of around 2 cm (1 inch) a year over the Pacific plates. Deep in the Pacific mantle there is
a plume of hot magma acting like a blow-torch that sears a trail of burn marks into the
over-riding American crust, which sizzles as it passes over it, spurting out massive flows
of basalt lava between August 21 and September 3 (16.6-15 million years ago). Hundreds
of eruptions build up to over 4km (2 mi) thick, covering much of Washington State,
northern Oregon, and western Idaho in a few hundred thousand years. This lava is
known today as the Columbia River Basalts and the mantle plume will later fuel the
Yellowstone Supervolcano. But right now its heat melts bits of crust that had scraped off
onto the underside of North America since the Cretaceous, releasing their trapped CO2 to
add to the CO2 that would normally accompany such eruptions.
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The result as you have experienced many times before is a rise in atmospheric
CO2 (to levels similar to todays), and corresponding global warming by 2 to 4C, and
the Antarctic ice sheet reduces to around 10 to 25% of its current size as sea levels rise
roughly 50m (160ft). But in time, as all that fresh basalt weathers, along with ongoing
weathering in all the active mountain ranges (the Rockies, Andes, Alps and Himalayas), it
absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, so global temperatures drop markedly. Antarcticas ice
cap stabilizes in early September (15 million years ago), Greenlands ice expands, and the
Arctic Ocean develops perennial sea ice at around the same time. As the ice caps
expand, they lock in more and more water, and global sea levels drop again, by between
55 and 75m (180 to 250 feet).
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The day the sea dries up

As India wedges itself ever further under Tibet, and Africas advances to Europe
continue, they force the Paratethys Sea to retreat further towards the modern shores of the
Black and Caspian seas. Arabia continues its separation from Africa with the opening of
the Red Sea, pushing its way into Iran which responds by throwing up the Zagros
Mountains.
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Apes have now spread from Africa to Europe where we find Dryopithecus, and to
Asia where we find Sivapithecus (the ancestor of orangutans). But back in Africa we
find apes like Kenyapithecus, whose teeth, face and elbow more closely resemble modern
apes and our pre-human ancestors. Kenyapithecus becomes very successful and spreads
as far as Turkey, and its possible that it is our ancestor.
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[A]

Then in mid-October (10 million years ago) the Andes undergo rapid uplift of over
2 km (1.2mi or about half the height of the Rocky Mountains) in under 2 million years.
Thats the geological equivalent of taking the rapid elevator, and provides yet more eroded
rock to weather and cool the climate. At the same time weather patterns around India and
East Africa change temporarily, turning dry African savanna into wet lakelands, as Indias
monsoon intensifies. As ice sheets grow, global ocean currents switch over to the
modern conveyor pattern at this time, changing the distribution of nutrients between the
Pacific and Atlantic an event known as The Great Silica Switch.
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By November (7.3 million years ago) your climate has now cooled enough for
most of Greenland to be covered in ice.
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Touma, Ardi and the dawn of humankind

Coincidentally, a new ape called

Sahelanthropus (but nicknamed Touma) appears on the tranquil shores of a vast
Saharan lake, in the 1st week of November (7 million years ago). What sets Touma apart
is his more upright stance. And even though his brain is small (a chimp-like 370 cubic
centimeters (cc), or 27% of modern human brain size), its shape is new. It has the distinct
brain stem, occipital lobes, and prefrontal cortex that mark him out as our earliest uprightwalking hominin ancestor. So Touma stands literally at the dawn of humankind.
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He is soon joined by another ape-like creature called Orrorin, who is also

adapted to spending at least some time on 2 legs.
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By the middle of November (5.8 million years ago) the lush forests and river
banks of the Afar region in Ethiopia are echoing to a new call. The screeches come from
a troop of new upright-walking apes at the waters edge, vigilant for predators, before
they retreat into the branches of fig trees and palms as a herd of Kudu antelope
approach. Among them is your ancestor, Ardi. Ardi is a young mother standing about
4 feet (120cm) tall, with large hands and thumb-like big toes on her feet, and a brain larger
than Toumas at around 450cc. She is an Ardipithecus, a group of primitive human
ancestors that survive until about 4.3 million years ago (the end of November).
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Costa Del Salt

In the continuing game of continental Sardines, Morocco is now touching Spain

at Gibraltar, constricting the connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. A
sharp cooling phase now triggers a drop in sea levels, leaving the Straits of Gibraltar high
and dry on November 14 (5.96 million years ago). The land-locked Mediterranean Sea
begins to evaporate, and over 360,000 years the level falls until it is two small seas
separated by Italy, and it keeps on falling. Eventually it drops by 5 km (3 mi) (thats 3
times deeper than the Grand Canyon) depositing a 2.5 km (1.5 mi) thick layer of salt and
gypsum on the sea bed. In fact, so much salt and sediment is deposited so quickly that
its weight depresses the crust of the Mediterranean into the mantle a little, sending a
topographic bulge rippling outwards across Europe.
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While this is happening the polar latitudes end their latest glacial phase, raising
temperatures and rainfall around the world. As ice melts, so sea levels rise, and it may be
that or the ongoing seismic jostling between Morocco and Spain, which releases the
deluge.
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It is a deluge on a colossal scale!

On November 19th of your life (5.33 million years ago) water bursts into the
Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean through a 200 kilometer (124 mile) long channel.
Like a fire hose, water cannons onto the desiccated saltpans at 100 million cubic meters
every second (130 million cubic yards per second), with the power of a thousand Amazon
rivers. The Mediterranean Sea level rises as much as 10 meters a day for a year or two
in real time, until the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are level once more.
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Of ice and man

North America reaches for the companionship of South America, coupling through
the Isthmus of Panama around November 23 (4.8 million years ago). Their union blocks
ocean currents from crossing between the equatorial Pacific and the Atlantic, rebooting
deep water currents in the Pacific Ocean. Consequently, eastern Pacific water
temperatures cool substantially and so global temperatures drop another 1.5C (3F) over
the next million years or so.
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Lucy
Into this capricious climate a new creature is born in Africa, at the end of
November (4.2 million years ago). She is a human ancestor called Australopithecus but
she goes by the easier nickname: Lucy. She is your great, great (280,000 times)
grandmother! She is more comfortable walking on 2 legs than Ardi was and has a brain
capacity slightly larger than Ardi at 380-485cc, which is 28-36% of that of modern
humans. But she is still fairly ape-like, spending a good amount of time climbing in trees
to avoid predators and gathering food. Lucy is one of several different varieties of
Australopithecus that spread across the continent of Africa during the next 2 million years,
sometimes leaving their footprints in fresh-fallen volcanic ash of the Great Rift Valley.
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It isnt long before the environmental rug is pulled from under our
Australopithecus ancestors. A small asteroid blasts an 18km (11mi) hole at Elgygytgyn in
Siberia 3.6 million years ago,
and you experience another warm period between
December 2nd and 3rd (3.6 to 3.4 million years ago) whose cause is unclear.
In this
Pliocene epoch, summer Arctic temperatures are 8C (14F) warmer than today, and CO2
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levels are similar to today, as rain-drenched forests fringe the Arctic Ocean again, and
ice-averse mollusks live in Arctic waters. But the ever-drifting continents still have some
moves to pull. This time its Australia that shoves its way towards China, bullying the
Indonesian islands on its way. Between November 29 and December 7 (4 and 3 million
years ago), the rearrangement of islands changes the ocean connection between the Pacific
and the Indian Oceans, turning off a warm flow to the Indian Ocean and switching it over
to a cold current from the Northern Pacific that still flows today.
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The change in heat distribution

substantially cools higher latitudes, so ice begins its grip on the Arctic while Greenlands
ice cap expands and thickens. Antarctica cools substantially and develops a skirt of seaice that lasts through the summer. Cooling and mixing the deep ocean waters, along with
erosion and weathering in the Himalayas, the Andes, and elsewhere, draws down CO2
further. This sends you yo-yoing down a cooling trajectory until average global
temperatures fall below todays around December 7 (3 million years ago).
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And you keep getting colder.

Ice age
Like a dose of the flu, your temperature goes through the climate equivalent of a
bucking bronco. You suffer at least 15 temperature swings just between December 2
and December 10 alone (3.6-2.6 million years ago). Then the fluctuations become even
more extreme, with each cold swing colder than the last. Ice now envelopes the
northern latitudes of America, Europe and Asia, advancing and retreating with each
climate swing. In the tropics, especially Africa, cold swings bring drought and warm
swings bring rain.
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The icy harmony of orbital wobbles

These climate swings have a regular pattern. Up to December 26 (700,000 years
ago) the icy cycles are every 41,000 years punctuated by warm respites lasting from 500
to a few thousand years. Some warm episodes, like the one 2.4 million years ago, result
in substantial melting of the Greenland Ice Cap.
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 These swings are mainly caused

by Earths orbital wobbles. As our Earth circles the Sun, the orbit isnt a perfect circle, so
the planet is fractionally closer and further from the Sun at different times of the year. This
eccentricity changes on a 100,000 year cycle. Also, the axis about which we spin giving
us days and nights is on a slant (a hangover from the Moon-forming impact). But there is a
slight wobble in that slant, called obliquity, which varies on a 41,000 year cycle. There
is another orbital cycle called precession, which is the wobble of our rotation axis about
every 22,000 years - like a toy spinning top tracing out ever-widening circles before it falls
over. Just as a guitar chord is made from the combination of several different individual
notes, so the harmonic combination of these orbital cycles drives the waxing-waning song
of the ice ages.
The ice sheets spread and thicken during cold swings. The thicker they grow, the
more their weight depresses the crust beneath them, like a boat loaded with cargo (this is
called isostacy). The more the ice sheets thicken, the lower the crust sinks, and the
colder the climate must remain to preserve them. Eventually, as your orbit brings more
intense solar warmth to the northern hemisphere, its just not cold enough to sustain the
low-altitude ice. So the ice sheets melt away rapidly, retreating to the far north in just a
few thousand years, before the cycle begins all over again.
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But there is more to ice age cycles than orbital wobbles alone. Cooling oceans
absorb more CO2 but this effect lags behind the orbit cycle by a thousand years or so,
and it is countered by changes in ocean salinity, sea levels, and reduction in vegetated land
area. There is also the albedo effect, where the increasing area of bright ice reflects more
of the Suns heat back into space, amplifying cooling (the shiny bald head analogy, like
you experienced in the Permian).
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Ocean currents such as the North Atlantic Conveyor System slow or shut down
altogether during cold stages, changing the heat distribution around the globe, while
variations in sea level have knock-on effects themselves. When sea levels are low enough
to turn the Bering Strait into a land bridge, the Arctic Ocean is cut off from the Pacific, but
in warming cycles the two oceans reconnect. This is like throwing a switch in the heat342

distribution pattern for the oceans, which may be responsible for the sudden, extreme flipflops in climate known as Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events.
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Volcanic eruptions disrupt the cycles with random timing. Large eruptions of ash
and sulfur create a temporary cooling by screening out solar radiation, a much shorterterm effect than warming from their CO2 output.
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So the climate cycles are not at all like a classical guitar chord of clean orbital
notes. Rather they are noisy and distorted, more like a Jimi Hendrix electric guitar chord.
Drought and tsunami
As ice sheets spread across North America, Europe and Asia, they pick up billions
of rocks and boulders to grind the land under them. Each summer retreating ice exposes
the fine dust produced by this grinding, and wind whips it into dust storms, depositing it in
thick loess deposits in Asia. In fact theres 100 times more dust in the air at this time
than in the modern era.
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As temperatures fall so does the humidity of the atmosphere, so tropical monsoons

weaken and conditions become ever more arid. Even C4 grasses cant cope, so tropical
grasslands now give up territory to arid scrubland and then desert. Large swathes of midlatitude land alternate between arid steppes in cold cycles and temperate forest in warmer
interglacials. Global sea levels fall with each ice age, exposing continental shelves and
providing land bridges between former islands, reconnecting Arabia and Africa, and
across the Bering Strait between Asia and North America. There is no English Channel,
and the Thames and Rhine rivers join in a single estuary in the North Sea. With each
interglacial, sea levels rise, monsoon rains return to the Sahara, turning desert into pasture,
and filling lakes and numerous rivers that wind their way across the Sahara to the
Mediterranean.
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Out of the blue you are slammed by another asteroid, which hits in the
southeastern corner of the Pacific Ocean 2.51 million years ago. Known as the Eltanin
Impact, it vaporizes water and rock into the atmosphere, and sends a giant tsunami
throughout the Pacific and the south Atlantic where it devastates coastal land and buries it
in meters of debris. And it may be the ocean salt and rock dust from the impact, spreading
through the high atmosphere, which amplifies an already cold climate into a powerful ice
age.
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Large animals can conserve body heat more easily than smaller animals, so giant
mammals begin to dominate. 5 meter high (16 feet) wooly mammoths evolve, bearing
huge tusks to clear snow from the ground so that they can eat. In South America giant
ground sloths as big as an elephant and brandishing claws as long as a mans arm fight off
packs of saber-toothed tigers. Woolly rhinos and herds of modern-sized horses vie with
giant elk for grazing.
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Yellowstone
All this time North America has continued to creep westwards over the blowtorchlike mantle plume that caused the eruption of the Columbia River Basalts back in August.
It has burned an 800 kilometer (500 mile) chain of volcanoes that stretches from northern
Nevada all the way to Yellowstone in Wyoming, where it now it creates havoc.
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On December 15 of Your Life as Planet Earth (2.1 million years ago) the
Yellowstone Supervolcano explodes with titanic force, depositing a blanket of volcanic
ash over more than half of the present United States. The eruption sprays so much
molten rock into the air that the roof of its magma chamber collapses, creating a caldera
100 km (60 mi) wide. It will do it again on a slightly smaller scale on December 21 (1.3
million years ago), and again on December 26 (640,000 years ago). That last eruption
again covers about half of the United States in ash. Shortly after that, an eruption at
Long Valley in California blankets about a third of the United States with ash on
December 26 (630,000 years ago), and eruptions like these occur sporadically all around
the Pacific.
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But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Becoming human
Your see-sawing temperature means the environment is constantly changing. In
East Africa woodland gives way to savannah, then returns to woodland in pace with the
climate cycles, placing great environmental stress on our ancestors. This winnows the
fittest and most adaptable from the rest, forcing their rapid evolution.
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The first stone tools

During the reign of Lucy and her

Australopithecus relatives, someone invents simple stone tools. Its not clear exactly
which species is responsible, but it starts humankinds obsession with technology. It is
now around December 15 (1.98 million years ago), and Australopithecus has evolved a
more human creature, called Australopithecus sediba. Sediba walks upright on arched feet
like modern humans, and her hands, pelvis and feet are more human-like than Lucys.
Her hands are even dexterous enough to fashion tools, and her brain, though still about
the same size as earlier Australopithecus varieties, is shaped like a human brain. Her
brain is different because a crucial gene for brain development called SRGAP2 has
recently undergone its second big mutation (around time the first tools were invented)
resulting in an extra copy of the gene, which we have inherited to this day.
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She coexists with a variety of other early humans spread across Africa.
Paranthropus has evolved from Australopithecus into thickset creatures with powerful
jaws and thick teeth for chewing grasses in the savanna. Their brains are around 30-41%
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by her descendants.
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The first cook

December 16 (1.8 million years ago) unveils a tall, slender East African human,
similar in height, gait and stature to you and me. Homo erectus physique is adapted to hot,
dry conditions, and he can run and walk as effectively as modern humans. Homo
erectus is such a diverse group that several varieties look almost like different species ergaster, habilis, rudolfensis, antecessor and another as-yet-unnamed creature currently
labeled KNM-ER 1802. His brain enlarges from 44-67% to 95% of ours in the first
few hundred thousand years. His face is distinctly human with a pointed nose, but he has a
low forehead and a massive monobrow, and lacks a chin.
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What sets erectus apart from his ancestors is how smart he is. He soon learns to
make fire and use it for cooking, which provides the nutrition to support his enlarging
brain. He also makes a variety of sophisticated Acheulean stone tools, sometimes in
dedicated factories, and he can throw, enabling him to kill from a safer distance.
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Armed with tools, hunting

and defending by throwing, nourished by cooked food and supported by cooperative social
skills (possibly including some form of language), erectus wins out against large
carnivores in Africa for carrion and prey. As erectus takes over at the top of the food
chain, dethroned carnivores like the bear-otter go extinct. He now begins to travel the
world, spreading out of Africa into Europe and Asia, reaching as far as China and
Indonesia, even as his Paranthropus cousins begin to die out.
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Christmas in England
Early humans probably a variety of erectus - have now arrived in East Anglia,
England, just in time for Christmas (between 970,000 and 814,000 years ago). They are
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camping on a grassy plain by the Thames estuary (which is in Norfolk at this time),
leaving footprints in estuarine muds and fending off the occasional hyena.
As they
chip flints into tools near a conifer forest, they are surrounded by horses and antelope. An
icy wind blows off the North Sea from the advancing ice sheet a few days walk away,
signaling the onset of another cold phase. They will leave England soon, and their
descendants will return when the ice recedes again on Boxing Day (700,000 years ago).
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14 The first cook: Homo erectus (by Cicero Moraes - via Wikimedia Commons)
By now the climate has cooled so much that ice sheets no longer melt away in the
warm parts of the 41,000 year cycle, so they now last for entire 100,000 year orbital cycles
(now responding more to orbital eccentricity than orbital obliquity). Also, the
scouring effect of the ice has cleared away all the loose sediment beneath it, so the ice
changes from a flattish quick-responding sheet to a high plateau of persistent thick ice,
welded to bedrock.
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Its also around this time that another mutation in the genetic code for human
brains occurs, creating yet another copy of the SRGAP2 gene. This may be a crucial
factor in the gradual emergence of humans with brains about the size of our own brains.
Known as Homo heidelbergensis, they make their way all across Africa and into Europe
between December 27 and 29 (600,000 to 250,000 years ago). They are archaic versions
of ourselves, and they look like us except they have a low forehead and large eyebrow
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ridges, and lack a chin. These people also behave like us in many ways, efficiently using
fire and hunting with spears, some with stone tips that they hafted onto wooden shafts,
and others that they have whittled to a sharp point and then hardened with fire. They are
also creating and using a range of sophisticated stone tools, and have language.
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heidelbergensis is one of several regional varieties of human spread across Africa,

Europe and Asia. As heidelbergensis emerges into Europe and Africa, tribes of erectus are
now evolving in Asia. Some spread from Southeast Asia to Siberia, eventually becoming
Denisovans. Others become isolated on an island in Indonesia, where limited
resources drive them to evolve into the miniature floresiensis, nicknamed The Hobbit.
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Each time the ice advances, it isolates human and animal populations in refuges
like Spain, Italy, and the Balkans where they begin to evolve in response to local
conditions, differentiating from the original population. Brown bears, bison, musk ox
and even hedgehogs also undergo differentiation at this time.
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Man
Our species, Homo sapiens, gradually emerges in Africa around December 29
(around 208,000 years ago). They are your great, great (13,000 times) grandparents!
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We seem to be the product of the

continuing extreme climate fluctuations. Soon after our lineage appears, the world is
gripped by an extremely cold and hyper-arid phase known as MIS6. A terrible drought
grips Africa at this time: lakes and rivers dry up, and the parched savanna swirls with dust
devils. Desiccated corpses and bleached bones are all that remain of the herds of
antelope and gazelle. Our ancestors survive by their wits and migrate to isolated refuges,
such as the caves at Mossel Bay in South Africa, where they survive on shellfish and
fynbos plants.
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To start with, these humans look more like heidelbergensis, but over time they
come to look like the modern humans of today. They use fire not just for warmth and
cooking, but they have also figured out how to heat-treat stone to improve their tools,
resulting in advanced stone tools like bladelets. They hurl spears rather than just
stabbing with them, making them much more effective hunters. They also have a rich
culture, using ochre pigment for painting. They clearly have the smarts for technological
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and cultural innovation, cooperation and communication skills - language - to teach them
to others.
Around the same time, European heidelbergensis develop into the muscular, thickboned and big-eyed Neandertals. Neandertal anatomy makes sense for a cold-adapted
people that range the fringes of the ice sheets. Far from being the brutes of popular
culture, they are people with brains actually larger than mine (and maybe even yours) at
1412cc or 105% of modern humans. They probably speak a language, and they have
a culture which has a special regard for black bird feathers and eagle claws. From an
initially small population, they spread across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East,
and as far as western Asia, hunting in the fluctuating forests that fringe the ice sheets and
glaciers, and living in large huts constructed from mammoth bones.
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Our ancestors eke out an existence in their separate refuges, evolving

independently, until the climate begins to improve roughly 140,000 years ago. When the
hyper-arid MIS6 period is over, the rains return to Africa they bring with them the herds of
game and mankind can multiply and wander through Africa once again. Monsoon rains
refill Saharan lakes and rivers, tempting game and humans alike towards the
Mediterranean.
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And yet there is a sucker punch. A new colony around the oasis at Dakhleh in
Egypt is decimated by a meteorite impact on December 30 (around 145,000 thousand
years ago). The blast snaps trees for thousands of miles, injuring and killing people and
animals alike, while molten ejecta sets wildfires across the area. Fortunately the damage
is local to Egypt, and humans keep spreading.
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10. Your 100th Birthday!

You start your birthday your last day - on an optimistic note.

At midnight (126,000 years ago) you begin to feel the lovely warmth of an
interglacial called the Eemian, with Arctic temperatures rising to 8C warmer than in
the mid-20th century, but globally it will only reach about 1C warmer than modern
times. Its warm because our orbit is delivering about 11% more solar radiation to the
Arctic than the present day. Sea levels will soon rise up to 9 meters (30 feet) higher than
modern times, as a result of a drastic reduction of ice sheets in Greenland and
Antarctica.
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But before the sea levels rise, our

ancestors are already on the move. Arriving at the southern tip of the Red Sea, they find
the waters have been miraculously and biblically parted due to low sea levels. They cross
into Arabia by around 125,000 years ago and fan out, wandering the wilderness until
they reach the Straits of Hormuz. They gaze down from the Omani heights at a river (the
Persian Gulf is all but empty due to low sea levels) in search of a ford. From there they
move into Iran and further into Asia, where they encounter vestigial bands of Homo
erectus and Denisovans.
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Further waves of human tribes emerge from Africa through the eastern
Mediterranean, encountering Neandertals in the process. Some of us take a fancy to the
Neandertals (or the other way around) and there is some interbreeding, to the extent that
modern Europeans, North Africans and Asians are genetically about 2% Neandertal,
whereas Africans south of the Sahara are mostly pure sapiens. Those of us with
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Neandertal genes inherit their genes for hair, skin, and enhanced risk of various diseases
like lupus and Chrons disease. The offspring of these unions are also less fertile than
purebred sapiens.
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As we spread into Asia we colonize new areas and mix with the local populations,
including Denisovans. Some close encounters are of the sexual kind, with the result that
Melanesians, Polynesians and Australian Aboriginals have inherited up to 5% of their
DNA from Denisovans. Still later populations emerge from Africa and spread and breed,
masking the genetics of earlier interbreeding.
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But youre already plunging into another icy chill that will last all day.
Occasionally, warmer ocean currents from the tropics eat away at northern sea ice until a
large area collapses. This generates a warm flash (known as a Dansgaard-Oeschger
Event) that comes on suddenly (in just decades in real time), warming the North by 915C (16-27F), but barely affecting the South. Within 30 minutes (3,000 years) the sea
ice regrows and you are back to numbing cold in higher latitudes, and drastic drought in
the tropics. This happens at least 25 times on your birthday alone!
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Change forces innovation. It drives our ancestors to develop new technology,

craftsmanship and adornments in fits and starts, coinciding with periods of increased
rainfall that accompany each warm swing in the global climate.
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The Asian front of our exodus receives a small setback when the Toba
supervolcano in the island of Sumatra explodes around 9:55 AM on your birthday (73,880
years ago). The eruption is extremely explosive, and it hurls immense quantities of ash
and sulfur into the upper atmosphere to circle the globe. Ash blankets a 6,500km
(4,000mi) wide area that extends from Arabia to China and the southern Indian Ocean,
covering India in ash 15 cm (6 in) thick. Amazingly it has very little effect on our
ancestors, who quickly return to the affected areas.
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World tour
We humans continue our peripatetic habits, multiplying and expanding our range.
At 2 PM, as an asteroid blasts the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona (49,000 years
ago), we have already reached Australia. Even in these times of low sea level this
requires crossing about 70 km (40 mi) of open ocean on some kind of raft or boat, and its
therefore no surprise that fishermen are soon harvesting tuna and other fish from the deep
ocean by 42,000 years ago.
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By 3:30 PM (45,000 years ago), taking advantage of a temporary respite from

the extreme cold and aridity, we have spread through the Middle East and Europe as far as
England, and through Asia to southeast Asia. By 4 PM (40,000 years ago) some of us
have made it to China.
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 Along the way we adopt mans

best friend domesticated dogs - by 33,000 years ago, and by 20,000 years ago in
China, some of us have moved from heat-treating stone tools to heat-treating clay. This is
the invention of pottery (a.k.a. China) and were already cooking food in those pots.
By around 17,000 years ago we are angling using fish hooks made from shell.
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Fratricide
As we go, either by genocide or by technical superiority or by sheer superior
numbers, Homo sapiens gradually eliminates all other claims to the Homo throne. At teatime on your birthday when you are snuffing the solitary candle that represents your 100
years, the last of the Neandertals finally dies out (around 40,000 years ago), some 2,500 to
5,000 years after our arrival in Europe. The Denisovans, the Hobbit-like floresiensis
people, and a mysterious Chinese group known only as the Red Deer Cave People also
disappear.
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Your long goodnight

It is now 8:30 PM (18,000 years ago) and you are as cold as you have ever been.
You have a thick ice sheet all across North America, from New Jersey and Long Island in
the east, as far as Washington State in the west. Ice has also overrun Greenland, Iceland,
most of Britain, Scandinavia, northern Europe and Russia. Neandertals have long since
died out but the rest of our ancestors are doing OK.
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By 8:45PM (17,000 years ago), as your orbit brings you warmer northern
summers, there is the first hint of a thaw. Melt water pools behind lobes of receding ice
sheet in western Montana and builds to a vast lake called Glacial Lake Missoula,
covering 7800 square kilometers (3,000 square miles) to a depth of 610 meters (2,000
feet). As warming continues, the ice dam weakens until it ruptures, sending a wall of
water 240 meters (800 feet) high surging across western Idaho and eastern Washington
state, travelling at 85 kph (50 mph), ripping away the ground in its path to the Pacific
Ocean, leaving a wide, barren landscape of scablands in its wake. Amazingly this is
just the latest of many similar catastrophes during the ice ages.
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Ice has now receded enough from the Aleutian Arc to expose a land connection
between eastern Siberia and Alaska, and by 9PM (15,000 years ago) some of us have
already spread across both American continents.
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Wherever we go, animals begin to disappear.

Not long after we arrive in Australia we hunt the giant kangaroo, a 2-tonne wombat and
other large animals into extinction, causing a permanent change in vegetation patterns and
promoting wildfires. Before we arrive, the Americas are crammed with large
herbivores like mammoths, camels and giant ground sloths, but within about 1,000 years
of our arrival, 80% of the large-bodied mammals are extinct. Over the planet as a whole,
our arrival coincides with the extinction of of mammal genera and of large animal
species. Some of the stress on these creatures may be due to climate change, but we are
the main culprits.
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By 9:15 PM (14,000 years ago) the thaw turns to lasting warmth and the ice
continues to retreat all across the world. As it departs it abandons its rocky luggage as
piles of sand and boulders that mark its furthest extent, creating Long Island in New York,
and stranding improbably large boulders on hilltops across the hinterland as they settle
through melting ice. Global sea levels are rising fast by as much as 5m (16ft) per century
for a while, then slowing to 40cm (16in) a century. They will eventually rise by over
120m (400ft) from their lowest levels in the ice age.
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Inventing agriculture
By 9:30 PM (about 13,000 years ago) humans take control of their food supply by
turning to agriculture, and they begin to settle in villages.
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But just as you are starting to get comfortable, something tips you back into ice - at
9:33 PM (12,890 years ago). Its possibly an asteroid impact that hits somewhere in
Quebec, Canada, spraying platinum-rich ejecta across Europe and the Americas, and into
the upper atmosphere, darkening the Sun and returning you to an ice age climate for
another 1,200 years (The Younger Dryas cold period).
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The end
The cold snap is relatively short-lived, and at 9:45 PM (11,700 years ago) you feel
another hot flash come on and this time you stay warm - the ice age is over!
But you dont feel much like celebrating. You feel the end approaching.

Temperatures around the world rise until around 10,000 years ago, when they level
off creating a stable and benign climate, cooling slowly, that lasts until the modern era.
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By 10:15 (9,000 years ago) Middle Eastern people are making pottery.
In the continuing thaw, melt water has pooled between the dwindling ice cap in
northern Canada and the Great Lakes of North America. Called Lake Agassiz, it now
covers a large swathe of Canada in up to 250m (820ft) of water. At 10:24 PM (8,330 years
ago) the last of the ice in Hudson Bay collapses, sending the icy waters of Lake Agassiz
and an armada of icebergs flooding through the Hudson Strait into the North Atlantic,
chilling ocean temperatures, and cooling the climate in Europe and America for 3 or 4
centuries.
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And it may be this that prompts Middle Eastern people to invent irrigation and
cheese making by 10:30PM (8,000 years ago). 10:50PM (6,000 years ago) sees the
adoption of metal tools to replace the stone tools used over the previous 4 million years.
At around this time the Egyptian civilization begins.
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one hour to go
Age of empires
At 11PM (3,400BC) the Mesopotamians invent writing as the earliest city-states
take hold on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Soon after, the Brits begin construction of
Stonehenge (3,100BC) and then Egypt goes on a pyramid binge, constructing the Great
Pyramid at Giza and the Sphinx around 11:06 PM (2,560BC). Not to be outdone, Sargon
of Akkad begins the worlds first empire in Mesopotamia at 11:10PM (2334BC) around
the same time as some Indians colonize Australia, bringing dingoes and new technology.
At 11:30 PM Cyrus the Great of Persia creates an empire 50% larger than the Roman
Empire, gives the world its first bill of rights and a Suez canal. Then at 11:33PM
Alexander the Great defeats the Persians in 331BC.

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11:36PM- Julius Caesar is appointed dictator of Rome (44BC) 11:37 - the birth
of Jesus 11:44 - The birth of Mohammed (570 AD) 11:49 - Leif Ericson discovers
America in the year 1003 11:54 - Columbus discovers America again in 1492
Between 11:54 and 11:58 Europe goes through a Little Ice Age in the 14th to 19th
centuries caused by a colossal eruption of the Samalas volcano in Indonesia 11:58 The Wright Brothers make the first powered flight in 1903 and in 1908 a meteorite
explodes over Tunguska, Siberia, flattening over 2,000 square kilometers of forest and
showering the ground in iron and diamond dust.
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1 minute (70 heartbeats) to go

55 heartbeats the end of World War 2 39 heartbeats - The Beatles arrive in
America 35 heartbeats the first human on the Moon 8 heartbeats terrorists attack
the US on 9/11
Your life has flashed before your eyes, and you are barely aware of your last breath
leaving your body

11. Bottom Line

Your planet is very, very old.

Measured in the life span of a centenarian, simple life emerges in your teens. You
are well into your mid-life crisis before life starts polluting the planet with oxygen. You
are in your late 70s before primitive plants and fungi begin to colonize land. You are 86
before complex animals show up, 88 by the time worms alter ocean chemistry and the
seashell is invented, and 90 when fish evolve jaws and live birth. In your 90s 4-legged life
evolves from fish, and then dinosaurs, mammals, birds and flowering plants (including
grasses) emerge. The dinosaurs are extinguished when you are 98, leaving the field clear
for mammals and birds. Primates evolve in your last year of life, and in your last month
primitive pre-humans appear. Early humans spread from Africa to Europe and Asia by
Christmas in your last year, and then modern man evolves 2 days before you turn 100 and
spreads across the globe only during your last day.
Through all this, the planet shaped life, life shaped the planet, and cosmic events
shaped both.
Cosmic events shaped the Earth. The Moon-forming impact changed our
atmosphere and the core, which generates the magnetic force-field that protects us from so
much harmful solar radiation. The Moons tides stir the oceans, and the off-balance tilt of
our planet gives us seasons and orbital cycles of warmth and cold that even drove the
evolution of humans. Comets and asteroids have pelted us from the dawn of time,
sometimes bringing life-enabling chemicals, sometimes devastation.
Geologic events shaped life. Shifting tectonic plates gave us CO2-producing
volcanoes, mountains that erode and trap CO2 in the process, and ocean depths where old
crust and carbon is consumed for recycling in more eruptions. Shifting continents at times
allowed the global spread of creatures like dinosaurs and mammals, and at times
marooned life to evolve independently, like the kangaroo and apes. It reconfigured ocean
currents that changed global climate, tipping the planet into the ice ages that gripped the
world over the last 3 million years, driving the evolution of man. Even life itself seems to
have started as a rock-life hybrid in magma-powered underwater springs.
Life shaped the Earth. From the beginning, life started to mold the Earth in its own
image as stromatolites. Sunlight-harvesting germs gave the world oxygen that caused
the world to freeze, but they also made oxygenated minerals and ores, and saved our
oceans. Life colonizing land changed weathering, the carbon balance, and climate. It
generated more oxygen to support bigger animals that grew legs to walk on the green land.
New plants that grew tall on the strength of wood became coal, while algae died to give us
oil.
Rare, copious volcanic outpourings called Large Igneous Provinces punctuated
evolution by producing global warming, ocean acidification, and oxygen-starved seas.
They induced these climate changes by emitting vast quantities of CO2 and Methane faster
than the planet could safely absorb it, with devastating consequences for life at those
times.

Now we live in a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene. Humans are just
as much of an innovation to the Earth-climate-life system as the cyanobacteria that gave
the world oxygen, or the worms that churned up the Cambrian sea bed and changed ocean
chemistry. We are generating CO2 at rates and quantities to rival those Large Igneous
Provinces, dwarfing the CO2 produced by volcanoes in recent millennia. We cant expect
the balance between climate, life and Earth to remain inert to this human-induced change.
Rather, we can expect it to behave as it has done so many times before.
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Part 2: Techniques of time travel

When you think about it, it is an act of breathtaking audacity to plot the story of
Earth deep into the past, before history, before people, even before life. Yet it is the same
intrepidly inquisitive instinct that put man on the Moon, sailed the unexplored oceans, or
invented the airplane. The force that drove our ancestors to replace stone tools with metal
ones, or to take control of their food supply by farming, is the same self-improving force
that drives scientific inquiry. It is as human as our DNA.
Your Life as Planet Earth is a story revealed by some amazingly smart
deductions from evidence gleaned through all branches of science, across all scales of
observation from the microscopic to the cosmic. It is not fiction, and neither is it an
embroidered creation over a thin armature of evidence. Every fact is backed by scientific
evidence referenced to its source, and most of those sources are from respected scientific
journals that employ a peer-review checking process before they publish the information
to the world.
Some of that evidence is strong, some is more controversial. The deeper recesses
of Earths history the first 2 billion years or so are fraught with difficulty, for instance.
Of course, to describe every piece of evidence and to flesh-out every argument would take
as much space as a large university library, so I have focused on a few key areas of
evidence: cosmic origins, a dynamic planet, evolution of life, clocking time, and sampling
ancient climates.
New research is performed all the time, so fresh insights are likely, and some
conclusions are bound to be proven wrong at some point. Thats an essential aspect of
science its conclusions can be tested and either confirmed or disproved. Yet the basic
skeleton of facts tends to remain over time, being fleshed-out and brought into eversharper focus with each new research result, even if the finer details change.

1. Origin

What souvenirs remain of the dark beginning of our Solar System?

The oldest Earth-formed specks (zircon crystals from Jack Hills, Australia) are too
young - only 4.4 billion years old as are the oldest complete rocks at 4.2 billion years
old. That leaves the first 400 million years (or your first 8 years of Your Life as Planet
Earth) without Earth-rock evidence. Fortunately, we do have rocks older than that. We
have space rocks meteorites and lunar samples - and they tell us a great deal about the
origin of the Solar System and the Earth.

Cosmic sediments
Dating the birth of the Solar System
The date for the birth of the Solar System is measured from a kind of mottled
meteorite called a CI chondrite and on basalt-like meteorites called angrites.
Chondrites are essentially cosmic sediments composed of grains and sooty specks that
clumped together in space at the birth of the Solar System. The proportions of chemical
elements in CI chondrites closely match the proportions in our Sun so they are thought to
represent the primitive composition of our Solar System as a whole. They also contain a
kind of granule called a CAI (calcium-aluminum-rich inclusion) which, due to their
chemistry and high melting point, were probably the first minerals to condense from the
solar nebula. The age of CAIs is therefore taken as the de facto age of our Solar System,
and they, together with angrite meteorites, yield dates of 4.5682 billion years give or take
400,000 years.
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Planet formation from Enlightenment to Space Age

Any plausible explanation of the formation of our Solar System must be consistent
with some present-day observable facts: (1) the planets contain most of the angular
momentum (rotating force) in the Solar System, (2) all the planets orbit the Sun in the
same plane, which is also the Suns equator, and (3) most planets rotate in the same
direction, and most have their equator parallel to the Suns.
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The Nebular Hypothesis for the formation of

our Solar System actually predates the space-age by a long way. Originally suggested by
the German Enlightenment-era philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1755, then refined by

Laplace in 1796, it has since been refined by space-age scrutiny. Telescopes like the
Hubble, Spitzer and Herschel Space Telescopes have revealed stellar nurseries in huge
clouds of gas and dust (nebulae), with thousands of young suns burning within them. In
some, like the Orion and Trifid Nebulae, astronomers have photographed young stars at
their earliest stage of formation, in the center of disks of dust, just like that inferred for our
early Solar System. The light emitted by these disks reveals their composition of water
ice, silicate rock, methanol and carbon dioxide, similar to our own Solar System.
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NASAs space probe visit to the asteroid Vesta backs this up. The spacecraft
measurements matched Vesta with meteorites found on Earth, and revealed it to be an
embryonic planet formed from chondrite meteorites, preserved today as it was in the early
days of the Solar System. Earth must have been like Vesta in its infancy.
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The laws of physics (specifically the conservation of angular momentum) dictate

that as these discs of dust are drawn inwards towards their embryonic stars by gravity, the
contracting mass is forced to spin faster (just the way an ice skater spins faster as they
contract their arms) and so the particles collectively flatten into to a disk rather than a
sphere or any other shape. In this way planets form in the same plane as the Suns equator,
spinning the same direction as the sun.
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15 Embryonic solar systems: Hubble Space Telescope image of the

Orion Nebula showing 5 young stars surrounded by gas and dust disks
that may go on to develop planets. Inset: close-up of a young star under
a million years old within a protoplanetary disk about 7 times larger
than our solar system. Credit: C.R. ODell/ Rice University; NASA

Moon formation
The Giant Impact Hypothesis is one of several ideas that have been put forward

to explain our Moon, but it matches the evidence best and a broad consensus of scientists
accepts it. The evidence for the Giant Impact comes from the chemical composition of
the Moon and Earth, their physical structure, and the constraints imposed by the present
orbit of the Moon.
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Chemical twins
Lunar rock brought back by the US Apollo and Soviet Luna missions are
remarkably similar to the Earth rocks anorthosite and basalt. Of course there are
differences due to the harsh lunar environment lunar samples are pitted by microscopic
meteorite impacts, altered by cosmic rays, and show internal signs of shocks from asteroid
impacts. They are also totally dry and have not been oxidized.
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These samples reveal that the Moon and Earth are compositional twins.
Proportions of isotopes (meaning the same elements but with fractionally different masses,
such as those of titanium, tungsten, oxygen and hydrogen ) in these rocks are exactly
the same in the Earth and the Moon, yet there are large chemical differences with other
Solar System objects. This tells us the Moon and the Earth formed together from a
largely shared source.
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Tying down the date of that impact is helped by the fact that uranium-to-lead ratios
can be graphed back to an event of major loss of lead from Earths crust and mantle
roughly 100 million years after the formation of the Solar System, when it and other heavy
elements sank to the core through a magma ocean created by the Giant Impact. This
timing coincides neatly with a rubidium-strontium radiometric date for the Moon, which is
70-100 million years after Solar System formation. The conversion of iodine to xenon by
radioactive decay also points to a huge loss of xenon from the Earth at around 100 million
years after formation.
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Interestingly, the Moons relative lack of volatile elements, like sodium, potassium,
and light isotopes of zinc, dovetails with the missing xenon. Their loss is explained by
the searing heat of the Giant Impact which drove our primordial atmosphere and lighter
elements of rock vapor into space. It also makes sense of Earths relatively thin
atmosphere today compared to Venus. Without the Giant Impact, the Earth may well
have retained its primordial atmosphere and suffered the sterilizing runaway greenhouse
conditions that Venus suffers from now.
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Trojans and orbits

The Earth-Moon orbit, Earths tilted daily-rotation axis, and the Moons slow
recession away from us, are all explained by the Giant Impact. More evidence comes from
our Moons relatively large size compared to Earth, unlike the relatively small moons of
most other planets in the Solar System, which makes sense if it formed from an impactmixture of another planet (Theia) and Earth debris. The Moons core is proportionally
much smaller than the cores of other terrestrial planets, as we would expect from its
formation from impact debris around the more massive Earth, which would have captured
more of the heavier particles after the impact.
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Computer calculations of giant impacts, using the laws of physics governing mass,
gravity and angular momentum, show how a Moon-forming Giant Impact is a very

feasible way to create our Moon. But these simulations also suggest an intriguing
possibility that the Earth had more than one moon in its childhood.
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Evidence for 2 moons

Companion moons are a common outcome

from such simulations, although most of their orbits are unstable, so they quickly impact
or fly off into space. However, if a companion moon forms at a Trojan Point (a point
about 60 degrees ahead or behind our Moon but in the same orbit as our Moon) it can
survive for tens of millions of years before crumpling slowly into the larger moon at subsonic speeds. By that time the smaller moon would have solidified, but the larger moon
would still be partly molten. The slow impact leaves a rubble pile over the larger moon,
rather than blasting a high-energy, mantle-melting crater, and the added weight of that
debris squishes the still-molten lunar mantle to the other side, the side we see from Earth.
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Although not universally accepted, this conjecture neatly explains the lunar
highlands on the far side of the Moon compared with the flatter landscape of basalt lavas
that we see from Earth. Recent gravity surveys of the Moon support this idea. They found
the highlands to be 12% less dense than expected from the rest of the Moon (consistent
with the rubble pile from a smaller moon), and found giant lava-filled cracks in the
Moons crust showing the Moon added 10km (6mi) to its circumference at a time after it
was partly cooled. Satellite measurements of the composition of the far side of the
Moon also confirm its rocks have not gone through as much chemical differentiation as
the near side of the Moon, as would be expected from a smaller moon that solidified
quickly.
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16 The Big Splat collision of 2 moons to create our present single

moon with remnants of the smaller moon forming the mountainous far
side. 1 to 3 redrawn from computer simulations by Jutzi & Asphaug 2011,
photo from NASA LRO

Other ideas and why they dont work:

At one time there were three main competing ideas for the Moons formation. The
first was that the Earth and the Moon formed next to each other at the same time. But the
different densities of the Moon and Earth are not feasible if they congealed from the same
part of the nebula, and its very unlikely the neighbors would have avoided collision.
The second idea was that the Moon spun off from the Earth, but for this to work the Moon
would have to orbit Earth around its equator which it doesnt. The third idea was that
the Moon was a passing planet that got captured into orbit around Earth. But this idea
cant account for the chemical similarities between the Earth and the Moon, and the
vanishingly small chance that the Moon could approach Earth without either slamming
into us or just deflecting into space again.

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The lost elements clues to Earths childhood

Since the Earth is made up originally from asteroids and comets, you might expect
the proportions of elements in Earth rock samples to be the same as those for meteorites
(asteroids that fell to Earth). They arent, and this tells us a great deal about what
happened in the early childhood of the Earth.

Iron-lovers
I mentioned the loss of lead from the Earths crust and mantle that helps tie the

Giant Impact to about 100 million years after the formation of the Solar System. But
evidence for the wholesale melting of a large proportion of Earths mantle comes in the
form of the abundance (or lack of it) of other metals such as manganese, nickel, cobalt,
gold and platinum. These so-called siderophile (iron-lover) elements dissolve in iron
at the temperatures and pressures within the Earth. When you plot their abundance against
their concentrations in meteorites, you see that they are strangely depleted compared to
other metals. This is explained by iron, along with those other metals, sinking into the
Earths core through a Magma Ocean while the mantle was mostly molten after the
Giant Impact. The quantities of these iron-lovers that remain in rocks near the surface (that
we mine for precious metals) are paradoxically greater than you would expect after core
formation. In fact there is some evidence (based on tungsten isotopes in some of the oldest
crustal rocks) that our crust was topped-up with these precious metals by asteroids that
bombarded Earth after the core was already formed. This late veneer of asteroid
material seems to have happened everywhere in our Solar System.
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Rejected daughters

A clue for how quickly the

Earth cooled after the Giant Impact can be found in isotopes of the gas xenon, which I
mentioned above in dating the Giant Impact. Xenon is rejected during mineral formation,
so it escapes into the atmosphere through volcanoes or a magma ocean. Isotopes, you may
recall, are the same element but with fractionally different mass. The lighter isotope
xenon-129 was produced by radioactive decay of short-lived iodine-129 which went
extinct in the natural world a very long time ago. The heavier isotopes xenon-131 to136
were produced by a different, longer-lived parent (Plutonium-244), which is also longextinct. And thats the clever bit we can use these xenon daughters to infer what was
happening to their parents while they were still around in those first few tens-to-hundreds
of millions of years after the formation of the Solar System!
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They show that more than 98% of the xenon offspring from the shorter-lived
parent iodine-129 was lost to space from the hot atmosphere, but only around 70% of the

xenon offspring from the longer-lived parent Plutonium-244 was lost. In other words, we
lost much more xenon earlier, and much less later, so the Earths mantle must have
cooled quickly in first 200 to 400 hundred million years after the Giant Impact. In fact it
cooled by about 300C, which is more than it has cooled in the entire time since then,
much faster than the present rate of mantle cooling of about 40C per billion years. Such
rapid cooling means that heat was lost from the mantle very efficiently through strong
churning of a magma ocean, and precludes a thick, insulating crust.
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This paints a picture of the Earth soon after the Giant Impact, covered by a mosaic
of black and yellow, patches of bright liquid seething to the surface, crusting to black and
sinking beneath the yellow glow of fresh lava, resurfacing the entire planet every million
years or so, in a scene resembling the surface of lava lakes in active volcanoes today
(albeit on a much larger scale).
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Freezing the mantle

There is considerable uncertainty in how long the mantle (as opposed to the crust)
took to solidify after the Giant Impact and before the Jack Hills zircons. Estimates vary
between around 1 to 5 million to 50 million years to freeze the mantle, and then
another 100 to 200 million years before radioactive heat remelted the mantle enough to
allow it to move as it does today. But these studies do agree that the Earth cooled much
more slowly once it was covered by a solid crust, just as the lid on a cooking pot keeps its
contents warm.

30 7

Flaccid early crust - before plate tectonics

In your first memories I mentioned a type of very resilient mineral called zircon
that constitutes the earliest trace of our Earth, from 4.4 billion years ago. Within zircons
like these, extracted from the oldest rocks on Earth, there are measurable impurities of a
chemical element called hafnium (Hf). One isotope of hafnium (176Hf) is a product of
radioactive decay, so its ratio to another isotope (177Hf) changes over time. When that
ratio is plotted against the samples formation date, most rock samples plot along the
straight line we would expect from continual melting and differentiating of the Earths
mantle from an original asteroid composition. But the most ancient rock samples (from
Jack Hills in Australia and the Acasta Gneiss from Canada) plot along an entirely different
line, showing that they formed independently in crust that stayed stable for hundreds of
millions of years. That is far longer than modern oceanic crust survives, and so it tells us
that the world worked differently back then, without the plate tectonics of the modern
planet.
4

In fact, some rocks from that time are of a type called komatites which have a
high level of magnesium oxide in them. These only form at temperatures about 350C
hotter than even the hottest basalt lavas of today. Scientists plugged these temperatures
and rock properties into computer models that run equations for the physics of fluid
dynamics, viscosity, buoyancy, stress, strain, and heat flow. The models showed that the
crust was too weak back then to sustain subduction - the process of one tectonic plate
descending into the mantle beneath another, which is necessary to sustain plate tectonics.
It took a long time before the crust cooled enough to gain the strength needed for
subduction and the steady mantle circulation and cooling that goes along with it. Careful
31

analysis of over 70,000 rock samples from across the globe backs this up. It shows the
clear geochemical signal of long-term, gradual cooling in the mantle and crust starting
roughly 3.2 billion years ago, consistent with the steady loss of heat through mantle
convection after subduction and plate tectonics was initiated at that time.
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Last tango of Saturn and Jupiter

Dating Moon rock samples from the Apollo and Luna missions yielded a curious
gap in impact craters older than about 4 billion years, and also showed that after about 3.5
billion years ago crater formation was at least 100 times less frequent. Since most of
the samples were collected from impact craters on the near side of the Moon, it was
reasonable to suspect the samples were dominated by a few major impacts, obscuring
older dates. In fact samples from Apollo 16 and 17 were later found to be dominated by a
single impact 3.9 billion years ago. So scientists turned to bits of the Moon that fell to
Earth as meteorites in places like Libya and Antarctica to supplement their data, but so far
these have just confirmed the gap. Lunar geologists have also mapped the craters in
lunar reconnaissance photos, building up a detailed sequence of crater formation. This
allows them use the ages from the few lunar samples to bracket the ages of many other
craters, and again shows that 80% of the Moons surface was resurfaced by impacts
between the formation of the Nectaris and Orientale basins (3.92 to around 3.8 billion
years ago, a duration of 120 million years). In other words there was a Late Heavy
Bombardment of the Moon during the teen years in Your Life as Planet Earth. But the
paucity of samples and dating uncertainties do allow for a more protracted bombardment
potentially lasting more than 400 million years.
441 32

441

441 32

32

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The Moon retains its ancient

cratered face, but all the craters from the bombardment on Earth have long since eroded
away. Fortunately we can estimate what the bombardment was like on Earth by
extrapolating from the Moon. The Earth was both a bigger target and more massive (with
more gravitational pull) than the Moon, so it would have been hit about 20 times more
often than the Moon.
11

Since the craters on Earth have been erased, direct evidence instead comes from
microscopic glass spheres that form from condensing rock vapor after an impact. These
spherules have been recovered from dated sediments, revealing the frequency and size
of ancient asteroid impacts. It shows that impacts big enough to spread molten rock
droplets across the entire globe were frequent well after the traditional end of the Late
Heavy Bombardment, only tailing off by around 2.5 billion years ago.
36

The clues to the cause of this cosmic hailstorm came from peculiar orbits of
objects in the Kuiper Belt, the distant cloud of asteroids that includes Pluto. Scientists
found that some asteroids in the Kuiper Belt orbited in a regular dance with Neptune,
orbiting the Sun either twice for every three, or once for every two of Neptunes orbits.
Other objects in the Kuiper Belt have strangely elongate orbits, or orbits that take them
well out of the Solar System plane, and some have compositions that must have formed
much closer to the Sun before finding themselves at the outer boondocks of the Solar
system.
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Solving how the Solar System could end up in its current configuration, including
the Kuiper Belt oddities, starting from a disk of dust and planetary embryos, has in large
part relied on computer models controlled by the laws of physics concerning gravity and
orbits. It turns out that to get to the current configuration from the earliest days of the
Solar System, you have to start with a more compact distribution of the planets like
rewinding a video of a game of billiards. Fast-forwarding the orbits reveals a critical point
at the beginning of the Late Heavy Bombardment when Jupiter and Saturn begin to
resonate with each other in a kind of cosmic tango. This instability yanks Neptune and
Uranus out of their stable orbits, which in turn scatters comets and asteroids throughout
the Solar System, including towards Earth. This idea is known as the Nice Model (not
because its especially pleasing, but after the French city where it was discussed).
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Armageddon?
Ever since we discovered that the dinosaurs were wiped off the planet by an
asteroid, we have had a cultural obsession with impacts, resulting in more than a few
disaster movies. But only recently have we begun to assess the real threat of an impact
catastrophe. Tens of thousands of centimeter-sized objects burn up in our atmosphere
yearly, as do a few meter-scale objects. The fireballs they make are detected by
monitoring satellites and ground-based sound recorders, or observed as shooting stars.
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 Its the bigger objects, 50-100m (150-300ft)

or larger, in orbits that come near us, which might pose a danger. NASAs estimate for the
number of those is unsettling: roughly 5,000, of which only 30 percent have actually been
located. NASA maintains a watch on Near-Earth Objects it has identified, including a
325-meter-wide (1,000 foot) asteroid named Apophis which has a very small chance of an
impact with Earth in 2068. In fact we seem to be buzzed by a sizeable asteroid every
few months, like 2012 DA14 that missed us by just 15 minutes on February 15 2013, on
the same day that a 13,000 ton asteroid exploded in the sky above Chelyabinsk in Russia,
injuring more than 1,000 people.
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448

To date some 185 impact craters have been positively identified on Earth, with
new ones logged every year, and estimates suggest there are another 700 or so that we
havent found yet. To determine if a crater was caused by an impact rather than another
cause (like a volcano, salt movement, or folding), scientists look for the fingerprints of a
high velocity impact and its resulting shock wave. These include characteristic shock
fractures in quartz grains, beads of glass cooled from vaporized rock (impact spherules),
minerals like stishovite that only form under extreme pressures, abnormally high levels of
the element iridium, evidence of melting, and crater-sized cone-shaped fractures.
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445

And if the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact, maybe the other mass
extinctions like the Permian Great Dying were also caused by asteroids?
Not so fast.
Although there was an impact in Brazil about 3 million years before the Permian
extinction (almost coincident given the date uncertainty), it was comparatively small so it
cant explain the extinction and all the other documented environmental effects of that
time by itself. It may have released a large amount of methane into the atmosphere by
breaking up oil shales (fracking), which would have added greenhouse gasses to those
emanating from the Siberian Traps eruptions. An extensive search for a larger impact at
the time of the Permian mass extinction failed to find the high levels of iridium, shocked
quartz and impact spherules that would be expected, and no smoking gun impact
crater has been found and it would have to be big! Instead, all indicators for the cause of
the Permian Great Dying point to huge rises in atmospheric greenhouse gasses caused by
immense volcanic eruptions.

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176 174 180 181 178

Even the Cretaceous Chicxulub impact, which is widely credited with the end of

the dinosaurs, was not the only killer at the time. Indian volcanic eruptions around the
same time undoubtedly did affect the climate, and began the mass extinction 150,000
years before the impact that finished off the dinosaurs.
245 450

Rapid climate changes induced by greenhouse gas emissions from the same class
of immense volcanic eruptions that caused the Permian Great Dying, have been
consistently far more deadly to life on Earth than asteroid or comet impacts.
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2. The Terra Firma Illusion

Terra firma, bedrock, rock solid, rock of ages they all convey solidity,
constancy, reliability. For that reason rock is the brand image for many a bank and
insurance company. And for the most part, on the scale of our normal experience, nothing
is as solid as a rock, as permanent as a mountain, or as firm as the ground beneath our feet.
But just as the stability of financial institutions sometimes proves illusory, so is the
constancy of our Earth.
The solid Earth moves in many ways beyond our normal perception.

Drifting continents
It wasnt until the early 20th century that continental drift was surmised, and even
then it took decades to be widely accepted, but these days its not so hard to prove
continental drift we can just measure it.
The same GPS (Global Positioning System) that you use in your car or your
smartphone is also used to measure continental drift, and NASA displays these data on
their website. GPS measurements reveal ongoing plate movements today, such as the
collision of India into Asia moving at 4cm a year (1 in) on the Indian side, tapering off
to very slow changes north of Tibet. They also show the Himalayas herniating towards
China at around 2 cm (1 in) a year.
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17 GPS measurements show tectonic movement. Redrawn from Searle,

et al, J. Geol. Soc. 2011 over MODIS image by NASA
Scientists supplement GPS measurements with Very Long Baseline
Interferometry (using natural radio signals from quasars in deep space) and Satellite
Laser Ranging (using pulses of laser light bounced off satellites). Together, these survey
techniques have been crucial in plotting continental drift over the last few decades, but
they are little help in working out what is going on below the surface to drive this process.
For that geologists use a combination of field geology, calculations from earthquake
signals, and highly sensitive measurements of the Earths magnetic field.

Discovering drift
In fact, continental drift was discovered through just those techniques. The German
meteorologist and explorer Alfred Wegner, when he first described the concept of
continental drift back in 1912, was convinced by the way continents fit together like
jigsaw puzzle pieces, and by the matching distribution of plant fossils and rock types
across now widely-separated continents. Wegners ideas didnt gain widespread
acceptance until decades later it was counterintuitive that solid landmasses could drift,
or that continents could plow their way through solid rock. And besides, what possible
mechanism could drive such an epic process?
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In 1962 Harry Hess, an American geologist, made the pivotal insight into both the
process of continental drift and the mechanism that drives it. He knew that since the
1950s, surveys had identified underwater mountain chains all across the globe, forming a
Great Global Rift. He noticed that these mid-ocean ridges were always at the median
line between continents, had very high heat-flow, and conducted earthquake waves
strangely slowly, showing they were partly liquid. He deduced they must be zones where
the mantle wells-up hot fresh magma. Noticing that ocean floors have relatively little
sediment accumulation near mid-ocean ridges, he concluded that oceanic crust must be
young. Putting all the evidence together he concluded that the mantle was convecting circulating like a heat-driven conveyor belt - at around 1 cm ( inch) a year, with mid
ocean ridges marking the location of the rising part of the convection cycle. He realized
that this mantle convection was moving continents passively around the globe rather than
plowing through the mantle, and he realized that there must be descending parts of the
convection cycle where oceanic crust gets destroyed in a jaw-crusher - as he called it when it is shoved beneath continents. So Hess had proposed the mechanism that drives
continental drift, and further proof was soon to follow.
453

Magnetic zebra
In the 1920s a Japanese scientist named Motonori Matuyama established that the
Earth had undergone switches in its magnetic field, flipping north to south and back again.
This information became pivotal for our story the year Hess published his theories of sea
floor spreading, as the ship HMS Owen conducted a magnetic survey of the Indian Ocean.
When British scientists Drummond Matthews and Fred Vine graphed their magnetic
measurements, they showed a regular pattern of alternating strong and weak magnetic
field. They realized that these were a recording of the magnetic field flips that Matuyama
had described, fossilized into the ocean floor like zebra stripes, whose pattern formed a

mirror image either side of mid-ocean ridges. Other scientists found similar patterns in the
North Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, so it had to be a global phenomenon.
Vine and Matthews realized that their stripes were proof of Hesss theory of the
continuous production of new crust along mid-ocean ridges. Fresh lava at the ridge is
constantly cooling and freezing-in the magnetic field of the time, and is constantly
separating as the sea floor spreads, with the gap filled by fresh lava in a continuous
process.
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Jaw-crusher

The missing part of the puzzle was what

happened at the other end of the sea floor to make room for all that spreading Hesss
jaw crusher. Thats where seismologists (earthquake scientists) came in. For some time
they had noticed a distinct concentration of earthquakes around the Pacific Ocean. They
found that the zone of earthquakes tended to plunge deeper into the Earth the further away
from the ocean they occurred. They realized that the quakes are the rattle of Hesss jawcrusher as oceanic crust plunges into the mantle in a zone of crust destruction called a
subduction zone.
The Canadian geologist Tuzo Wilson realized that these processes must have
driven oceans to widen and shrink, and caused to continents to break apart and collide
through geological time. He and many others refined the idea of continental drift into
plate tectonics through the sixties and seventies, and since that pioneering work, a
host of new evidence, including videos of underwater eruptions and geothermal vents at
mid-ocean ridges and geophysical surveys, has confirmed the theory. And to circle back to
those GPS measurements, they do show Hesss deduced spreading at mid-ocean ridges,
and his jaw crusher collision of plates at subduction zones.
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Realizing that our Earth is made of tectonic plates, dynamic at the rate of a
fingernails growth, has been the crucial epiphany for understanding so much about our
planet. It explains earthquakes and volcanoes, building mountains and subsiding basins. It
enables scientists to predict the locations of oil reserves and mineral deposits. In short, it is
geologys unifying theory.

CAT scan results

Since then, advances in geophysics have enabled us to see into the Earth with

increasing clarity to reveal structures within the crust and beneath, all the way to the core.
This is an exciting time as satellite-based gravity and magnetic surveys vie with
seismic imaging for ever clearer and deeper views of our planets tectonic engine-room.
Weve come a long way since Wegner.
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Scientists measuring the electrical conductivity through mid-ocean ridges have

shown that the separation of tectonic plates is a passive process. Plates are pulled apart by
mantle movement and sinking of the subducting edge of the plate. The pulling-apart
lowers the pressure between plates, which causes the mantle in between to melt and rise,
filling fissures that form as the plates tear apart. Geothermal heat powers seawater
through the newly-solidified, cracked crust until it jets into the ocean as hydrothermal
vents or black smokers, and this spreading zone is relatively buoyant, riding high as the
mountainous chain of mid-ocean ridges.
459

Seismic imaging, using echoes from artificial shockwaves or from natural

earthquakes, has revealed ever more information about the structure and processes of the
deep crust, the mantle and even the core. As computing power and storage capacity
increased, they permitted seismologists to record and process ever larger quantities of
data. Seismologists now use hundreds of thousands of earthquake traces from hundreds
of natural earthquakes across the globe, detected in monitoring stations distributed across
large sections of the world. They analyze the spectra of the earthquake waves and
compare miniscule differences in the wave shapes recorded at different locations for the
same earthquake, in order to assess the properties of the rocks that the waves passed
through on their journey across the interior of Earth. In this way they build a 3dimensional image, just like a medical CAT-scan or MRI, of the crust and mantle.
316

Seismic tomography shows the Pacific crust plunging to annihilation beneath

Washington State and California. It reveals graveyards of broken pieces of subducted plate
buried under the Pacific Northwest of the USA; a plume of magma extending from the
hadean depths of the mantle feeding the Yellowstone Supervolcano; ancient crust that
underpins the Great Plains and parts of the Rocky Mountains; and even gobs of crust
dripping off into the mantle from under the Colorado Plateau. It reveals finger-like
plumes of hot mantle dotted all across the Pacific that are smeared into channels by the
motion of the overlying tectonic plate. These plumes also show up in satellite-based
gravity measurements, corresponding with hot spots all over the globe.
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Mantle Plumes seem to protrude from enigmatic Plume Generation Zones - belts
near Earths core that appear to leak hot fingers of core-mantle magma towards the
surface. These zones are like skirts enclosing two large mushy regions at the core-mantle
boundary, one beneath Africa and the northern Atlantic nicknamed Tuzo, and the other
beneath the western Pacific, nicknamed Jason. Both these regions, and the Plume
Generation Zones around them, seem to have remained remarkably static over at least the
last 500 million years, even as continents drifted high above them the way clouds drift
over a landscape.
455

Mantle Plumes are also linked to those catastrophic eruptions that caused global
warming and extinctions in Earths past, known as Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs).
178

18 Seismic tomography revealing a mantle plume beneath Yellowstone.

Redder colors are molten/semi-molten zones that slow down
earthquake waves. Redrawn in 3D from 2D sections in Obrebski et al,
Geophys. J. Int. (2011).

Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) vs Volcanoes

We are some way from being able to predict volcanic eruptions reliably, but there
have been some successes. In one example, US and Philippine scientists successfully
forecast the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Their forecast saved at least 5,000 lives and
at least $250 million in property damage. Hopefully we will see many more examples
like this as new technology and research is brought to bear. For instance, satellite surveys
using a sophisticated radar technique called InSAR can now reveal volcanoes swelling
with magma buildup before eruptions, and geophysicists have found characteristic
long-period seismic waves can signal an imminent eruption.
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Volcanoes a double-edged sword for our climate

Explosive volcanoes like Pinatubo and El Chichon usually occur above subduction

zones

where

waterlogged

plates

plunge

into

white-hot

mantle.

They release CO2 when they erupt, which

combines with CO2 from eruptions all over the world over many millennia to keep the
planet from freezing. But violent eruptions also inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere
where it converts to sulfate, which acts like sunscreen in the short term. Consequently we
see cold periods lasting a few years after large eruptions like Laki in 1783, Tambora in
1815, and Cosiguina in 1835, El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Laki
caused a severe winter in 1783/4 and a range of extreme weather across the globe, while
Tambora caused a year without a summer in 1816. Earlier volcanic-induced cold periods
are even documented in medieval Irish chronicles.
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But other volcanoes occur away from subduction zones and spreading ridges, in
the middle of plates. They seem to be associated with mantle plumes, like the one beneath
Yellowstone. The plumes burn hot spot volcanoes through the solid crust above them,
sometimes making long island chains, like the Hawaiian-Emperor chain. Usually these
volcanoes are non-explosive, with hot, runny lava like at Hawaii. But sometimes local
conditions can make even these volcanoes explosive, for example if the volcano erupts
through a glacier (as was the case for the Eyjafjallajkull eruption that grounded European
flights in 2010). And sometimes the plume magma is mixed with more explosive magma
melted from continental crust around it like at Yellowstone.
Large Igneous Provinces are not your regular volcanoes
Even Hawaii, Pinatubo, Vesuvius and Tambora are dwarfed by the epic
outpourings of lava known as Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs). Every year there are
something like 50 to 65 volcanic eruptions, but we havent had a LIP eruption in 16
million years. LIPs are about 40 times larger than even our largest modern-day
volcano (Hawaii) and seem to be caused by mantle plumes interacting with continental
crust, injecting sheets of super-hot, very liquid magma through sediments underground, as
well as smothering enormous areas of the Earths surface under lakes of lava. They are a
throwback to the eruptive incontinence of the pre-teen Earth, conducting heat and magma
from the lower mantle to the surface. LIPs are concentrated at times when continents are
fragmenting, and at places which occur over deep mantle Plume Generation Zones. As
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more and more LIPs are analyzed across the world, its clear that the combination of their
extraordinary scale (some cover 1% of the planets surface) erupted over short time
periods (geologically speaking) and their ability to release prodigious quantities of
greenhouse gasses (directly, and also by baking the crust they erupt through), makes them
so disruptive to the climate.
272 178

19A Large Igneous Province (LIP) eruption compared to the worlds

largest active volcano today. Loosely based on Svensen et al EPSL 2009,
Howarth et al Lithos 2014, Elkins-Tanton GSA Spec Pub 2005, Keller et al
J Geol Soc India 2011, Li et al Nature Geoscience 2014.

Wandering poles
But what of the wanderings of continents in the deep past?

 The evidence for that comes

from the same kind of magnetic phenomenon that Vine and Matthews measured in the
Indian Ocean. But rather than surveying vast swathes of crust, scientists measure the fossil
magnetic field frozen into individual rock samples of different ages. As molten rocks cool,
some crystals record the direction of Earths magnetic field within them. In fact, rocks
dont even have to be molten, they just have to be heated above their curie temperature
which is much cooler (in the case of iron oxide its less than half the melting temperature).
So the magnetic direction of these minerals is set and reset any time they are heated above
their curie temperature.
As any school kid knows, the Earths magnetic field points outwards at the south
magnetic pole and curves until it points inwards again at the north magnetic pole. So,
knowing how steeply the magnetic field dips into (or out of) the ground tells you how far
north or south you are. In this way, rocks can record their latitude of formation and its
often far from their present latitude. Unfortunately this doesnt help with their east-west
location (longitude) but with enough samples these studies of fossil magnetism (or
paleomagnetics) plot a continents journey through time, and show when different parts
of a continent came together. There are now sufficient data to plot the wandering
continents back hundreds of millions, even billions of years ago.
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466 117

Ghosts of continents past

It seems improbable that there could be any trace left of a piece of Earths crust
after it has been through Hesss jaw-crusher, descended into the hellish temperatures and
pressures of the mantle, melted and conveyed through the planets interior, and then
erupted in some new location on the surface. And yet, like a suspects DNA left at a crime
scene, chemical traces of long-ago-lost crust can be revealed through exquisitely sensitive
geochemical measurements.
They say diamonds are forever and perhaps they are right. The timing of the
beginning of subduction was hotly debated until a recent study of some remarkably

resilient diamonds was published. The scientists dated microscopic impurities locked in
diamonds that had been dragged from deep beneath ancient continental roots by more
recent volcanic eruptions. Impurities in the diamonds that were more than 3 billion years
old were made of peridotite, a kind of olivine-rich rock that makes up the upper part of the
Earths mantle. But a different impurity eclogite only showed up in younger
diamonds. Eclogite is created by the ultra-high pressure cooking of slabs of oceanic crust
during subduction. The switch in the type of impurity told scientists that the Wilson
Cycle - rock recycling through subduction - started roughly 3 billion years ago,
consistent with the change in mantle cooling rate at that time, that I mentioned in the last
chapter (those rejected daughters and that flaccid crust).
55

Even oxygen-free traces of sediments that were subducted into the mantle before
the Great Oxidation Event (Earths mid-life crisis) can be detected in volcanic glass from
recent eruptions at some mid-ocean ridges today a recycling that took more than 2.5
billion years to complete. Subducted sediments can also leave tell-tale variations in
isotopes of hafnium trapped in resilient little zircon crystals like those we spoke of as
Earths first memories. These hafnium isotopes are ghosts of sediments past because
they indicate the kinds of sediments that lay on long-vanished seabeds before they
disappeared during an ancient continental collision, millions or billions of years before
they were recycled into the crust again as fresh igneous rocks.
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468

Starting subduction
There are chemical fingerprints for both the onset of subduction and the steady
cooling of the mantle since then. Those hafnium isotopes I just mentioned also reveal the
beginning of subduction through a marked change in the growth rate of continental crust
around 3.2 billion years ago, in line with the appearance of those subduction-flagging
diamonds. 57
56

55

On top of that evidence, statistical analysis of over 70,000 rock samples has also
found the tell-tale chemical signature of long term crust recycling, mantle churning, and
progressive cooling. Lava at mid ocean ridges and other volcanoes fed by mantle magma
show a decline in concentrations of nickel, chromium and magnesium, but an increase in
sodium and potassium, over the last 3 billion years or so. This change reflects the
reduction in the proportion of mantle thats actually molten from about 30% 3 billion
years ago, to about 10% in todays cooler mantle. Continental rocks have changed too.
Ratios of indicator elements like sodium/potassium, lanthanum/ytterbium and the
proportion of europium to other Rare-Earth Elements, have progressively reduced over
the last 3 billion years or so, reflecting the continued evolution of a repeatedly melted,
maturing continental crust.
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Amasia the next supercontinent?

So, in the century since Continental Drift was first posited, a great accumulation of
evidence has confirmed and refined the theory into Plate Tectonics. Multiple lines of
evidence narrate the story of wandering ancient continents, their collisions and the
building of mountain chains, their inevitable break-up and renewed journeys until our
present-day geography is arrived at. And in knowing this, it is clear that todays globe of
seeming permanence is just a snapshot, a moment of illusory stillness on a continuum of

change, which will eventually lead to the assembly of a new supercontinent - dubbed
Amasia - probably near the North Pole in roughly 200 million years time, which will
in turn break up, its parts destined to drift in cycles of supercontinent assembly and
breakup in perpetuity, or at least until our planet is engulfed by our dying Sun, which is a
very long way off.
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The plumbing of Hades

The chemical symbol for lead is Pb from the Latin plumbum which is also the
origin for the English word plumbing. Thats ironic because lead is at the heart of the
chemical evidence for the origin, movement and connections of magma throughout the
mantle. It begins with a problem known to geochemists as the lead paradox, and the
solution to that problem reveals fundamental information about the way the innards of the
planet work.
437

Experiments have shown us that as the mantle melts and recrystallizes over time, it
should expel more uranium than lead into crustal rocks, leading to a decrease in uranium
levels in the mantle. And since uranium decays radioactively to become lead, the mantle
should have more of the lead from the origin of the Solar System, and much less of the
type of lead that is made by the decay of uranium. But samples of lavas at mid-ocean
ridges and oceanic islands like Hawaii show the opposite. And thats the lead paradox.
437

Plum pudding and marble cake

The solution was expected to lie in the fact

that slabs of uranium-enriched crust are constantly subducting, returning uranium and its
decay-product-lead to the mantle. But theres a hitch the recycled crust can only explain
the lead levels found in ocean island basalts if the subducted slabs are kept isolated in the
mantle for between 1 and 2 billion years (like plums in plum pudding), for their uranium
to decay to more lead, before being mixed in with erupting basalts. But convection in the
mantle (that drives plate tectonics) should smear and mix the recycled crust with lowuranium mantle (like the chocolate layers in marble cake, and not like plums) to an extent
that conflicts with those lava samples. The paradox remained unresolved.
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A rare piece of lower crust that got transported to the surface in the Himalayan
mountain-building train-wreck finally tipped the balance in favor of both marble cake and
plums! The Pakistani rocks showed that as fast as melting over a subduction zone

generates new, buoyant continental crust, it leaves a residue of very heavy minerals (the
anti-crust, if you will). These dense, low-uranium plums of matter preferentially lockaway the kind of lead that was formed at the origin of the Solar System (as distinct from
lead created by the decay of uranium). They drip slowly to the lowermost mantle near the
core, where they resist mixing with the mantle. That leaves the rest of the mantle cake
with its marbling of recycled old crust to erupt as basalt in volcanic islands or mid-ocean
ridges, enriched in uranium-derived-lead. This elegant combination of geology and
chemistry showed us the connectedness of crust formation, subduction, mantle circulation,
and mid-ocean volcanics predicted by Hesss continental drift all those years ago.
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A source near the core

Evidence for ocean island volcanoes being plumbed into a layer near the core
comes from isotopes of osmium. Osmium-186 is the product of radioactive decay of
platinum-190, which was strongly concentrated into the core early in Earths development.
So high levels of osmium-186 in Hawaiian lavas and in Permian basalts from the Norilsk
area of Siberia strongly hint at magma interaction with the core before either of these lavas
erupted. Ocean-islands magma origin from a near-core reservoir of magma is reinforced
by their high levels of nickel, helium-3 and neon, all indicators of a primordial or nearEarths-core source.
471 437 472

Seismic proof of the pudding

This geochemical evidence has since been backed up by seismic images that show
semi-liquid areas at the core-mantle boundary, and revealing that the volcanic islands of
Hawaii, Kerguelan and Tristan da Cunha lie at the edges of these zones. The chemical
variation in Hawaiis lavas shows that some of the Hawaiian volcanoes (Mauna Loa and
others on the southern side of the chain) are more plumbed-in with this core-boundary
source of magma, and some (Mauna Kea and others on the northern side of the chain)
have more recycled crust. Seismic studies show that even the Yellowstone supervolcano
is fed by a mantle plume originating from near the core, which fits with high coreassociated helium-3 values measured in Yellowstones lavas.
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Did the Earth move for you too?

Of course the motions of Earths plates have a far more immediate relevance than
just being the conveyor of planetary change through deep time. According to the World
Health Organization, plate tectonics is responsible for almost as many deaths as all other
natural disasters (storms, floods, drought, wildfires, heat waves and cold) put together.
The Haiti earthquake in 2010 alone caused the death of 222,500 people, and on average
tectonics claims over 100,000 lives a year through earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis.

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Earthquakes and instant gold

If you have never experienced an earthquake, nothing can fully convey the
stomach-icing panic you feel when the solid ground shakes, when buildings that should be
rigid and protective sway and crumble. Since infancy your body has understood these

things to be hard, constant and

unmoving.
An earthquake feels as if the laws of physics were just revoked, and thrusts those
unconscious assumptions into vivid fallacy. As the walls shake and gaps appear, you
experience raw animal terror.
Plate tectonics makes sense of the pattern of earthquakes around the world. It
explains why quakes are generally concentrated along plate boundaries by the juddering,
stuck-unstuck scraping of one plate against another, or by one plate bulldozing over
another, sending it to annihilation in the mantle. Each quake (even those too small be felt
by people) is picked up by seismometers and accelerometers which measure shaking in all
directions, and are networked together across the globe to allow a precise triangulation of
the location of the quake. Seismologists can even calculate the 3D orientation of a fault
plane deep underground from the precise wave attributes.
Forecasting quakes
And if you look at the patterns of quakes on the USGS website, it immediately
becomes apparent that a real-world plate edge such as the one in California is a much
more complicated affair than a simple fault line. In fact it is composed of many
individual faults and fractures in a complicated 3-dimensional honeycomb. A closer look
at any one of those fractures on the scale of a road cutting, for instance, reveals its own
internal fracture structure, and so on down to the microscopic scale of individual fractured
grains of rock. Sometimes rock conditions lubricate fractures, allowing them to creep past
each other without generating earthquakes, but this creates knock-on stresses and strains
on all the nearby fractures. Add-in varied rock-types, fluctuating groundwater pressures
and temperature changes at depth, and it is no wonder that predicting earthquakes is so
hard!
We still are a long way from forecasting earthquakes the way we do the weather,
but seismologists are able to generate maps of earthquake risk and predicted shaking
strengths, to aid the design of quake-resilient buildings. Monitoring before, during and
after major earthquakes helps identify where stresses have moved and therefore where the
next large earthquake might reasonably be expected. This has revealed some surprises,
such as the way plates go through a slow-motion rebound lasting years after major

earthquakes and how earthquakes on one fault can raise the chance of an earthquake in
some areas, and yet cast stress shadows that reduce the chance of quakes in other
areas. It has even revealed how earthquakes can create gold veins in an instant by
causing sudden pressure drops in underground fluids!
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The formation of a new plate boundary isnt that frequent on geological timescales,
so its all the more remarkable that we can witness the start of one today. 2 huge
earthquakes in April 2012 were the earliest cracks heralding the breakup of the IndoAustralian plate, beginning a new plate boundary in the Indian Ocean, triggered by the
Tsunami-producing Banda-Aceh earthquake in 2004.
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Earthquakes and volcanoes are such well-worn topics, covered in a myriad of other
books and TV programs, so I wont take up more space with them here. However, there
are other, more surprising ways the Earth moves that few people know about. The most
common but least known is the phenomenon of Earth tides.

Earth tides and SQUIDs

Everyone knows the sea level rises and falls twice a day in tides. But few people
know that the solid Earth itself rises and falls with the orbit of the Moon, imperceptibly
but measurably. The ground beneath your feet moves up and down by as much as 30cm
(12in) twice a day. You dont feel it because the effect is evenly distributed over a wide
area.
GPS systems have to account for Earth tides when calculating positions as do
astronomical measurements, and large physics experiments like the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN have to be designed to allow for them. Scientists measure Earth Tides using
exquisitely sensitive instruments like Quartz Tube Extensometers (to measure the
stretching of Earths surface), liquids in tubes (to measure tilt), and SQUIDs
(Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices) to measure the tiny gravity variations.
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Earth Tides are a rare example of Earth movement that is not caused by plate
tectonics, but they do have an influence on tectonics. They can be sufficient to push an
already expectant volcano into erupting and may be the straw that breaks the camels
back in triggering some earthquakes. Tidal kneading of our planets interior creates
heat. Currently this amounts to about 0.2 Terawatts of energy - about 150 times less than
heat generation by natural radioactive decay (about 30 Terawatts) - but in the early Earth
when the Moon was closer, it must have been a more significant contributor of internal
heat.
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11

How fast does a mountain move?

When Mount Everest was first surveyed, its height was calculated by Babu
Radhanath Sikdar to be 29,002 feet (8840m). This figure was revised as surveying became
more accurate and stands at somewhere between 29,017ft (8844.33m) and 29,035ft
(8,850m) at rock level. Or rather it did in 1999 right now it is probably a little higher
it is rising about 4mm (about 1/8 in) a year - and has moved northeastwards by about 10
times as much.
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Mountains everywhere, not just Everest, are on the move, victims of three
competing forces: plate tectonics, erosion, and an effect known as isostacy.

Pressure-cooker
The higher a mountain range grows, the deeper its crustal roots sag into the mantle
beneath, like a heavily laden ship sits lower in the sea. Thats called isostacy. The roots
of mountain chains are pushed to such depths and temperatures that the rocks they are
made from are pressure-cooked into new kinds of rock: mud becomes slate; slate cooks
into flakey mica schist; sandstones become quartzite, and eventually granite-like gneiss. If
the cooking continues long enough, the rocks become overcooked and melt completely to
form granite.
If you have driven through a mountainous area you may have noticed loops and
swirls of folded rocks in road cuttings. It takes the immense pressures and temperatures
found in the roots of mountains to fold rock, play-dough-like, into such forms of fluid
beauty.
The flip-side to all this machismo mountain-building and forceful folding is the
slow slaughter of mountains by erosion, and the dumping of their bodies, grain-by-grain,
as sediments in river beds, lakes and oceans. Almost as fast as mountains build skywards
they are assaulted by a barrage of frost and rain to erode them down, and once tectonic
pressure relents millions of years later, erosion wins, diminishing mighty mountains to no
more than a range of hills made from the cooked remnants of mountain roots.
Erosion can be assessed by monitoring the sediment load in rivers, and it can be
faster than 10mm ( in) a year or as slow as 0.5mm (1/64in) a year. But erosion
doesnt have it all its own way as the ground washes away, it lightens the load on the
mountain roots, which slowly rise like a ship being unloaded (isostacy again), which is
why mountain chains formed even hundreds of millions of years ago are still hilly today
(like the Scottish Highlands and the Appalachians).
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Landslides
It turns out that mountain erosion is far more dramatic than just the Zen-like rainerodes-mountain-one-grain-at-a-time. Landslides are the most potent mountain-killing
force.
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The word landslide probably recalls TV

footage of an unfortunate property slowly departing down a hillside. And of course those

do happen from time to time, but they are at the extremely wimpy end of the landslide
scale.
To get an idea of the real power of landslides, imagine miles of mountains
collapsing in an instant, dropping 50 billion tons of rock into the valley below, which races
up the opposite side of the valley before soaring, airborne, clear over the ridge and into the
next valley! A flying wall of rock 14km (9mi) wide, travelling at such speed it can glide
into the next valley sounds impossible, but it happened in the Zagros Mountains, Iran,
some 10,000 years ago, in just one example of many all across the world. Others include
the Flims rockslide in Switzerland, which dumped 12 cubic kilometers (2.9 cubic miles) in
the path of the River Rhine, a landslide in Alaska in 1958 that triggered a tsunami taller
than the Empire State Building, and it was a landslide that triggered the Mt St Helens
volcanic eruption in 1980.
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The speed of these phenomena is astonishing. In 1970 an earthquake in the Ancash

region of Peru triggered an avalanche that turned into an 80 million cubic meter (105
million cubic yard) slide of water, mud and rocks that moved at 340kph(about 200mph) as fast as a Formula 1 racing car! The speed was enough for it to ride over hills140m
(460ft) high, hurling huge boulders into the air that landed up to 1km ( mi) away!
Tragically, it buried a city and part of another with a loss of over 18,000 lives.
491

Fast-moving slides like these have a special name Sturzstrom. They move with
such velocity that they can melt the ground they pass over, leaving a distinctive rock
called frictionite, which has been found across the globe, including in the Himalayas.
492

But perhaps we should be more concerned about the mortal threat posed by
landslides beneath the waves. The Storegga Slide was an undersea landslide that started
off the coast of Norway about 8,000 years ago. The scale of this mass migration of rock is
staggering it spread across a large area of the Atlantic seabed, reaching halfway to
Iceland! In doing so it triggered a tsunami that deluged Norwegian and North Sea coasts
with waves up to 20m (65 feet) high in the Shetlands and up to 3 meters (10 feet) on the
coasts of the Netherlands and eastern England. This devastated stone-age populations
living there who were already at the mercy of rising sea levels at the end of the last ice
age, probably wiping out any remaining inhabitants of Dogger Land (a now drowned
island in the North Sea) and finally separating Britain from continental Europe. Similar
giant submarine landslides have been identified across the world, for example off the
western coast of Africa (which flowed 1500km, (900mi) or the same as the distance from
New York to Orlando), and in the deep waters off Hawaii.
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 These events are not consigned to

ancient history, either. The 1929 Grand Banks landslide off the coast of Nova Scotia killed
28 people and left 10,000 homeless, and a 6m (18ft) tsunami of mysterious origin affected
the British Isles and Denmark on June 5 1858. Today, some scientists suggest that the
eastern seaboard of America is at risk from a tsunami that would result from an
underwater landslide in the Canary Islands. Studies of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the
island of La Palma suggest its flank is primed to collapse at some point nobody knows
when. If it does, some calculations predict it could generate a trans-Atlantic tsunami that
would arrive on the American coast 7 hours later with waves as high as 3 to 8 meters (10
to 20 feet). This compares with the storm surge that accompanied Hurricane Katrina in
New Orleans in 2005, and could cause extensive damage to major coastal cities like New
York, Boston, Washington DC and Miami. Many scientists consider this disastrous
scenario unlikely, but research continues in an attempt to get a better handle on the
threat and similar-scale submarine slides have been found elsewhere in the Canary
Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Caribbean, suggesting the threat is plausible.
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Volcanoes of mud and salt

Lava and volcanoes go together like well, they just do. But there are volcanoes
that spew mud or even salt instead of lava.
On May 28 2006 a drilling rig was going about its routine business of exploring for
oil in the island of Java, Indonesia. The drill bit was grinding its way to a target nearly
3,000m (9,000ft) below the surface when water, steam, and the smell of rotten eggs started
erupting from the ground 150m (500ft) away from the rig. Soon hot stinking mud began to
vomit from the orifice and flow all around it, spreading further and further with each
passing day. 180,000 cubic meters of mud erupted daily, swamping surrounding farmland,
homes and villages leaving 13,000 people homeless. Dubbed Lusi, its still erupting
and is likely to continue for years to come!
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502

Lusi and mud volcanoes like it are no less a consequence of tectonic pressures in
the Earth than their fiery counterparts. Waterlogged clays buried deep underground as

plates collide are under intense pressure, ready to escape through any fissure they can find.
An earthquake (or in the case of Lusi, a drilling rig) can be the kick they need to open a
channel to the surface. Around a thousand natural mud volcanoes have been identified on
land, and a similar number has been identified offshore, spread all across the globe from
the Niger and Amazon deltas to the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Burma
and the islands of Indonesia. Along with mud, they also vent large quantities methane (a
powerful greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere.
503

Salt can make its own volcanoes in a very slow-motion equivalent of mud
volcanoes. Layers of salt from long-buried salt pans become more buoyant than the
sediments above them, so they flow. They rise as blobs that disrupt the sediments they
push through, sometimes reaching the surface like huge pus-filled boils, kilometers wide
and hundreds of meters high. Such salt mountains can even spawn salt glaciers
(namakiers) that slowly descend their briny slopes. There are hundreds of these in the
Zagros Mountains of Iran (namak means salt in Farsi).
504

Salt movement is a boon for industry. Underground disruption by salt movement

often creates traps where oil and natural gas can collect in sufficient quantities to make
extracting them worthwhile, for example in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. And
the tendency of underground salt to flow may aid disposal of radioactive waste. Simulated
canisters of radioactive waste were placed in a German salt cavern and left there. In just 8
years the seemingly-solid salt crept until it had completely entombed the waste
containers.
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In touch with your inner mantle

The mantle shows itself through the crust in subtle ways, the way a lost toy is
betrayed by a lump in a rug.

We are now beginning to appreciate that the

motions of the mantle show themselves in the broadest scales of our continental
landscapes. Where hot mantle mushrooms up under the crust it elevates the land over
thousands of kilometers, like the high plateaus of the American West, and the highlands
of East Africa (the African Superswell Structure). As a kid in a high-altitude school in
equatorial Kenya, I never imagined that the thin air and occasional night frosts on the
soccer fields were a direct result of a swollen mantle! But the African Superswell is small
compared to the largest inflammations on the planet.
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As kids we are taught that Earth is a sphere, and to a gross approximation it is. But
if you exaggerate the highs and lows of our planets shape (the Geoid) it is more like a
potato than a ball. Two broad inflammations of the Geoid at opposite points on the globe
have been mapped by satellites, one corresponding to Africa and the northern Atlantic,
and the other across the western Pacific. These swellings correspond to those regions at
the core-mantle boundary (nicknamed Jason and Tuzo) associated with Plume
Generation Zones.
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20 Jason and Tuzo superimposed on the Geoid (Earths shape).

Color scale shows how the actual Shape of the globe differs from a
slightly flattened sphere (in meters). Jason and Tuzo at the core-mantle
boundary correspond to swellings in Earths shape at opposite sides of
the globe. Source: Burke, Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 2011; Geoid ESA
GOCE High Level Processing Facility
The mantle is far too deep beneath the crust to drill into. Its around 5 to 10 km (36mi) beneath the deep ocean floor, and 30 to 60km (20-40mi) beneath the surface of
continents, whereas the deepest hole ever drilled was in Russia and it reached just 12km
(7 mi) after nearly 2 decades of drilling! So scientists have relied on lumps of it
brought up in volcanic eruptions, or indirect geophysical or geochemical analyses to learn
about it. But recently scientists discovered an area where the mantle actually pokes
through the crust at the Marion Rise in the Indian Ocean. This unusually buoyant piece of
mantle is probably left over from the Karoo volcanic eruptions associated with the
Toarcian extinction event in the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous eruptions as Madagascar
separated from India.
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507

Rebounding from the ice age

During the last ice age Scandinavia and North America were covered in a great
thickness of ice more than 2.5 km (1.5mi) deep. This ice mass was heavy, so heavy
in fact that it depressed the crust into the mantle (isostacy again), and the displaced mantle
ebbed away from the dent, causing land for hundreds of miles around the edges of the ice
508 509

to bulge. The ice-depressed crust lowered the altitude of the ice, making it easier to melt
when solar warmth returned, generating rapid collapses of the ice sheets many times in the
last 400,000 years. When the ice melted, that weight was lifted, allowing the mantle to
flow back again. But the mantle flows very slowly, so the crust is still rebounding even
now, some 8,000 years after the last ice sheet melted.
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Evidence for this lies in shoreline deposits well above todays sea level, and in data
painstakingly gleaned from plant and animal remains in Scandinavian lakes that were
overrun by sea and then reemerged. Dating these remains shows that in Scandinavia the
land rose at between 1 and 1.6 cm (3/8 to 5/8 in) per year at the end of the last ice age.
Then rising sea levels overtook the rising land, drowning freshwater lakes with salt water
containing marine mollusks and algae. When sea levels stabilized, the rebounding land
re-emerged and its lakes contained fresh water again. Elsewhere in Scandinavia the
presence of marine sediments miles inland, and freshwater lakes that once were part of the
Baltic Sea, and ancient seaside settlements that are now miles from shore, are all vivid
signs of the rebound after the last ice age.
510

GPS measurements confirm that Scandinavia is still rising by up to 1.2cm ( in) a

year, and surrounding areas are sinking by 2mm (1/16in) per year. Computer modeling of
these movements shows that it is putting the crust under considerable strain and this
sometimes triggers new earthquakes on ancient faults. It also opens those old fractures
up for fluids and gasses to leak through them.
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Of course, the extreme example of ice depressing a large area of land is

Antarctica. Airborne radar, seismic surveys and satellite altimetry allow us to see
through the ice and plot maps of the sub-glacial landscape. They show that in some parts
the Antarctic ice has depressed the ground up to 2.5km (1.5mi) below sea level, and entire
mountain ranges with 3km (2mi) high peaks are submerged under a kilometer of ice!
514

Bottom line:
The Earth is dynamic across scales and timeframes beyond our everyday
experience. Our landscapes and our atmosphere today are a consequence of these ongoing
changes, which have been revealed by a myriad of scientific techniques, ranging from
CAT scans through the interior of the Earth using earthquake waves, to exquisitely
sensitive measurements of chemical variations. These data have shown us that the seeming
permanence of our Earth is just an illusion. Our planet has been moving, changing and
evolving since its birth, and it continues to do so today and it will into the future.

3. Proof of Life

When Darwin first suggested the evolution of species through natural selection, he
was troubled by a dilemma:
it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was
deposited long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the
whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day; and that during
these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures To the
question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to
these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can
give no satisfactory answer.
515

In the mid to late 1800s, in the very early days of paleontology, it appeared as if a
myriad of species just appeared, spontaneously, at the beginning of the Cambrian period
(541 million years ago, or aged 88 in Your Life as Planet Earth). That, and the lack of
fossils catching creatures in the act of evolving from primitive species into modern ones
(birds, amphibians, humans), were serious obstacles to the acceptance of evolution. As
Darwin said:
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such
intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finelygraduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious
objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I
believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
515

He was right, of course. The geological record is imperfect. But this was the
infancy of Earth science, a time when Darwin himself grappled with the span of
geological time. He and his peers were apparently still unaware of Mendels theories of
genetics (published at around the same time as later editions of his On the Origin of
Species), and of course this was well before radiometric dating and a century before plate
tectonics was understood. This was the time of the American Civil War and the Crimean
War, before the source of the Nile had even been discovered.
515

Things have moved on over the inervening 150+ years, and Darwins dilemma has
been resolved. Not only have fossils been found going back 3 billion years (long before
the Cambrian), but also fossils of intermediates for many species have been found,
including precursors to whales, horses, birds, amphibians, and even humans.

 As we stand today, the evidence

for evolution is overwhelming. It is as proven as a round Earth and the Sun-centered Solar
System. Yet a surprising number of people just do not believe it.
So its worth
exploring the fascinating and powerful evidence for evolution, which flows from 3
different areas of science the fossil record, the biological record, and laboratory and field
observations of evolution happening before our eyes.
516 517

Before I do, its worth pointing out that evolution as fact is accepted by practically
all scientists, and is the stated position of scientific institutions like The American
Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the Geological Society of London
(the oldest learned society for the Earth sciences in the world), and The National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America (including many Nobel Prize winners).
The Geological Society of London states that evolution is a fact long established
beyond doubt. Similarly the American Geophysical Union calls evolution one of the
most important foundations of the science enterprise, and the Geological Society of
America calls evolution now well established as a well-tested fact. The National
Academy of Sciences states that: Biological evolution is one of the most important ideas
of modern science. Evolution is supported by abundant evidence from many different
fields of scientific investigation.
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Evolution before our eyes

Farmers and animal breeders the world over have long used selective breeding to
produce all the different kinds of domesticated dogs, cats and farm animals we have today.
They used animal husbandry (human selection) to evolve shapes as diverse as the
Dachshund and the Great Dane, large cows with milk-production that would be considered
miraculous a few hundred years ago, bulls for beef twice as large as their ancestors, larger
woollier sheep, and pigs tuned to the different bacon markets in Europe and America.
For many years farmers have used knowledge of genetics to improve crop resistance to
disease, pests and drought through plant hybridization. These same aims are now the
driving force behind the production of genetically modified crops. Its inconceivable that
522

natural selection pressures (like changes in available vegetation or competition from other
species), applied to generation after generation over millions of years, would have any less
effect.

21: Human selection causing evolution in farm animals: Historical

Yields per Animal in Britain and Holland. Based on Apostolides, et al,
Univ. Warwick, 2008.
Evolution has been directly observed in the laboratory, for instance within fruit
flies, bacteria, wheat, and even Bird Flu. It has also been observed outside the
lab, for example the increasing prevalence of drug-resistant malaria, antibiotic-resistant
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and the SARS microbe. The
process of natural selection causing evolution is surprisingly rapid: scientists working in
Trinidad watched fish evolve in response to environmental change in as few as 20
generations (a guppy generation is 3-4 months, so thats 5-6 years).
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That doesnt mean theres nothing left to learn about evolution far from it.
As the complete genetic codes (genomes) of more and more species are mapped,
we are learning some surprising things. At the time of writing over 3,000 species have had
their genomes mapped, including humans, bonobo apes, tomatoes, grape vines, mice, rice,
yeast, corn, sorghum, some viruses and bacteria, some fungi, the turkey and even the
puffer fish, and over 12,000 more species are in the works. These genome maps
enable sections of genetic code that are the same in different species to be identified, and
so ancestral trees can be defined from matched genes.
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In the early stages of mapping the human genome, it appeared as if most 98% of our genetic material served no purpose, so it was dubbed junk DNA. But since then
this junk has been found to have many functions, from defining proteins to marking

landing spots for proteins that influence genes, to switches that turn off bits of our
chromosomes. A portion of the junk is not human but actually viral DNA mixed in
with our genes, creating populations of endogenous retroviruses that we pass on to our
kids in just the same way we pass on the color of their eyes! It turns out that humans - and
most mammals - carry DNA from viruses inherited over millions of years, going back to
the age of the dinosaurs! Some of our genes have also been found to be fossil genes
that gave us immunity to long-forgotten diseases deep in our evolutionary past, but which
we still carry with us.
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The technological revolution in gene sequencing that made genome-mapping a

practical endeavor has also triggered new movements in biology like epigenetics, and
the overlapping field of evo-devo. They are starting to illuminate how our environment
may switch on or switch off genes that we inherit, and the way a gene is expressed in an
embryo alters the shape of an animal, like a bird having a longer beak than normal. This
refining understanding of genetics holds promise for improved treatments for cancer and
other diseases.
So evolution through natural selection is proven in the laboratories, field studies
and medical experience of today. But thats not much help in narrating the play of life
from its earliest origins. For that we turn to the fossil record, as well as the trail of clues
contained within the cells of living organisms today.

Not your grandfathers fossils

When I say fossil you are probably picturing a dusty piece of rock with a curly
seashell protruding from it. Thats the kind that Darwin and his contemporaries were
familiar with, but the fossils we can detect today are beyond the wildest imaginings of
those 19th century collectors. Paleontologists now study fossils ranging from the
microscopic to the size of an entire forest. Using techniques as diverse as rock-dissolving
acids and CAT scans. They can even learn about ancient life when theres nothing left but
a stain, or a burrow, or even just an imbalance between atomic isotopes.

Bear in mind that its actually quite hard to

preserve a dead creature as a fossil. It requires a series of happy accidents, like being
covered by low-oxygen sediments soon after death to avoid rotting away, compaction of
those sediments into rock, tectonic upheaval, exhumation millions of years later, and

finally a chance find by a paleontologist. This means that the oldest fossil of a plant or
animal is unlikely to be the first individual of that species, and the last recorded fossil may
well predate the actual extinction of the species (this is known as the Signor-Lipps
Effect).

Elusive earliest life

It would be great if we could find tangible fossil traces of LUCA the first life on
Earth - but its hard to see how we could tell a fossil LUCA vent from any other ancient
submarine vent. In the absence of fossil evidence for LUCA, we have to resort to
biological clues to her existence later in this chapter.
For hard, fossil evidence of the earliest life we turn to microscopic traces in some
of Earths most ancient rocks. Claims were made in the 1990s for fossil traces of life as
old as 3.8 billion years, in rocks located in the inhospitable wilds of western Greenland,
but they have since been refuted. Other scientists painstakingly picked-apart the
complicated rock structure and found that, sadly, the rocks with the putative life-traces
werent as old as first thought, and that they were formed as underground magma
intrusions wholly unsuitable for the discovery of primordial traces of life.
533

Its hard to overstate how difficult it is to find and date unambiguous traces of
microscopic life over 3 billion years old, in rocks that have been squeezed and folded and
heated many times until even establishing the original rock type is not trivial. Unlike
seashells, skeletons, teeth or even the imprint of a fern frond, the traces of early life are
miniscule and barely different from their surrounding rock. It is not even enough to find
traces of carbon associated with microscopic fuzzy bits. The carbon must be derived from
kerogen (which is also found in petroleum and coal deposits) and must have reduced
levels of the isotope carbon-13 which is depleted by biologic processes. In fact the
earliest traces of life on Earth are just such carbon deposits.
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37

We begin to see clearer traces of early life in the Barberton Greenstone Belt in
South Africa, in the form of microscopic tubes on the rims of 3.5-billion-year-old lavas
that bear uncanny resemblance to microbe-formed structures on the skin of modern
submarine lavas. The clincher is that traces of carbon within these tubes have the right
proportion of carbon isotopes to indicate they were created by life.
48

In the first part of this book I described the humble stromatolite basically a
mound created by layers of slimy bacteria trapping and precipitating sediments. The
ancient rocks of Western Australia contain an entire 3.43-billion-year-old reef of
stromatolites. The distinctive domes, cones and egg-crate shapes are proof of early slimelife, further confirmed by the superb preservation of clusters of microscopic cells, tubes,
threads, films and spindle-shapes. The diversity of fossil microbe shapes suggests that
even back then there already was a veritable community of microbial life. Better than that,
scientists found tiny crystals of fools gold (pyrite or iron sulfide) associated with the
fossil cells, which have a sulfur isotope ratio that is a dead giveaway that they were
formed by microbes extracting energy from sulfur chemicals in the water.
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Those sulfur isotopes are an example of another kind of fossil that Darwin could
not have imagined: chemical fossils.

Chemical fossils
Amazingly, scientists today can detect signs of ancient life even when there is
nothing left but a slight stain between grains of ancient rock.
For instance, the first evidence for the more complex kind of cell that led to you
and me shows up as little more than a chemical trace. Our cells, like the cells of all
eukaryotes (animals, plants, fungi, amoebas and some other single-celled critters) use a
class of chemicals called sterols, an important difference from non-eukaryotes like
bacteria and archaea. Sterols are necessary for the biochemistry of our cell membranes
(cholesterol is a sterol). So finding sterols in ancient rocks would be a great clue that
eukaryotes rather than more primitive bacteria or archaea were present. Unfortunately
sterols degrade over time but the good news is that they degrade into steranes, which are
much more resilient chemicals capable of hanging around for a couple of billion years or
more. In fact, scientists joke that after you are dead and buried, the last trace of you will be
your cholesterol!
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Traces of steranes have been found in rocks approximately 2.5 billion years old
from Canada, Gabon and South Africa. In some locations there is uncertainty that the
steranes date from the formation of the original sediments rather than from fluids that
seeped in over eons since, but for now the balance of opinion is that they remain the
earliest, if tenuous proof of eukaryote life our distant ancestors.
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Similarly, the first traces of

cyanobacteria those first producers of oxygen that gave Earth its mid-life crisis are
chemicals. A small group of chemicals known as 2-methylhopanes are all that remain of
the first cyanobacteria. As was the case with steranes, there has been some debate over
how reliable these oily hints are, but again recent work tends to confirm them as a valid
trace for those special oxygen-producing creatures around 2.7 billion years ago.
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Interestingly, eukaryotes need oxygen to make sterols something they had to

rely on cyanobacteria to provide, and it may be no coincidence that both innovations in
life show up at broadly the same time. But the steranes show us that eukaryotes were
around some 300 million years before oxygen had built up significantly in air and water,
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so scientists were scratching their heads about that for a while. Thankfully, recent
experiments have shown that primitive eukaryotes dont need much oxygen to produce
sterols trace amounts are enough, and thats all that was available from those first
cyanobacteria until the rocks and oceans were done absorbing all the oxygen they could.
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At the other end of the timescale, sterols in sewage have been put to work to track
the spread of human settlements after the ice-ages. Some sterols (5-stanols) are only
found in human and livestock feces, and above certain levels they are a sure indicator of
human settlement. By analyzing the fine layers of sediments for these fecal markers in a
lake in northern Norway, scientists were able to date the first human settlements there to
2,300 years ago.
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Chemical traces also provide important clues to the first colonization of land by
early plants and fungi in the Cambrian period. Analysis of fossilized soil from that time
reveals a pattern of aluminum, silicon and phosphorous levels that show it was treated by
organic acids which are naturally produced by plant roots in soils to this day. A
phosphorous mineral called apatite is missing from the top layer of the soil (plants absorb
phosphorous, depleting it from soil, which is why you add it to lawns and gardens in
fertilizer). In addition, the clays in the soil show that calcium ions were plentiful. These
clues together are a tell-tale biosignature of specialized fungi that live in symbiosis with
plant roots, called mycorrhizal fungi. Because these fungi rely on plants for essential
nutrients, evidence for them is also evidence for plants on land at that time, bolstering the
first tenuous evidence for liverwort-like plants in the fossil record.
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Chemical fossils are far more than arcane tools for specialized paleontologists. The
oil industry has been using chemical fossils (biomarkers) for decades to appraise rocks
that may have been the source for oil. They can choose from a menu of several hundred
different chemicals with exotic names to discover what kind of life led to the formation of
a sample of oil, and in many cases the kind of environment that it lived in. For instance,
a class of chemicals made of a chain of carbon atoms, called alkanes, betrays their
origins in the number of carbon atoms they contain. Alkanes with 15, 17 or 19 carbon
atoms come from lake or marine algae, whereas those with 27, 29 or 31 carbon atoms
originated as land plants. Pristane and Phytane are all that remain of longdecomposed chlorophyll from plants, and Bicadinane tells us the rock once contained
the resins from conifer trees. Still others like Oleananes and lupanes originated
from flowering plants, whereas dibenzothiophene, dibenzofuran and biphenyl,
can indicate where woody plants were buried but have long since decomposed. These last
three tell us about the amount of vegetation washing from land into oceans. A big drop in
these chemicals tells us there was probably a big reduction in vegetation on land, such as
happened at the Permian Great Dying.
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One of the most important traces of life, and yet maybe the subtlest, relies on
subatomic differences in carbon isotopes. Most carbon in the world in the air you
breathe, the food you eat and the fuel you burn is made up of the isotope carbon-12
(12C). Only around 1% is made up of the fractionally heavier carbon-13 isotope (13C).
And it is this miniscule difference in mass that can tell us if life produced a carbon sample.
Life generally prefers the regular 12C variety of carbon. This means organisms
concentrate 12C within them while 13C is shunned and builds up in the atmosphere and

oceans. Even the earliest traces of life show up as 3.7 billion year old carbon deposits that
are depleted in 13C.
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Fossil fuels like coal, oil and methane have the same high 12C proportions of their
plant origins. If a vast amount of fossil fuel is burned or natural methane is released into
the air, this shows up as a big increase in 12C levels (and a corresponding negative shift in
13C), such as happened at the Permian Great Dying, the Triassic, and the PETM.
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So in myriad ways chemical traces can serve as fossils of life for which no other
evidence remains. But subtle variations in chemicals can tell us other surprising things
about ancient life, even ancient behaviors.
Tooth tales: ancient migrations and diets
The idea that dinosaurs underwent seasonal migrations over several hundred
kilometers, like modern wildebeest in East Africa, is beguiling. But how can we possibly
know? We cant track their footprints very far, and the fossil bones lie where the creature
died like a death-mask that cant tell of its living travels. Establishing the behavior of
extinct creatures is fraught with difficulty, so it would seem impossible to prove the
wanderings of individuals some 150 million years ago. Yet scientists have done just that
by some ingenious work using fossil teeth from giant, long-necked Camarasaurus
dinosaurs.
They analyzed the growth layers in the fossil dinosaur teeth for variations in
isotopes of oxygen. They were then able to link those chemical traces to the water that the
creatures drank, using the oxygen isotopes in sediments at different places across Utah and
Wyoming. In this way they showed that several Camarasaurus individuals migrated from
lowlands in the east to spend the summer dry months in western highlands before
returning to the lowlands.
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A similar study on our prehuman ancestors was just as revealing. Scientists used fossil teeth from 2-million-year-old

South African Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus specimens. By

comparing the strontium isotope variations within the teeth of males and females with
natural strontium levels in locations near where they were found, they were able to show
that males tended to live in one area all their lives, whereas females were generally born
elsewhere. In other words, it was the custom of our very early ancestors for brides to leave
their homes and live with their husbands family!
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Oral hygiene in our primitive ancestors was not up to our modern standards
which is a good thing for science. By picking at the dental plaque preserved on the teeth of
Australopithecus sediba (a 2-million-year-old pre-human) scientists were able to find
microscopic traces of what they had been eating still stuck there. Specifically they
collected phytoliths which are microscopic silica crystals formed naturally in plant cells.
These have characteristic shapes depending on the species of plant, so the scientists were
able to tell that sediba ate mainly woodland leaves, fruits and bark. The scientists also
used lasers to vaporize tiny pits into the enamel of the teeth (laser ablation) and analyze
the isotopes of carbon in the vapor. This showed that throughout their growth, these
individuals had preferred a forest diet. Thank goodness they didnt floss!
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Realm of the tiny

Although Darwin was aware of microscopic fossils (he referred to them as
infusoria and rhizopods) advances in microscopy since his time have revealed a
cornucopia of tiny fossils that have played an important part in our understanding of
changes in Earth through time. Even when rock might appear barren of fossils to the
naked eye, modern microscopy - especially the electron microscope - allows us to zoom
into the realm of the tiny where we can find a cast of thousands waiting to be read like a
book to reveal ancient climates, water conditions and biodiversity.
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Phytoliths, for instance, are not just used to reveal the dietary choices of our
ancestors and other extinct creatures. They are resilient enough to survive in rocks when
all other traces of the plant that formed them have disappeared, and they even survive the
journey through an animals gut to be preserved in fossil poop (more delicately referred to
as coprolites). These allow us to trace the spread of grasslands across the globe, and
to build a picture of the flora that inhabited an area at a particular time.
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Spores and pollen heralds for land plants

Crucial evidence for the evolution and spread of land plants comes from fossil
pollen and spores. These tiny reproductive particles have distinctive shapes and textures
that are characteristic of the types of plant that they originated from, so in finding the
spore or pollen you have evidence for the plant that produced it. Spores or pollen are more
likely to be preserved than their parent plants because each plant produces them in large
numbers, they are made of resilient materials, and are small enough to be blown or washed
into lakes or seas where sediments will preserve them even if the parent plant lived on
some eroding hill slope doomed to disappearance.
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The earliest tentative evidence for land plants shows up as microscopic

cryptospores and enigmatic tubes in the deep recesses of the Grand Canyon and
Tennessee. These are over 500 million years old, about 100 million years older than
whole-plant fossils in the Scottish Rhynie Chert. Its uncertain if those cryptospores
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come from a kind of liverwort or from algae, but they do resemble younger liverwort
spores and they are only 40 million years older than confirmed land plant spores from
Argentina. Considering recent evidence for the kind of fungi that are associated with
plant roots (mycorrhizal fungi) in 500 million-year-old Cambrian soils, the case for the
rise of early land plants around 500 million years ago looks increasingly plausible.
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Not long after those cryptospores appear, we start finding Trilete spores a kind
that bears a Y-shaped dent. These are linked to plants that had evolved stems (vascular
plants), like Cooksonia, hornworts and mosses. They first show up in the early Devonian,
around 450 million years ago, again well before the whole-plant fossils for these plants are
found, placing the arrival of vascular plants at a time of significant atmospheric, climate
and evolutionary changes.
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With the advent of seed plants, pollen grains begin to show up in rocks. Pollen is
as diagnostic of its originating plants as spores are for more primitive plants. This is
tremendously helpful in plotting the spread of conifers, and then (in the Cretaceous)
flowering plants, and is invaluable for revealing the traumatic changes at major
extinction events such as at the end of the Triassic, when forests were devastated and
replaced by ferns. Pollen is also useful in narrowing down the time period rocks were
formed in, especially in fresh water sediments where marine fossils normally employed
for this job are missing.
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These tiny plant fossils are just a small part of the wide palette of microfossils that
scientists use to correlate different rock layers, to establish their dates, and to reveal
ancient environments.
Temperature-telling teeth
Perhaps the most bizarre are tiny, spiky tooth-like fossils called conodonts,
which were used for decades to match up different strata without anyone really knowing
what kind of animal they came from. Then in the early 1980s a fossil of a big-eyed eellike creature was found in Scottish oil shales with these teeth intact, revealing that they
were indeed a kind of feeding apparatus. Aside from defining various geological time
zones, they can show how hot the rock containing them became during its sojourn
underground. The phosphorous-based mineral that conodonts are made from changes
color based on the temperature it has been heated to, from pale brown, to brown, black,
and finally white (around 80, 140, 480 and 550C respectively). This information
helps calibrate how deep rocks have been buried in tectonic upheavals, and tells oil
explorers what grade of oil or gas they can expect to find. Conodonts first appeared in the
Cambrian and they succumbed in the Triassic mass extinction 200 million years ago.
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The Swiss Army Knife of fossils

 Fortunately there is another group of tiny

marine creatures who outlived the conodont animal - the foraminifera, or forams as
most people prefer to call them. They are amoeba-like blobs which have the advantage
(for us) that they make a durable skin with a huge variety of shapes ranging from simple
balls to elaborate seashell-like structures, spirals, bunches of grapes or even vases,
depending on the species.
Forams have so many uses you can think of them as the little Swiss Army Knives
of micropaleontology! Being only about half a millimeter big means that even a single
borehole can recover a useful sample of fossils. They are widespread in many
environments and they underwent rapid evolutionary bursts, which allows precise
matching to other locations across the globe. Oxygen isotopes in their shells give a
measure of the water temperature they lived in, and different foram species that live in
different habitats reveal ancient ocean temperature, salinity and depth profiles.
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22 A diversity of forams from a single beach in Burma. The photo is

just 5.2 mm (2/10 in) across. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Psammophile
and many more
Even Swiss Army Knives have their limits. In deep waters where the calcium
carbonate of foram shells is dissolved away, scientists can turn instead to the silica-based
skeletons of radiolaria. These perforated balls and y-shapes are only about 1/10 of a
millimeter big, but can be used much like forams. They are especially handy in rocks that
have undergone intense changes in continental collisions. Their tiny flinty skeletons
preserved in bands of chert are often the only fossils that survive in those rocks, providing
a unique insight to conditions in long-departed seas.
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There is a host of other useful microfossils that I dont have space to discuss here,
like Acritarchs (a catch-all name for a range of planktonic creatures, cysts and embryos
from the early days of life to the present), chitinozoa (resembling small vases), ostracods
(tiny leggy crustaceans in clam-like shells), diatoms, coccolithophores (whose bodies
make up chalk) and dinoflagellates.
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So by delving into the realm of things too small to be seen without a microscope,
scientists have been able to trace the evolution and global spread of different plant groups,
learn about the diet of extinct animals, uncover the thermal history of rock strata, reveal
ancient ocean temperatures, salinities and depths, and even match up disparate rock layers.
But what about the other end of the scale - fossils so big they cant be appreciated wihout
a birds-eye view?

Realm of the really big

Fossil forests

We often talk of not being able to see the wood

for the trees but in the Earth sciences this can be both a figurative and a literal problem.
Much can be deduced from a single fossil an isolated leaf impression, a shell or a tooth
for instance but inferring how different life forms coexisted in a community, based on
isolated specimens, is fraught with difficulty. Just occasionally we do uncover fossils of
such size and quality, and from a single instant, that they capture an entire ecosystem
frozen in time. They are a bit like the ruins of Roman Pompeii where human bodies and
artifacts lie preserved in the moment they were overrun by volcanic ash in AD 79.
The Pompeii analogy is particularly apt for the fossil Permian forest discovered at
Wuda in Inner Mongolia, China, where over 1,000 square meters of forest has been found
preserved in volcanic ash, just like the unfortunate Romans. This exceptional preservation
has allowed scientists to plot the locations of thousands of individual plants in the actual
spots where they lived 300 million years ago in their swamp, and so to reconstruct the
ancient forest of long-extinct plants trees, ferns, undergrowth and all.
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Perhaps the best known example is the Joggins fossil forest preserved in the
tidelands of Nova-Scotia. This has over 60 separate levels of fossil forest, which made a
profound impression on Sir Charles Lyell and Sir William Dawson (two founding fathers
of geology), when they visited the site in 1852. Along with fossil tree-trunks standing
today where they grew in the Carboniferous, they discovered fossil amphibians, reptiles,
millipedes and snails preserved where they hid in the hollows of those trees. Dawson
returned in 1877 armed with explosives to uncover more, and collected over 100 fossil
amphibians and reptiles! The Joggins fossil forest influenced Darwins theory of evolution
and helped resolve the debate about the origin of coal.
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There are over 60 Carboniferous-era fossil forest sites that have been uncovered
across the globe so far, including a 310 million-year-old rainforest in Ovn, in the
Czech Republic, preserved in Pompeii-like ash, allowing paleontologists to distinguish the
ground cover and understory plants from the creepers and the forest canopy.
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Bone beds and trackways

One of the most impressive fossil sites I have seen is the Dinosaur Quarry at the
Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, USA. It is a warehouse-sized, bone-strewn slab of
rock upon which the contorted skeletons of dozens of dinosaurs of different species,
young and old, lie as they were buried in their mass grave 150 million years ago. The

quarry is just one part of the Morrison Formation which has yielded many dinosaur fossils
across the western USA, including a huge collection of dinosaur footprints in southeastern
Colorado. This dinosaur trackway, with the footprints of more than 100 different
dinosaurs, shed light on their gregarious behavior and also on the ratio of predators to prey
species (which turned out to be similar to the ratio in modern species). There have been
similar finds around the world including in Yemen , France , China and Arkansas.
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Its not just dinosaurs and coal forests that are preserved on a big scale. A 15 km (9
mile) area in Californias San Joaquin Basin is home to a bonebed dating back to the
Miocene, some 15 million years ago. It is just crammed with shark teeth, bones of
dolphins, seals, whales, turtles, camels, horses, and teeth from the extinct giant shark
called Carcarodon megalodon, which was much larger than a modern Great White
shark.
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So paleontologists do occasionally get their hands on fossil sites that help them get
the big picture of what an ecosystem was like at a given point in time and space. But
sometimes they are blessed with discoveries that are special for another reason - they
reveal much more than bones, shells and tree trunks. They reveal the delicate soft tissues
that normally rot or are scavenged away before a fossil is safely locked-away in sediment.

Soft Stuff
If you think of your own body, theres much more to you than your skeleton, and
yet for the most part if a fossil is preserved at all, only the hard parts bones, teeth, shells,
spores and woody trunks get preserved. Forensic scientists could make a reasonable
reconstruction of what you look like if all they had were your bones, but think about all
those creatures who have no hard parts to speak of the jellyfish and worms of this world.
And even those that do have bones or shells what did the animal that owned the bones, or
inhabited the shells, really look like? Without soft tissues you have a very impoverished
sampling of the real diversity of life at the time.
And that was essentially Darwins dilemma, since in his day fossil collecting had
not yet encountered those rare and precious fossil sites known as lagersttten, where soft
parts of creatures are delicately preserved. All they knew of were fossils from after the
evolution of the seashell. Lagersttten have fleshed-out (pun intended) the diversity of life
before the seashell first appeared in the Cambrian, and since.
Gunflint and Bitter Springs
It wasnt until the 1950s that the first convincing evidence for Precambrian life
was discovered in the 2.1 billion-year-old Gunflint Chert (a banded iron formation) on
the shores of Lake Superior, Canada. A geologist named Stanley Tyler took rock
specimens and ground them into thin, translucent microscope slides. The flinty, striped
rock was found to contain a wealth of cells and filaments, even preserving the internal
structure of some. The silica in the waters where these microbes lived had permeated
their bodies and entombed them in rock hard enough to resist the ravages of 2.1 billion
years of continental drift, burial, exhumation and ice ages. The silica preserved such detail
that the fossils were unassailable evidence for early Precambrian life, at around the time of
the planets mid-life crisis that I described in the first part of this book.
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Before long, other discoveries of petrified Precambrian life were discovered. At

Bitter Springs in central Australia, more filaments and chains of cells were discovered in
820 million-year-old chert. These have been identified as cyanobacteria, algae, possible
fungi and other microbes.
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Jellyfish and embryos

In 1947 geologist Reginald Sprigg announced his discovery of fossil jellyfish
and other soft-bodied animals he had found on a mineral prospecting trip at Ediacara in
the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. He assumed they were Cambrian, but they were
later found to be Precambrian from around 560 million years ago. His discovery of
fronds, disks and other shapes in sandstones bore witness to diverse soft-bodied-animal
life at the end of the Slushball Earth period.
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It sparked a search for similar fossils around the world, and since then exquisitely
preserved fossils of this period have been found at Doushantuo in China, Mistaken Point
in Canada, in Namibia, the White Sea region of Russia, India, and Shropshire in
England. The fine detail preserved at some sites has even allowed scientists to study
individual cells. For example, the Doushantuo fossils include tiny animal embryo cells,
seaweed, sponges and relatives of jellyfish.
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Reaching up into the Cambrian (aged

88 in Your Life as Planet Earth), we find more examples of extraordinary preservation,
like a crustacean with every delicate strand of its filter-feeding mouthparts preserved in
fools gold, or the fossilized brain of an ancestor to insects, spiders and crustaceans!
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The 510-million-year-old Canadian Burgess Shale is a spectacular location for

Cambrian soft-bodied fossils. If you have ever discovered a bug flattened between the
pages of an old book, you have a reasonable idea of the fossils there. Taking the place of
pages are layers of shale, and the squished bugs are a wide range of arthropods, mollusks,
worms and the earliest precursors to vertebrates. The preservation is so good it even
includes the guts of some creatures! There are other Cambrian sites with similarly
excellent preservation in Greenland, rsten in Sweden, Emu Bay in Australia, and
Chengjiang in China.
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Spiders from Scotland, feathers from Germany

Moving forward in time there are other lagersttten sites scattered across the globe
and the geological timescale, each filling in more detail of the anatomies of ancient
creatures.
The Scottish Rhynie Chert is one. It shines a spotlight on the earliest days of
land plants and the fungi, microbes, spiders, insects, mites and centipedes that lived
among them. This Devonian community lived near volcanic hot springs that periodically
engulfed them in silica-rich fluids that petrified them, down to the cellular level 410
million years ago (aged 91 in Your Life as Planet Earth). The Solnhofen limestone quarry
in Germany is another example. It preserves Jurassic creatures including the early bird
Archaeopteryx as well as pterosaurs, dinosaurs and fish. The first Solnhofen
Archaeopteryx specimen had clear impressions of feathers as well as a reptilian tail and
clawed fingers. Its announcement just 2 years after Darwin published his first edition of
On the Origin of Species was greeted skeptically at first, but eventually it was accepted
as an intermediate between dinosaurs and birds.
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If lagersttten are the Rolls Royces of fossil sites, it tempting to think of the next
kind of fossil as more like a Ford transit van utilitarian but indispensable.

Burrows and footprints

A rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, aside from being one of the most
awesome experiences possible, is a backwards recital from the pages of time. Starting at
Lees Ferry surrounded by dinosaur-era strata, you regress through Carboniferous strata
replete with marine fossils, until towards the end of the second day you reach the
Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone. Here the canyon walls look like they were assaulted by
rioting pastry chefs! Millions of finger-like blobs and smears bear witness to the feeding
of creatures who tunneled in the sea bed some 525 million years ago, devouring anything
before it had a chance to become a fossil, but leaving their burrows behind instead as
Trace Fossils.

23 525 million-year-old worm burrows in the Tapeats Sandtone, Grand

Canyon. Watch and shoe for scale, photo by the author.
Trace Fossils are the burrows, tracks and footprints left behind by life. The blobs in
the Tapeats Sandstone are a kind called Trichophycus which arent found in rocks before
the Cambrian Explosion, a clear indication of the new kinds of life that emerged then. In
fact, trace fossils provide the earliest clues to the emergence of complex creatures because
backfilled furrows require a creature that has a distinct front and rear end (bilateran).
Such trace fossils have also been found in possibly older rocks in Uruguay, but their age is
still debated.
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You can find other trace fossils in the Tapeats Sandstone: rope-like trails snaking
through the worm burrows are trilobite tracks (known as Cruziana). In fact we know
from trace fossils like Cruziana that arthropods (the group that contains trilobites, crabs,
spiders and insects) appeared at the dawn of the Cambrian, millions of years before the
oldest trilobite fossil itself, just like the fossil spores that predate their parent plant
fossils as I described in The Realm of the Tiny above.
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Careful recording of trace fossils can tell scientists about the environment they
were made in, its biodiversity, the relative oxygen level, whether sea levels were rising
or falling at the time, and even changes in salinity. In fact the dinosaur trackway I
mentioned in Realm of the Really Big above is also a trace fossil, revealing gregarious
animal behavior. In the case of the largest dinosaurs, there are relatively few skeletal
fossils, but their footprints are much more common. This allows scientists to use statistical
analysis on the patterns of dinosaur footprints to tease out evolutionary changes over time.
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One such study was able to show that dinosaurs became more specialized into different
ecological niches as time progressed from the Jurassic into the Cretaceous.
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Just occasionally a dead body lies

fossilized at the end of its tracks, enabling scientists to make a firm link between the trace
and the creature that made it. In one example, from Solnhofen in Germany (where that
famous Archaeopteryx bird fossil was found), a horseshoe crab lies at the end of a 10
meter (11 yard) death-march preserved as tracks in the stone. Its footprints are a poignant
record of the crabs erratic behavior as it asphyxiated in an oxygen-starved lagoon 150
million years ago.
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So trace fossils are a valuable part of the fossil record, which can record the
communities that lived together, their environment, and even their behavior. But these
days paleontologists also have high-tech tools to see through rock and extract even the
most delicate, complicated fossils.

CAT scans
You or someone you know may have had a CAT scan in hospital. The CAT
stands for Computer Aided Tomography, a range of techniques widely used outside
medicine, including in paleontology. Often fossils are so inextricably bound in their rocky
tombs that any attempt to extract them would destroy them, so scientists use advanced
CAT scanning technology to extract those fossils intact, albeit virtually, to reveal the
tiniest of details.
In one example, every microscopic hair of a diminutive fly trapped in amber was
revealed, and pollen grains on its back shown with enough detail to identify the species of
plant the fly was pollinating. The 1mm (1/32 in) thrips were scanned at facility known as
the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility ESRF in France, which accelerates
electrons close to the speed of light in a synchrotron the size of a stadium, generating
exceptionally bright beams of x-rays. This is a modern upgrade of the technique used to
reveal the double-helix structure of DNA employed by Franklin, Watson and Crick in the
1950s. In those days they used x-ray films but in the case of our thrips, the scattered x-rays
were measured by electronic detectors. Software then calculated the internal structure of
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the specimens from those measurements, revealing a 3-dimensional computer image of the
pollinating flies. This was more than a visual joy-ride, as the results showed that the thrips
were specialized pollinators of cycad plants 110 million years ago.
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A similar project revealed hundreds of tiny ants, flies, spiders, and even snails in
opaque lumps of 100 million-year-old French amber and the same technique has
uncovered delicate feeding structures in ammonites that prove they ate plankton,
provided clear images of the inside of Ediacaran embryos, and revealed the growth of
teeth in 160,000 year-old humans. It is also ideal for getting inside fossils without
breaking them apart, which is how we know the brain shape of our pre-human ancestors
Sediba and Touma.
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Stadium-sized synchrotron facilities are dotted sparsely across the world, but X-ray
scanning is getting smaller, and it is now possible to get comparable images from
equipment the size of a large fridge-freezer. It was such equipment that uncovered some of
the oldest multicellular fossils from Gabon, and revealed a tiny mite hitching a ride on a
45 million-year-old spider. Neither do the images have to remain on screens. They can
be fed into 3D printers to manufacture enlarged plastic versions, accurate to the tiniest
detail, for paleontologists to examine in their hands.
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Using X-rays this way comes with a bonus feature. The spectra of the x-rays from
the specimen diagnose its chemical makeup. This has, for instance, allowed scientists to
infer color patterns on the feathers of long-extinct birds.
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In some cases where the fossils are the faintest of impressions in sandstone, a
different kind of scanning technique can be used. An offshoot from construction survey
technology, 3D laser-scanning tracks lasers across a specimen, recording every bump and
crevice. The results are fed into a computer and rendered in 3-dimensions. This
technique has revealed previously unappreciated growth patterns in Ediacaran fossils, and
has challenged ideas about feeding and evolutionary relationships between these
enigmatic creatures.
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So fossils that were unimaginable in Darwins day, and too small, fragile, or subtle
to study even in the 20th century, are now yielding to the technologies of the 21st century.

Missing links found!

One of the early criticisms of evolution was the lack of fossils of intermediate links
between species that were thought to have evolved one from the other. By the beginning
of the 21st century most of those missing links have in fact been found in the fossil record,
and its worth mentioning some.

Fish - from fins to legs

We now have fossils of most of the intermediate stages of the evolution from fish
to tetrapods (4-legged animals) during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. They
show a progression of reducing fishy characteristics and increasing land-adapted
characteristics through specimens including Kenichthys, Gogonasus, Eusthenopteron,
Tinirau, Panderichthys, Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, Ichthyostega, and a dozen or so
other species. This includes the progressive change from lobed fins and a finned tail, to
feet with toes and finless tails; but it also involves the loss of bony gill covers, a reduction
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in the size of postparietal bones and a lengthening snout as they adopted air-breathing
and changed feeding habits. The evolution of the ear is also recorded in this progression of
fossils. In fish we start with the fish spiracle (a small gill slit) and hyomandibula (a bone
supporting the gill cover). In Panderichthys the spiracle is widened and the hyomandibula
is shortened. In Tiktaalik the spiracle is further widened, and these changes continue until
both the spriracle and hyomandibula form the middle-ear in tetrapods.
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There is a minor wrinkle to resolve in this progression. A recent study of

Ichthyostegas hips show it couldnt walk the way later tetrapods do and so it must have
been another, hitherto undiscovered creature that left its footprints (trace fossils) on the
tidal flats of middle-Devonian Poland.
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For a while in the 20th Century it seemed that there was a 30 million year gap in
the fossil record between the primitive quasi-fish tetrapods like Ichthyostega, and clearly
land-adapted, lizard-like tetrapods in the Carboniferous. This became known as Romers
Gap after the scientist who described it, but since then the gap has progressively shrunk.
With the discovery of tetrapod fossils in Scotland (including Whatcheeria and
Pederpes), the gap has shrunk to about 10 million years (about 2 months in Your Life
as Planet Earth), and it seems likely that further fossils will be found for the intervening
time period.
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So the general progression from fish to tetrapods (thence to reptiles and onwards to
mammals and us) is well documented and supported by the fossil evidence.

Dinosaurs to birds
The evolution of birds from dinosaurs is partly about the evolution of feathers, and
partly about the development of flight.

As more and more dinosaur fossils

have been found it has become clear that feathers, or things like them, first appeared very
early in dinosaur evolution, by the early Jurassic. In fact so much has been learned in the
last two decades that the scaly, lizard-like velociraptors depicted in the movie Jurassic
Park are now known to have been feathered! Even the leathery-winged pterosaurs were
apparently covered in downy filaments. The extensive fossil record of variously stubbly,
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fuzzy, shaggy or plumed dinosaurs shows a general progression from fuzzy filaments, to
filaments branching from a central quill, to the types of feathers found in modern birds.
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But feathers alone are not necessarily evidence for flight. They probably served a
variety of purposes before flight: display or insulation for instance, and it is only late in
their evolution that they show the structures that enable modern birds to fly. Scientists
have been debating whether flight evolved from ground-dwelling creatures taking to the
air, or from tree-dwelling creatures gliding to the ground or other trees. Others say this
isnt the way to look at this at all what matters is how birds developed the flight stroke
the powerful flying wing-beat that keeps a bird in the air. Either way, the debate
continues, with one side linking the development of flight to how young birds flap-run
along the ground to climb over obstacles, while the other side refers to climbing
adaptations like the clawed fingers on the wings of early birds.
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Whichever theory is correct, it seems that flight itself was gained gradually,
starting as a kind of speed boost (flap-running) , or as a parachute to break a fall. As
flying developed, early birds like Sapeornis, Confuciusornis, Cathayornis, and Yanornis
used their legs as well as their arms as wings (like biplanes) but some scientists have
suggested these early birds feathers and muscles were still too weak for flapping flight.
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What matters here is that a number of transitional fossils have been discovered
showing the succession from dinosaur-like animals to creatures with feathered tails and
small wings to more comprehensively feathered creatures with leg feathers, and eventually
to unmistakable birds. We also see the loss of fingers on the wing and the loss of teeth,
the development of a wishbone, a backwards-pointing toe, and the enlargement of the
breastbone to the keel-like breastbone of modern birds. This wasnt a simple sequence of
replacement, since in China 125 million years ago the spectrum from fuzzy dino to actual
flying birds (like Jeholorinis) coexisted. They each must have had a viable niche for
survival.
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Snakes get legless

The evolution of snakes essentially legless lizards was a puzzle, but scientists
recently uncovered several fossils of creatures in transition from lizard to snake.
One example from eastern Wyoming is called Coniophis precedens. This Late
Cretaceous creature had a snake-like body and a lizard-like head, with a skull that was
intermediate between snakes and lizards. Its lizard-like vertebral spines also showed that
snakes evolved from burrowing lizards. Another example, Dinilysia patagonica from
Argentina also has a skull with a mixture of lizard and snake characteristics. One early
snake fossil, the Lebanese Eupodophis descouensi, even had vestigial legs that were
discovered using synchrotron X-ray tomography.
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Whales from legs to fins

Enormous progress has been made over the last couple of decades in uncovering
the evolution of whales and dolphins (collectively cetaceans). The earliest cetaceans
split from a common ancestor with hippos around 53 million years ago and fossil
examples include Himalayacetus, and Pakicetus from the Himalayan slopes of India and
Pakistan. Himalayacetus still had a land-adapted ear and walked on legs, although its teeth
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show it ate fish and foraged mainly in fresh water. Then we find Indohyus, a 48 millionyear-old raccoon-like creature that has the beginnings of the specialized adaptation to
underwater hearing, and dense bones to help it with neutral buoyancy. Soon after, we
find Ambulocetus, a large, furry, web-footed creature, with those same underwater hearing
adaptations.
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Early whale fossils from the next 10-15 million years are found in marine
sediments and begin to show up outside the India-Pakistan area into North Africa, Europe
and North America. Over this time the fossils show that whale ancestors severed their ties
to the land and became completely aquatic creatures. For instance, in Rodhocetus and
Georgiacetus we see the pelvis separating from the backbone, and vertebra there which
are fused together in humans and most other mammals, becoming separated. These
adaptations allow for more powerful swimming but would make walking on land difficult
to impossible. By 40 million years ago we have completely aquatic cetaceans like
Basilosaurus, which resembles a modern whale in almost every respect, except it still
has vestigial hind legs.
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Modern whales evolved at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary (about 34 million years

ago) at a time of major changes in ocean circulation and climate. By that time we
already see the split between baleen whales (filter feeders) and toothed whales.
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Humans
There are something like 24 ancestral human species in the fossil record
from the 7 million years between the most archaic creatures that first separated from the
chimpanzee lineage, to me and you. This wealth of evidence is not always straightforward.
It is complicated by often fragmentary fossils and relatively few complete (or near
complete) skeletons, and its clear that several species coexisted during much of our
evolution. The emerging view is that some of those anthropological species are
really just regional variants, or variants from different times, or even just individuals who
looked different, within far fewer actual biological species (biological species cannot
interbreed with other species). We know from genetics that human ancestral groups
sometimes interbred fusing separate branches of the evolutionary tree back together
again, so the pattern of evolution pattern is more of a braid or a tangled thicket than a
tree.
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Anything that dies on the African plains, if not immediately eaten by the predator
that killed it, is usually picked to pieces by scavengers from vultures to hyenas to insects,
before its bones are bleached to dust under the African sun. So we are lucky we have the
specimens we do for this relatively short period of terrestrial history. The remains we do
have paint a clear picture of the gradual development of human characteristics, like
walking upright on 2 legs, dexterous hands with thumbs, changes in pelvis and skull
shape, and increases in brain size.
Because a surprising number of people still believe humans were created in the last
few thousand years looking as we do now, I want to walk you through the evidence that
this just isnt so, being open about the uncertainties but also being clear about the strong
evidence that we do have.
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The ape-human split

 Its not correct to think of us as descended

from chimps, rather we and they had a common ancestor that was neither human nor
chimpanzee. Unfortunately the only archaic chimp fossils are a handful of teeth from
about 500,000 years ago, and the only fossil putative gorilla ancestor is Chororapithecus
from 10 million years ago. Thats a time when we find a diverse collection of apes
including Dryopithecus in Europe and Sivapithecus (the ancestor of orangutans) in Asia
and Kenyapithecus, whose teeth, face and elbow begin to resemble our pre-human
ancestors, in Africa and the Middle East.
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There are fossils of 2 creatures that must be close to that last ancestor we share
with chimps. They are each candidates for our ancestor, but we dont know for sure if
they are in a direct line from apes to us, or on some ancient side branch of our evolution.
Interestingly, the dates of these fossils falls into the time period shortly after the separation
of chimps and humans calculated from genetic data, of 7-8 million years ago.
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Sahelanthropus fossils date from around 7 to 6 million years ago. We have a skull
(nicknamed Touma), some lower jaws and some teeth, but no bones from the rest of the
skeleton. Its skull and teeth dont fit well with chimps & bonobos, but it is the shape of
its brain (revealed by synchrotron X-ray tomography) and the location of the spinal
column at the base of its skull, that most clearly places it in the hominin line as our
upright-walking ancestor. Orrorin is another. There is a fragment of a lower jaw and
some thigh bones, 13 specimens in all from the Kenyan Rift Valley. It lived 6 million
years ago and, given the few bones we have, theres no surprise we know very little about
it. It appears to have been able to walk upright, but its teeth are distinctly ape-like.
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And then theres Ardipithecus, or Ardi for short.

We have 2 skeletons of Ardi, one which has part of the skull and good preservation
of the hands and feet, and we have parts of an estimated 35 other individuals like Ardi.
We also have pieces of skull, teeth and bones from an older and slightly different
Ardipithecus. All the fossils were found in Ethiopia in rocks dated from about 6 to 4.4
million years ago. Ardis hands and feet are ape-like but her pelvis and skull suggest she
walked upright and her wrist suggests she couldnt have knuckle-walked or even swung
from branches like chimps. Her brain was only slightly larger than a chimps, but her
face and teeth are a little more human. The totality of the evidence has convinced many
scientists that Ardi is our next oldest relative after Touma, but this is still a matter of
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Archaic humans
Soon after Ardipithecus we find a variety of prehumans in the genus
Australopithecus, including the famous Lucy. There are a skull and bones from caves in
South Africa, a lower jaw from Tanzania, and a number of sites in Kenya, Ethiopia and
Chad which have yielded a well-preserved skull, bits of other skulls, many lower jaws,
teeth, and a number of limb bones. Although there are differences between the various
species of Australopithecus (anamensis, afarensis, africanus, bahrelghazali, prometheus,
and the closely-related Kenyanthropus platyops), if we focus on Lucy (a specimen of
afarensis) as being representative, we can see that in many ways she makes sense as the
next step on the ladder after Ardi on the way to us.
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The actual skeleton that was dubbed

Lucy is officially labeled AL 288, and is about 25% of an adult female skeleton found
in the Afar region of Ethiopia. At 3.2 million years old shes from the middle of the
Australopithecus time range. Her short legs and pelvis shape show she was capable of
walking upright on 2 legs better than Ardi, but not for great distances like us, and there
are several contemporary trails of fossil footprints in Tanzania from a Lucy-like prehuman
that support this idea. Her brain size is similar to Ardis, but her teeth are more human.
Evidence that she still spent significant time climbing in trees comes from a fossil
juvenile found in Dikika, Ethiopia. Specifically, the shoulder blade of that fossil has
important ape-like climbing characteristics.
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So Lucy has attributes that are closer to humans than Ardi is. Moreover, it is
during the reign of africanus that we begin to see the first simple stone tools known as
Oldowan tools, although exactly who made them is uncertain.
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Sediba is the next superstar on this evolutionary tour. Shes more closely related
to the southern African Australopithecus africanus than eastern African afarensis that
includes Lucy, and she dates to a much more recent age of 1.977 million years ago.
There are 2 partial Sediba skeletons (possibly mother and son) that were found encased in
rock inside caves at Malapa in South Africa along with a leg bone from a third
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individual, and more remains have been found through X-ray scanning of rocks from
those same caves.
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We have a nearly complete wrist and hand of the adult female, which is partly
Australopithecus-like (a climbing-adapted upper arm and powerful forearms for climbing
trees ) and partly Homo-like (a long thumb and short fingers for precision gripping and,
possibly, stone tool production). Sediba has a human-like ankle, foot arch, and Achilles
tendon, yet her foot is also partly ape-like, with a thinner heel and a bigger inside ankle
bone than humans. She walked awkwardly, with her foot rolled on its outer edge rather
than our modern flat-footed gait, a condition that some runners and high-heel wearers
suffer from today. Her brain is about the same size as other Australopithecus brains, but its
shape shows its structure was closer to a modern human brain than other Australopithecus
brains. Interestingly, genetic studies suggest there was a crucial mutation roughly 2.4
million years ago that duplicated the human brain-gene called SRGAP2, which fits
well with the emergence of a more human-like brain at this time. Her teeth are also
intermediate between Australopithecus and Homo, rounding out the pretty convincing
evidence for Sediba being a transitional species linking Australopithecus to the Homo
genus that includes us.
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But if Sediba is the ancestor of the later Homo species including you and me
then there is a problem with her timing. At 1.997 million years ago, she is more recent
than the first putative Homo fossils at around 2.4 million years so either she is a relic of
a group that gave rise to Homo much earlier, or maybe the older Homo fossils are dubious,
or a bit of both. It turns out that that the oldest reliable specimens of Homo are around 1.9
million years old. The older assumed-Homo fossils are fragmented or isolated bits of
skull and teeth, which are tough to assign to any species with confidence, or whose date is
suspect. So the upshot is that the timing still makes sense for Sediba to be transitional
between Australopithecus and Homo.
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At around the same time as Sediba, we find fossils of weirdly robust prehumans
called Paranthropus. Fossils of this genus have been recovered from South Africa,
Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia. These creatures have a wide face, a distinct ridge along the
top of their skulls and massive jaws with large, fast-growing molars suggesting they were
adapted to a great deal of chewing, and analysis of their teeth reveals that they did indeed
graze on large quantities of grasses and sedges. Their hip joint is like most
Australopithecus suggesting Paranthropus did walk on 2 legs but not exclusively, and
curiously their brain is slightly larger than that of their Australopithecus cousins. Some
scientists lump Paranthropus in with Australopithecus, but their anatomical features
dont survive into Homo, suggesting that Paranthropus was a side branch of our evolution
that died out.
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Ecce Homo
The group that succeeded Sediba and her Australopithecus relatives was Homo which includes you and me (we are Homo sapiens, which is self-congratulatory Latin for
wise man).
The Homo genus is complicated and varied, with up to 5 different kinds of Homo
living at the same time immediately after Sediba (around 2 to 1.6 million years ago). They

were habilis, rudolfensis, ergaster, and a specimen labeled KNM-ER 1802, which has
recently been attributed to a new, unnamed species. They overlapped with
Paranthropus, so its clear that our ancestors in Africa were a diverse lot at that time.
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These earliest Homo

specimens can be seen as transitional between Australopithecus anatomy and the kind of
anatomy we find in later Homo species. Fossils for this group come from Olduvai Gorge
in Tanzania, Koobi Fora in Kenya, as well as Ethiopia, South Africa and Malawi. The
famous Turkana Boy ergaster fossil is a nearly complete skeleton from Kenya, without
feet and few finger bones. The skulls and skull fragments tell us they had a brain size of
around 600 cubic centimeters (37-48% of ours), which is a significant step up from the
brains of Australopithecus and Paranthropus.
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Recent finds in Dmanisi in Georgia suggest that the variations between habilis,
rudolfensis, ergaster and erectus are all just individual variation in early Homo, and so can
all be lumped in with Homo erectus, but this remains controversial.
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Homo erectus fossils have been found in rocks dated from about 1.8 million years
ago to 30,000 years ago across the continent of Africa, in Georgia, and as far afield as
China and Indonesia. The fossils are mainly skulls, with some bones from the body but
few hands or feet. In most respects Homo erectus was quite like modern humans in
height (with much individual variation), proportions, teeth, gait and stature. The
differences are its substantial monobrow, a pointed back of the skull, and a chin-less jaw
that is thicker than in modern humans. His limbs also had thicker bones than ours, but
his hands were as dexterous as ours. Like us he had a flattish face with a pointed nose,
a barrel-shaped ribcage, and his knee and thigh joints show he was just as adapted to
upright walking or running as you and me. His smaller teeth than Australopithecus
fossils are probably the result of increasing use of tools to do the work formerly done by
teeth, and microscopic scratch patterns on his teeth show that he had a more varied diet
than either habilis, Australopithecus or Paranthropus. Tool marks on bones and isotope
evidence show erectus had a generalized diet including meat.
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Still, the brain of erectus was not quite as big as ours (67-95% of a modern human
brain) which raises the question of how intelligent he was. Turkana Boy (ergaster) seems
to have a smaller brain than later erectus fossils, so there was some enlargement as
erectus evolved. In fact the most recent mutation of our SRGAP2 brain gene happened
around 1 million years ago, in the middle of erectus age range, before the appearance of
later Homo species like the Neandertals and modern humans.
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But the fact that by at least 1 million

years ago (probably earlier) they had learned to use fire, suggests that erectus was in fact
pretty intelligent. If you have watched Survivor man, Man versus Wild, or even Boy
Scouts try to make fire without matches, its clear that it involves some sophisticated
higher-level cognitive functions like problem-solving, preparation, learning, and
communication. The strongest evidence for this comes from the Wonderwerk Cave in
South Africa, in the form of burned bones and plant ash found in an ancient fireplace.
Fires were clearly a regular habit rather than chance events, and the quantity of burned
bones strongly suggests erectus was cooking food. Other, more tentative evidence for
erectus use of fire comes from sites in East Africa up to 1.5 million years ago, and more
recent deposits in Israel.
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Cooking is vital for brain development, because there just arent enough foraging
hours in a day for erectus to sustain the number of neurons in their brains on raw food!
Cooking supplied the calories needed by erectus and later humans, and it freed-up time for
them to be social, make tools, and engage in other activities rather than grazing all day.
There is also tenuous evidence that erectus might possibly have had some form of
language, based on the shape of the base of its skull and the timing of language-implying
anatomy found in later species.
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Another sign of erectus intelligence is their distinctive Acheulean stone tools.

These tools were clearly made with considerable care and skill, and they begin to show up
in Kenya and Ethiopia 1.75 million years ago, right at the start of erectus date range.
They are a variety of specialized tools that show refinement between the earliest and latest
examples. Erectus seems to have had tool factories for example at Konso in Ethiopia
and at Kokiselei and Olorgasailie in Kenya, suggesting a degree of social organization
akin to modern humans. The anatomy of erectus waist, elbow and shoulder shows it was
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the first human capable of throwing weapons - killing from a distance - so it cant be
coincidence that at around the same time as the emergence of erectus, we begin to see
extinctions of a number of large carnivores in Africa.
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The fact that erectus spread so quickly across the world, successfully exploiting
environments quite different from Africa, shows that erectus was special, and entirely
new. They also lasted well into the era of Homo sapiens, and they seem to have evolved
the later species of Homo.
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floresiensis (nicknamed The Hobbit) is an oddball. This diminutive creature was

discovered in a cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia and may have evolved from
erectus. 2 skeletons and up to 100 fossils have been found representing up to 10
floresiensis individuals. It has a brain about the size of an Australopithecus in an early
Homo-like skull, a unique pelvis and legs, and in adulthood it is only the size of modern
4-year-old child.
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Denisovans are a newly-discovered species from a cave in the Altai Mountains in

southern Siberia. All we have of them so far is a finger bone and 2 teeth, but the bone still
has good quality DNA in it so scientists were able to sequence the genome of this
Denisovan girl who lived between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. The DNA confirmed
that the girl was not Neandertal but was instead the product of a different migration out of
Africa, and that her lineage had separated from that of Neandertals and us about 1 million
years ago, suggesting erectus as its tentative ancestor.
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From erectus to modern humans

We have over 80 skeletal remains of antecessor representing some 7 individuals,
including bits of skull, teeth, and a mandible, from Atapuerca in Spain. The fossils are
found with stone artefacts and are dated between 1.2 million years and 900,000 years
old. antecessor seems to be an evolved European version of erectus, and some
consider it the ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans, but most scientists do not.
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heidelbergensis is the earliest of our ancestors to have a brain as large as some

modern humans, and is perhaps better thought of as archaic Homo sapiens. We have
fossils from Europe, the Near East, Africa, China and India dated between 600,000 to
100,000 years ago. Some researchers classify African heidelbergensis as a separate group
called Homo rhodesiensis, and see those as the ancestors of Homo sapiens.
heidelbergensis skeletons are more robust than ours, with thick skulls, large eyebrow
ridges and a forward-projecting face . Their leg joints are also large and adapted to
long-distance travel. Heidelbergensis evolved from erectus, developing an enlarged and
more rounded back of the skull and a broader forehead enclosing a larger brain in the
process. They probably had speech, based on fossil hyoid bones from their throats, the
nature of the middle-ear bones, and the size of certain nerve canals. They evolved into
modern humans in Africa, and into Neandertals in Europe, showing a gradation of
characteristics over time into those species (for example many fossils at Sima de los
Huesos in Spain). heidelbergensis was an accomplished toolmaker and butcher, using
fire-hardened wooden spears and a variety of stone tools to process animal carcasses.
They also hafted stone tips to wooden shafts to make spears, which involves tying a
suitably-crafted spear tip to a shaft using some kind of twine and maybe glue. This
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suggests high level cognitive ability and communication to teach the skill to others, which
adds more weight to the suggestion they had some form of speech. Evidence for this
comes from excavations in South Africa, England and Germany.
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Neandertals were a highly successful

group whose territory extended across Europe and the Near East and into western Asia
from around 200,000 to around 40,000 years ago, overlapping the age range of
modern humans in Africa and erectus in Asia. This age range assumes the older fossils
at Sima de los Huesos are assigned to heidelbergensis and not Neandertals, which is still
debated. Fossils of more than 275 individual Neandertals have been found from over
70 sites, representing a strong fossil record. They had distinctive low-browed skulls with
large eyebrow ridges, big eyes, wide noses and a small-to-non-existent chin, and their
bodies were stocky, robust and muscular, suggesting a very strenuous lifestyle.
Neandertal DNA has been recovered from several individuals and their genomes
sequenced, showing that there was much less genetic diversity in Neandertals than in
modern humans. They did have brains as large as ours (actually slightly larger) and had
at least one distinctive culture of tools known as Mousterian. They used ochre for
paint, scratched symbols onto bones, and they adorned themselves with feathers and
eagle claws. They also constructed 10m (32 feet) wide huts from carefully selected
mammoth bones. There is evidence that they had speech based on the shape of their
hyoid bone in their throats, the presence of the speech-associated variant of the FOXP2
gene in their DNA, the shape of their middle-ear bones, the size of relevant nerve canals,
their culture and their symbolic behavior.

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In other words, aside from appearance and stature, they were quite similar to the
earliest modern humans and not the primitive, brutish creatures so often depicted in
popular culture. In fact they appear to have been about as modern, culturally and
behaviorally, as Anatomaically Modern Humans who lived at the same time as them.
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Improvements in carbon dating have now pushed back the dates for the last
Neandertals from about 30,000 to about 40,000 years ago, but the extent and nature of
modern-looking humans overlap with Neandertals is still debated, with the possibility of a
later Neandertal outpost in Southern Spain.
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Anatomically modern humans emerged around 208,000 years ago in Africa, and
the oldest fossils are from Omo Kinish in Ethiopia. Fossils of ancient Homo sapiens
have been discovered on every continent except Antarctica, with the first discovery in
1822 in a Welsh cave, and there are plenty of sapiens fossils in good condition. What
they show is a gradation over time from archaic Homo sapiens with robust skulls and
muscular bodies to the lighter-boned modern humans of today. Early fossils also show a
gradation between heidelbergensis and Anatomically Modern Humans, making the
boundary hard to set but supporting our gradual evolution from African heidelbergensis
(sometimes called rhodesiensis). It was probably more complicated than that, given
interbreeding between closely-related but distinct groups, and the high degree of
individual and regional variability over time in archaic groups like erectus.
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Direct fossil dates for modern humans in Europe are from around 44,000 years
ago but technology associated with modern humans begins to show up in Europe around
45,000 years ago, during a relatively warm and humid respite in the ice age known as
MIS3. That gives a protracted overlap with Neandertals in Europe of 2,600 to 5,400
years. Interestingly, places like Arcy-sur-Cure in France show that Neandertals changed
their Mousterian culture to a kind of hybrid culture (Chtelperronian) once modern
humans arrived in the region about 44,000 years ago, and then modern human
Protoaurignacian and Aurignacian artefacts take over completely by about 41,000
years ago, suggesting the extinction of Neandertals at that location around that date.
This transition occurs earlier in southern Europe, showing that the annexing of Europe by
modern humans was slow and piecemeal.
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The traditionally-assumed single

African exodus 60,000 years ago has now been superseded by evidence of older
wanderings, and recognition of much more complexity to the migrations. This is a
hotbed of current research on all fronts: archeological, fossil, and genetic; but it suggests a
complicated pattern of dispersal, generally associated with warmer, wetter interglacials.
Considering that we are talking of a time period in excess of 100,000 years, this
complexity is unsurprising, since in just the last 5,000 years we have seen many
wholesale population migrations through Europe alone (Indo-Europeans, Hittites, Celts,
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Aryans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Persians, Romans, Samartians, Goths, Huns and Mongols
to name a few).
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So, to sum up, there is a wealth of fossil evidence for the emergence of modern
humans from apes through a series of intermediate species. This is an exciting time of big
steps in our knowledge brought about by improved dating and genetics, which I will cover
in the next section. There are also new fossil finds that have yet to be spliced into this
story, like those recently unearthed in the Rising Star Expedition in South Africa. But it
doesnt seem likely that the broad-brush picture of our journey from apes to modern
humans will change fundamentally.
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24 Human Evolution Family Tree. After Wood, PNAS 2010; Pickering et al,
Science 2011; Leakey et al, Nature 2012; Krause et al, Nature 2010; Langergraber et
al, PNAS 2012; Dennis et al, Cell 2012; Wilkins et al, Science 2012; Berna et al,
PNAS 2012; Beyene et al, PNAS 2013; Clarke, The paleobiology of
Australopithecus, Springer 2013; Herries, et al. The paleobiology of
Australopithecus, Springer 2013; Lordkipanidze et al, Science 2013; Pars et al,

J.Arch.Sci 2013.

Breadcrumbs of evolution
In the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, the children leave a trail of breadcrumbs so
that they might find their way home after being abandoned in the forest. This is a good
analogy for the way clues in our biology today can lead us back, like a trail of
breadcrumbs, to our origins.
The genetic code in all organisms is based on a 4-letter alphabet representing the 4
different bases in DNA, and the patterns of these letters are amenable to computer
processing, which can find identical matches of sequences and even close matches that
arent identical. Now that the entire genomes of many organisms have been sequenced,
and with recent advances in computer processing, we can now parse these vast sets of
genetic codes for matches between organisms, and we can rank the closeness of those
matches.
This tool is known as molecular phylogeny and provides a new and powerful
way to illuminate the evolutionary tree of life based on how similar creatures genetic
codes are. It is actually not restricted to genetic code it can be applied to the makeup and
structure of proteins too (the proteome - the protein equivalent of the genome).

LUCA and the dawn of life

We can learn a surprising amount about LUCA the Last Universal Common
Ancestor of all life on Earth from these studies. For instance, one study concentrated on
the proteins in 420 organisms spread across the 3 domains of life: archaea (simple singlecelled organisms), bacteria, and eukarya (fungi, plants, animals). They ran their algorithms
to identify proteins shared across all these life forms (therefore present in their common
ancestor) and found 70 families of proteins that all other life has inherited in some way
from LUCA.
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This primordial set of proteins sheds some light on the nature of LUCA (or the
urancestor as the authors prefer to call it). It tells us that LUCA had enzymes for
metabolism and for making a simple cell membrane of glycerol ether and ester lipids, and
it had the ability to synthesize proteins. It also had very simple genetic replication using
RNA rather than DNA. LUCA had the simplest type of RNA called 16S rRNA, and
its metabolism must have used the Krebs cycle and a process known as chemiosmosis.
LUCA did not start life in an especially hot environment. The tolerance for high
temperatures seems to have evolved after LUCA, requiring that wherever LUCA lived, the
environment at that time was not far off modern conditions.
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Of course these are the characteristics of our last common ancestor (as in the one
that could replicate itself and pass on genes to its descendants), and not necessarily the
earliest prototype of life on Earth. The scenario for the origin of life on our planet as a
kind of living rock in submarine vents is speculative but plausible. This subject alone is
a books-worth, so I can only touch on the highlights here. For a fuller account of the
emergence of life from chemistry, see Nick Lanes book: Life Ascending.
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 We have to bridge the gap between

the LUCA revealed by those molecular phylogeny studies, and the chemistry that existed
before life in the oxygen-less early Earth. Science has moved on from the famous
experiments of the 1950s which suggested lightning could generate the chemicals of life.
They were based on an assumed composition of Earths early atmosphere that we now
know was wrong, and when you repeat the experiments using the more realistic
atmosphere you just dont get those protein building blocks we call amino acids. More
recent experiments suggest that you can get more amino acids from a realistic atmosphere
if you add other chemicals, but it just isnt necessary to invoke lightning now that we have
discovered most of lifes chemical building blocks already exist in meteorites and so
were readily available on the early Earth. The other source of essential life chemicals is
the natural chemistry of deep ocean vents. Measurements of the chemistry at alkaline
submarine vents today, such as the Rainbow Hydrothermal Field in the Mid Atlantic
Ridge, have found they exude hydrogen, methane, and hydrocarbons with life-like carbon
chain lengths of between 16 and 29 carbon atoms.
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The real problem is getting from those chemical building blocks to complicated
life-chemicals like RNA. RNA is a string of ribonucleotides, and each of those is made up
of a sugar, a phosphate group and a base (one of the 4 letters in our genetic code).
Scientists have found that if you recreate the chemistry of the early Earth oceans, then
ribonucleotides spontaneously form in that soup, but they have not yet been able to go
the next step and combine those ribonucleotides to make RNA. Once you do have strands
of RNA, experiments have shown they spontaneously cooperate with each other and grow.
More complex RNA networks grow faster than single molecules, so there seems to be an
inherent bias for RNA-based chemistry to evolve the complexity of life.
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Life needs energy and so the earliest life needed some form of metabolism to
extract energy from its environment. All life today has a metabolism based on a cycle of
chemical reactions known as the Krebs Cycle and a process known as chemiosmosis.
The fact that these are shared across all life suggests we inherited them from LUCA.
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Archaea today use enzymes containing iron, nickel and sulfur to react hydrogen
with CO2 to produce organic molecules and, crucially, energy. The metallic cores of those

enzymes are very similar to natural minerals in hydrothermal vents. The vent minerals
react hydrothermal fluids with CO2 - rich water to produce acetyl thioester (similar to
vinegar), which in turn reacts spontaneously with CO2 to produce pyruvate, which kicks
off the Krebs Cycle. In other words, the natural geochemistry around ancient mineral
vents spontaneously produces the chemistry to arrive at the Krebs Cycle.
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Chemiosmosis is a chain of reactions to create a charge across a membrane, just

like the electric charge between the + and - terminals of a battery. The fact that all life
uses protons (hydrogen ions) for chemiosmosis, rather than any other kind of ion, seems to
hark back to the natural proton gradient at hydrothermal vents (like the Rainbow vents)
where alkaline fluids meet mildly acidic, carbon-rich sea water, producing a natural charge
which can be exploited by metabolism.
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Of course life on Earth today is not tied to submarine vents, so at some point our
transition from rock chemistry to cellular life must have involved the development of cell
membranes to package the chemicals required for metabolism and replication into an
independent cell.
All cell membranes are composed of glycerol phosphate phospholipids and this,
again, suggests LUCA had such a membrane. It turns out that an ironnickel phosphide
mineral common in meteorites (schreibersite) reacts with sea water in early-Earth
conditions (low-oxygen, mild temperatures) to produce those very membrane molecules.
Other experiments have shown that organic materials in meteorites like the Murchison
meteorite will spontaneously make little bubble-like cells in water, capable of enclosing
packages of RNA and other chemicals, and which grow and divide spontaneously. So the
fact that life emerged during the heavy bombardment of Earth by asteroids is probably no
coincidence, as schreibersite probably also supplied the phosphorous required to make the
essential life chemicals RNA and ATP.
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Interestingly, archaea and bacteria have their own variants of cell membranes,
which implies that LUCA may have had a mixture of the two. This difference also helps
us understand how eukaryotes including us evolved (which Ill cover below). By the time
LUCA left her rocky womb she possessed complex lipid membranes and the enzymes to
make them.
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The great schism the separation of the 3 domains of life

The protein study I mentioned above also mapped-out the family tree of life,
supporting the fundamental split into 3 domains early on, and suggesting that archaea are
closer to LUCA (and therefore more primordial) than bacteria. That study not only gives
us the order of evolution (who begat whom), but it also gives an idea of when those
organisms first evolved (calibrated using dated fossils). This molecular clock places the
split of eukaryotes (the kind of cell which gave rise to multicellular life including humans)
from bacteria at about 2.9 billion years ago. This is around the time when about 27% of
all gene families in creatures alive today, across all forms of life, seem to have evolved.
These gene families are mainly involved in respiration, and that makes sense because this
was around the beginning of the Great Oxidation Event (the mid-life crisis of the first part
of this book) which would have allowed organisms to respire using oxygen for the first
time.
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Our genes involved in replication and making proteins are inherited from archaea,
yet our genes for metabolism and cellular functions are essentially bacterial. Our cell
membranes are bacterial in origin, as are the membranes that surround the cell nucleus and
mitochondria (the parts of eukaryote cells that generate energy). Mitochondria, in fact,
have their own DNA which is kept separate from the rest of the cells DNA and, unlike the
rest of our genes, it is only inherited from mothers. This suggests that eukaryote cells
originated as a hybrid of an archaeal cell and a bacterium, or possibly from a bacterium
engulfing both an archaeal cell and another bacterium. Either way, the bacterium lived on
as mitochondria, resulting in more sophisticated, more energetic cells (eukaryotes) that
paved the way for complex life, and eventually us.
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Breadcrumbs of mammal evolution

Its remarkable that molecular phylogeny, a technique of sleuthing through our
genes and proteins, agrees so well with the evolutionary relationships previously derived
through many decades of painstakingly detailed fossil comparisons. It complements the
fossil record, filling in gaps where the fossil record is sparse, and the molecular clock
can improve our knowledge of when new groups evolved.
We also get two bites at the genetic cherry, as the technique can be used on both
nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA. For example, by using both kids of DNA, scientists
have been able to clarify the evolution of mammals, showing that a number of groups had
already evolved before the demise of the dinosaurs, but that they only diversified in the 20
million years after the dinosaur extinction. Another study using both kinds of DNA
showed that a major radiation in whales coincided with the startup of the Antarctic
Circumpolar Current around 31-34 million years ago, the same event that triggered the
Antarctic ice cap and our spiral into an ice-age climate. That study also found whale and
dolphin diversification in the period of 13-4 million years ago, when the Tethys, the IndoPacific, and Panama ocean connections closed.
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Scientists are now borrowing techniques from molecular phylogeny and applying
them instead to physical characteristics (phenomes) of living and fossil creatures. This
technique was used to track the emergence of the first placental mammals (our ancestors)
to very soon after the end-Cretaceous extinction.
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Evolution in humans revealed by genetics

Sequencing human genomes has led to an explosion of information about our
evolution. Modern human genomes across the globe have shed light on patterns of
ancestry, but ancient genomes from archaic humans have also been sequenced, including
several Neandertals, a Denisovan, and a 400,000 year old heidelbergensis. As I write this,
new genetic data are emerging every few months with fresh insights on our origins.
It is very clear from our genomes that about 2% of our genes are Neandertal (for
Europeans, Asians, and North Africans ), and that some 20% of Neandertal genes are
scattered throughout different human populations today. Melanesians, Aboriginal
Australians, Polynesians, Fijians, and some Indonesians have also inherited about 4% of
their genes from Denisovans, who in turn inherited genes from an older, non-Neandertal
group. The genes of a heidelbergensis person from Spain turned out to be more
closely related to Denisovans than Neandertals, despite its quasi-Neandertal skeleton.
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The fact that some Asian populations have Denisovan DNA but others (like mainland East
Asians, western Indonesians and some other groups) do not, means that any interbreeding
must have occurred in Southeast Asia. This suggests that the enigmatic Denisovans had a
vast range from tropical southeastern Asia all the way to frozen Siberia. What all this
tells us is that the migrations and interbreedings of Homo populations were much more
complex and interesting - than we previously assumed.
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Neither were we a final

product of evolution when we emerged in Africa 208,000 years ago. We continued to
change in response to the unique environmental challenges we faced as we spread across
different regions of the globe.
Genome studies tell us East Asians have evolved subtly different genes concerned
with hearing and vision, blood pressure and metabolism, and West Africans have evolved
specialized genes for disease immunity. In Europe and Africa, life alongside domestic
cattle resulted in evolution of adult lactose tolerance, something that is switched off after
weaning in other populations and all lactose-intolerant people. And Tibetans, who live at
high altitude, have evolved differences from closely-related Han Chinese in genes
associated with blood oxygen levels.
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Genetics tells us that the San people of southern Africa (sometimes called
Bushmen) became a distinct population very early on at around 130,000 years ago, long
before Eurasians began to diverge from African populations between 64,000 and 38,000
years ago. They also tell us that America was initially populated by several distinct
migrations from Siberia, and show how those populations spread south along the coast
into South America, and east of the Rockies from Alaska.
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These studies also tell us that there is far more individual genetic variation within
our population groups than between them. There is much active research on our
genomes which will shed new light on our recent and distant past. Molecular clocks will
be refined and no doubt revisions will occur, but so far the genetic evidence has fleshedout the story of our evolution that was previously only revealed by bones and teeth.
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Shared anatomy
Its not just our genes and proteins that bear witness to our evolution. Our very
flesh and bones contain echoes of our ancestors.
Take your legs and arms, for instance, and compare them with the limbs of all 4limbed creatures since our divergence from fish. We all have the same basic structure of a
single upper bone in arms and legs, two bones for our lower limbs, and then a series of
smaller (wrist or foot) bones before ending with 5 toes or fingers. This is true for humans,
whales, dogs, cats, horses, bats, lizards and even frogs.
There are many cases where you can trace changing anatomy through a series of
descendent species. We can see the sophisticated mammalian ear begin its evolution from
the reptile ear. Small bones at the back of the jaw in reptiles began to separate in early
Cretaceous utriconodont mammals, before eventually becoming the tiny bones of our
middle ear in later mammals. Jaws are another example. After some initial variation in
very early fish, their shape settled on a design that stayed through fish and then the 4legged creatures that moved onto land.
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Evolving embryos
Of all the 4-limbed animals, birds would appear to be the exception to the 5fingered rule, because they have lost 2 of those 5 digits. But they do have those fingers as
embryos when they are still in their eggs. Watching a bird embryo develop shows that it
starts with 5 digits but then the extra digits stop developing and degenerate long before
the bird hatches, so they arent an exception after all.
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In fact the way embryos develop offers still more clues to the origins of species.
Vertebrate embryos, including humans, all go through a similar development sequence
which reveals vestiges of the ancient creatures we evolved from. At an early stage of
development we all have a tail, gill slits, and gill cover. As the embryo develops further
some of these remain vestigial (like our tail) and some are repurposed, like the gills which
become our parathyroid glands.
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Bottom Line:
Evolution is a fact accepted by practically all the worlds scientists, because of the
overwhelming body of evidence that proves it. The evidence for evolution and for the
myriad creatures that existed long before us is writ large and tiny in rocks across 3.7
billion years of our planets history. More than that, it is written in the very biology of
living things today their genes, their anatomy and their biochemistry. Evolution through
selection has been observed in the lab, outside the lab and in the history of domestic
animals. But more than that, we are increasingly understanding how the evolution of life
has been an integral part of our planets evolution.

4. The Clocks In Rocks

Sands of time
Throughout this book I have referred to events at specific times in the past thousands, millions and even billions of years ago. Being able to nail events down to
specific times, and so work out the order of events, is pivotal for working out the history
of our planet. How we know those dates is therefore a cornerstone of our understanding of
Earths past.

From scripture to nature

In the 17th century, Bishop Ussher based his calculation of the age of the Earth on
a literal reading of the Bible. He decided that the Earth was created in 4,004 BC, and this
date has become a fixation for Young Earth Creationists today. But the bishop had only
ancient texts and family trees to go on, unconstrained by scientific measurements and
observations from the natural world.
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In the 18th and 19th Centuries, as geology moved from a collecting hobby to a
science, observations of nature were brought to bear on the question. It was James Hutton
who first articulated the idea that it must have taken eons to produce the landscapes of
today. Hutton was part of the Enlightenment society that flourished in Edinburgh after the
Jacobite rebellion. He travelled and made observations of the rocks everywhere he went,
which convinced him that erosion leads to sediments that form rock. He also observed
marine sediments high up in mountains, and deduced that the mountains must have been
raised from the bottom of the sea.
After the first edition of his Theory of the Earth was published, he visited Siccar
Point, about 50km (30mi) east of Edinburgh, where he saw red sandstone strata draped
over upended layers of gray sandstone. That crystallized his understanding of the deep
time required to explain what he saw: eons must have passed from the initial formation of
the grey sandstone layers, to the time needed to petrify and upend them, then later to drape
them in fresh red sands, for those also to petrify, and then the whole edifice to be raised,
eroded and exposed before him. All that must have taken far longer than Usshers 6,000
years:
It is only in science that any question concerning the origin and end of
things is formed; and it is in science only that the resolution of those
questions is to be attained. The natural operations of this globe, by which
the size and shape of our land are changed, are so slow as to be altogether
imperceptible to men who are employed in pursuing the various
occupations of life and literature.
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Smiths puzzle
William Smith came a little after Hutton. From his work building canals and coal
mines, Smith deduced that sediments laid down at the same time had the same
characteristics and, crucially, the same assemblage of fossils. Armed with this
knowledge, Smith was able to trace strata from one mine to another, and from one county
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to another, fitting them together like pieces of a puzzle. He labored many years singlehandedly, mapping strata all across Britain, until he had produced the worlds first
geological map in 1815. Far more than an impressively-colored piece of paper, this
summarized the entire geological history of Britain in a single, graphical document. By
stringing together many individual successions of strata in their proper order of formation,
he had multiplied Huttons eons.
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Geologists follow Smiths mapping technique to this day, and still use fossil
assemblages to correlate and date strata (although these days those dates are calibrated to
radiometric dates which I will come to below). But it was a while before Smiths
achievement was understood for its true significance, and he was treated shamefully in the
interim a tale deftly told by Simon Winchester in his book The Map That Changed the
World.
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So Smith had succeeded in defining the relative dates of strata (this layer came
before that layer, and so on), and Hutton had shown us that the planets history was
played-out across the eons of deep time. Huttons insights influenced scientists after him,
from Sir Charles Lyell (who visited the Joggins fossil forest in Nova Scotia, in the Proof
of Life chapter earlier) to Darwin. Darwin himself observed the slow rate of
accumulation and erosion of sediments in British landscapes, and multiplied those times
by the vast thicknesses of sands and clays exposed in cliffs, to arrive at timescales in the
hundreds of millions of years.
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Yet absolute dates (exactly how many million years old a particular stratum is)
remained elusive. So, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, scientists
turned to physics for answers.

To start with they were way off. In the 1860s Lord

Kelvin attempted to calculate the age of the Earth by assuming it had cooled from a
molten state. He came up with between 20 million and 400 million years. He was
profoundly wrong because he guessed a melting point for rock which was way too high,
his value for how fast the Earth conducts heat was wrong, and crucially he did not know
about the heat added by natural radioactive decay. He also did not factor in other heat
sources like asteroid impacts and the heat generated by the planets core. The heat balance
of our planet is much more complex than imagined by Kelvin, which is why his age of
the Earth is far too young.
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Fortunately, in the 20th Century, physicists like Rutherford and Boltwood began to
measure radioactive decay, delivering a new technique for measuring accurate, absolute

dates by radiometric dating.

Radiation-free proofs of an old Earth

Since radiometric dating is dismissed by Young Earth Creationists, its worth
touching on a few of the ways we know that the Earth is very old, even without using
radiometric dating.
Measured continental drift
If we start with modern GPS measurements of the speed of movement of
continents today, we can calculate how many years back in time you have to go to join
continents like Africa and South America back together. Using the GPS-measured drift
rate today of around 26mm (1in) per year, multiplied by the distance between the
continents of roughly 5,500km (3,400mi), it takes you back roughly 200 million years to
join the continents together again. Lo and behold, that puts you at the end of the Triassic
period, which is when geological and radiometric dating evidence does, indeed, have the
beginning of the opening of the Atlantic. This crude calculation illustrates that we are
dealing in hundreds of millions of years, not thousands.
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And a similar exercise can be done with Hawaii. The Big Island of Hawaii
currently sits over a mantle hot spot that has remained fairly fixed as the pacific plate
drifted over it, like a blow-torch, melting a string of volcanoes into the seafloor to create
the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain. GPS data show the plate is moving at about 7090mm (2 - 3 in) per year.
That means the Midway Islands (around 2400 km
(1500mi) away) should be roughly 28 million years old. Potassium-argon radiometric
dates for the Midway Islands are around 27.7 Million years old.
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Erosion rates
Measurements have been made of erosion rates across the worlds river basins, and
as you might imagine, they vary. They range from averages around 0.5 mm per year
(1/64in) across most of the worlds rivers to around 5mm per year ( in) in tectonically
active mountain ranges, to a few cm per year in volcanic areas.
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The point of this is you end up with a minimum of millions of years required to
erode the miles-deep river valleys through the worlds great mountain chains. And thats if
you suspend geological reality by ignoring tectonics or isostacy (the unloading-a-boat
effect), which just prolong that time in reality. We do know for certain that they are
eroding (from measurements of sediment loads in rivers, for instance), and we can
measure with GPS the rate of their tectonic uplift (Mount Everest has been rising about
4mm (about 1/8 in) a year ). Once again, these are very simplistic calculations, but they
force us to accept timescales of millions of years to explain such topography.
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Tree rings
Everybody knows that each ring in the wood of a tree represents 1 annual growth
cycle, so counting the growth rings gives you the age of the tree. Unfortunately its not
quite that simple because some trees have missing or false rings, so in reality counting
rings from a single tree doesnt always yield very accurate dates. But you can get around
the idiosyncrasies of individual trees by counting the rings in many trees and crossmatching their thick-thin ring patterns like barcodes. In this way an accurate master
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chronology can be built up, starting with living trees and going back many thousands of
years.

Oak tree rings in Germany can be

traced back over 9,000 years, and a combined Swiss-German pine tree record goes back
more than 12,000 years. The German oak chronology matches an Irish oak chronology
as far back as the 3rd millennium BC. The North American Bristlecone Pine record goes
back over 7,000 years and several living trees of this species have been found to be over
2,000 years old. Thousands of tree-ring chronologies from across the world and many
tree types have been measured, and they can all be cross-referenced, albeit with minor
error in some cases (there is apparently a 37 year error comparing the bristlecone pine
chronology with the German pine chronology or about 0.5%).
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This is further, unassailable evidence that the Earth is much older than Usshers six
millennia.
Coral growth bands
Corals have annual growth bands much like trees, and they are used to construct
chronologies in much the same way as tree rings. Cores drilled from coral reefs are
photographed under ultraviolet light which makes the summer (tropical rainy season)
growth bands glow. These bands are traced, compiled, and cross-matched with other
cores to produce a year-by-year count. In many cases variations in stable isotopes (not the
radioactive kind) are logged along the coral record to help constrain that annual count.
Corals grow in more complicated shapes than trees, so its harder to construct
chronologies as accurate as the tree ring record, but despite that, scientists have been able
to trace a year-by-year record that extends back around 130,000 years, with just a 2%
error.
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Lakebeds
Some lakes have been quietly silting-up for thousands of years. Each year in
summer they lay down a lighter colored layer of fine sand, and each winter a thin film of
black clay drapes the lakebed. Drill-cores through these lakebeds reveal black and white
stripes called varves exactly one for each year, just like tree rings. Counting the stripes

gives you the number of years it took to make the sediment in that lake bed.
Lake varves record the passage of up to 30,000 years in a single lake (Lake
Suigetsu, Japan) and they occur all across the globe. Many records begin today and
extend continuously back, but others begin in the past so they have to be matched by other
means to an absolute date. Matching different sequences from many lakes (using
radiometric dating or volcanic ash deposits or magnetic data) creates a robust year-by-year
timeframe going back tens of thousands of years, with errors calculated to be just 1-3%.
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Ice Cores
Ice cores are cylinders of ice bored from ice caps and glaciers by special drilling
rigs. They are mainly from the deep ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, and comprise a
record of snows for millennia together with any trace impurities that were in the air at the
time. The younger part of the record can be annually counted just like tree rings, coral
bands and varves, but for the longer timescales we are interested in here, visual layer
counting alone is insufficient. The difficulties are many; including ice compression and
diffusion that blurs the seasonal distinctions. Nevertheless, detailed chemical sampling
along the ice cores yields wiggles in the ratios of isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen (again,
these are nothing to do with the isotopes used for radiometric dating) which reflect
temperature variations at the time the snow was falling. These show a distinct up-down
wave corresponding to summer-winter cycles giving a timescale of 1 year per wiggle. To
supplement the isotope wiggles, scientists also use analyses of dust levels (which vary
seasonally) and ash from volcanic eruptions to cross-match different cores.
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The upshot of all that is that we have ice core records that go back 800,000 years.

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Cave crud
Were all familiar with the spiky stalactites and stalagmites that build up in caves,
if only from movies. Many contain annually-layered deposits which go back even further
in time than ice cores. Their annual banding is related to seasonal variations in the amount
of water percolating into the cave, and several can be traced back hundreds of thousands
of years (a cave in Borneo goes back 600,000 years, and the Soreq and Peqiin Caves
in Israel go back 250,000 years). Most of those older dates are based on radiometric
dating, but a few younger caves have had stalagmite layers counted going back 6,500
years (the Cold Air Cave in South Africa) and others about half that age (eg Carlsbad
Cavern, USA: 2800 years; northwestern Scotland: 3600 years).
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Some of these layer-counted speleothem records have also been radiometrically

dated (eg the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico). The radiometric dates do indeed match
the layer counted dates, validating the radiometric technique at least over the timescale of
a few thousand years.
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25 Annually-layered rock clocks: coral bands, lake varves and a

stalagmite layers. Photos by:- corals: Rob Dunbar, Rice University /
NOAA Paleoclimatology; Varves: Takeshi Nakagawa, suigetsu.org;
Stalactite: Dr. Honglin Xiao, Elon College/ Department of Geology,
University of Georgia
Physics of the Sun
Evidence taken, quite literally, from out of this world also corroborates an ancient
origin for the Solar System. The age of the Sun can be computed from the proportion of
hydrogen to helium in its core, because in a Main Sequence star like our Sun this
hydrogen is converted to helium at a specific rate. The trick, then, is to find out what those
proportions are. It turns out that the Sun, which is basically a giant hydrogen bomb,
resonates with its nuclear reactions. The frequency of that vibration is very strongly
related to the proportion of hydrogen to helium in its core. Scientists detect the vibrations
using Sun-observing satellites like NASAs SOHO and SDO and those
heleoseismic measurements place the birth of the Sun between 4.6 billion years and
4:57 billion years remarkably close to radiometric dates of meteorites which are used
to date the birth of the Solar System (including Earth).

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An old Earth even without radiometric dating

The last few paragraphs add up to a number of completely independent lines of
evidence for the millions of years of Earths existence. When compared they agree with
each other, recording the same climate cycles. So even without recourse to radiometric

dating, there is a mountain (pun intended) of evidence for the long timeframe of the planet
conventionally understood by science. They also agree with, and therefore validate,
radiometric dates.

Radioactive rock-clocks
Radiometric dating, using radioactive isotopes, allows us to read the natural
clocks in rocks. Unlike most of the methods above, radiometric dating isnt limited to a
few specific situations (like trees or lake bottoms) or to the last few hundred thousand
years. It can be used across the span of geological time and on many different rocks,
making it indispensable for any practical understanding of our deep past.
It only became possible with the advances in atomic physics in the 20th century,
and the development of an exquisitely sensitive technique for measuring minute quantities
of chemical elements in a sample - the mass spectrometer.

Atomic race track

The mass spectrometer sounds complicated but in essence its very simple. Its
basically a race track for atoms.
Imagine 2 racecars, one lightweight, the other heavily overloaded, racing around a
bend. The lighter car makes the bend, but the heavy car smashes into the barrier. The mass
spectrometer works just the same way it separates atoms that weigh differently, no
matter how slight that difference. A sample is heated to the point that its atoms lose their
covering of electrons, leaving just atomic nuclei. The naked nuclei are then accelerated by
magnets along a curved track and, just like our imaginary race cars, the lighter atoms
make it around the bend but the heavier ones slam into the wall. Sensors record the
locations of crashes, and a little calculation gives the weights of the atoms and their
quantities.
There are many different kinds of mass spectrometers, including some that are
coupled to particle accelerators (smaller cousins of the famous Large Hadron Collider),
and some coupled to microscopes and lasers so that tiny samples can be vaporized from a
single crystal or individual growth layers in a tooth. But they all work in essentially the
same way, counting the amounts of atoms of different weights.
So what does atomic weight have to do with reading the clocks in rocks?

26 Atomic race track: how a mass spectrometer detects atoms of

different mass.

Moldy cheese

Radiometric dating works like moldy cheese.

If you leave cheese out of the refrigerator, it goes moldy. The longer you leave it,
the moldier it gets. With the exception of college students, we tend to throw that cheese
away as soon as the mold appears, but if you were to leave it out for a few weeks it would
eventually decay completely.
Its basically the same with radiometric dating. Radioactive elements
spontaneously decay to other elements over time. The atoms of the parent element and
the atoms of the daughter element have different weights, so the mass spectrometer tells
us the relative proportions of each. We use the ratio of parent (fresh cheese) atoms to the
daughter (moldy) atoms, and the rate they convert (their half-life), to get a date.
Half-life just means the time it takes for half of the original parent to decay. If an
elements half-life is, say, 100 years then after 100 years half of the parent will remain,

after 200 years half of that half will remain () and after 300 years is left, and so on in
an ever-decreasing curve.
Skeptics of radiometric dating claim that there is no experimental proof of the
technique (because humans havent been around long enough) making the dates are
unreliable. So its probably a good idea to explain why such criticism is misguided by
covering some of the ways that radiometric dating has been proven valid.

Time signal checking the accuracy of the radiometric clock

Lab proof
Firstly, radiometric dating has been proven in the lab. As scientists began to
understand radioactivity at the dawn of the 20th century, they realized that each kind of
radioactive isotope decayed at its own set rate its half-life. Some decay fast, and others
decay over billions of years, but experiments and theory showed they all decay in the
same precisely-predictable way. In fact it is a law of physics that has been checked and
rechecked many times over the last 60 years or so. Still, we should prove its validity
much further into the past than that.
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Cross-checking with other kinds of rock clocks

A good way to check radiometric dates is to compare them with other reliable rock
clocks like the tree rings, corals, cave deposits and varves I mentioned earlier. These
have been used to calibrate radiocarbon and uranium dating to 50,000 years ago.
Uranium dates have also been checked against annual layers in stalagmites from caves like
the Carlsbad Cavern, USA (2800 years) and caves in northern India (about 700 years).
Carbon-14, lead-210, Cesium-137, lead-206/207 and Plutonium-239+240 dating
techniques have been cross-matched to varves going back 15,000 years.
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So we have independent validation of radiometric dating going back tens of

thousands of years, but we want to prove its reliability back into the millions and billions
of years in the lifetime of Earth.
Orbital tuning and seafloor spreading
To address this, scientists matched dates of sea-floor lavas (using potassium-argon
dates) with their expected age based on sea-floor spreading rates, going back several
million years. They also used the pattern of magnetic pole reversals preserved in terrestrial
basalt lavas. They successfully compared the radiometric dates of the basalts with the
patterns of magnetic reversals going back around a million years.
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To validate radiometric dates further into the past, they made use of Earths orbital
wobbles. These orbital wobbles, which I described as the major cause of fluctuations in
the ice ages, are known very accurately and can be projected with precision into the past.
They can be correlated with temperature variations in ocean water revealed to us through
oxygen isotopes in our microscopic fossil friends, the forams. In this way, radiometric
dates can be checked against orbital cycles and they match all the way back into the age
of the dinosaurs.
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Ancient nuclear reactor

Beyond that we must reach into the deep past, to the weird natural reactor that

occurred in Oklo, Gabon, around 2 billion years ago. First off, scientists can tell that a
nuclear reactor was operating there because the profile of elements in the ground closely
matches that in waste from modern nuclear reactors, and the isotopic abundances of
several elements can only be explained by nuclear fission reactions (isotopes of
neodymium, Plutonium-239 and uranium-235). This relates to radiometric dating because
the proportions of those isotopes today are exactly as predicted by a constant nuclear
decay rate operating over the last 2 billion years. In other words, the rate of radioactive
decay has been constant, and therefore reliable for dating, at least since the time of Oklo,
around 2 billion years ago.
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Immunity from temperature and pressure changes

But what if our clock speeds up or slows in extreme conditions deep inside the
Earth? It turns out that the dates are immune to extreme temperatures and pressures
because the radioactive decay happens in the atomic nucleus, shielded from chemical
reactions, which only involve electrons. Lab experiments have put radioactive samples
through bomb explosions, frozen them to near absolute zero, taken them to mountain tops
and down the deepest mines, spun them in centrifuges, fried them with electricity and put
them in strong magnetic fields, all to no avail. Their decay constant remained just that
constant.
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There is one exception a kind of decay called electron capture. Experiments
on Beryllium-7 showed that electron capture can be affected by extreme pressures those
found very deep in the mantle. Isotopes of rhenium and dysprosium also change their halflives if their electrons are removed, but the conditions that would make that happen exist
only in the interiors of stars! In reality Beryllium-7 is not used for dating, and the related
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potassium-Argon (K-Ar) dating that should theoretically be affected, is not used under
those conditions because rocks are molten at those extreme temperatures and pressures (so
the radiometric clock is never set). Nevertheless, a small error in the decay constant for
K-Ar dates has recently been corrected, which Ill explain below.
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In the final analysis, there are dozens of different radioactive isotopes used for
dating, who each have different chemistries and get incorporated into different rock types,
and yet they all produce consistent dates compared to each other. Moreover, dating is
carried out routinely in hundreds of labs around the world with consistent results. So
radiometric dating has been proven in the lab and validated by cross-checking with a
range of other rock clocks, and between different radioactive isotopes. Radiometric
dating is conclusively valid.
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Errors and uncertainties

This doesnt mean that every radiometric age is infallible. As the geologist and
author Brent Dalrymple put it: failures may be due to: laboratory errors (mistakes
happen), unrecognized geologic factors (nature sometimes fools us), or misapplication of
techniques (no one is perfect). To mitigate these risks, scientists analyze multiple
samples, use several independent techniques, and check the geology around the sample
location.
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As better instruments become available and measurements more precise, some

fine-tuning inevitably occurs, and occasionally new techniques supersede old ones. For
instance, a small error in uranium dating was recently uncovered that affects dates of the
most ancient rocks and meteorites, enough to reduce ages at the beginning of the Solar
System by 700,000 years but still only a tiny error (0.015% or about 5 days in Your
Life as Planet Earth). The electron-capture decay constant for potassium-Argon (K-Ar)
dates is another example. Using values adopted in the 1960s and 70s, K-Ar and argonargon (Ar-Ar) dates were generally younger by around 2% compared to other dating
techniques. The K-Ar decay constant has since been corrected, and newer results (since
2010) are as accurate as uranium-lead dating.
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It also doesnt mean the dates are exact to the day. A date of, say 2.024 0.062
million years doesnt mean April the 24th, in the year 2,021,987BC. It just means it is most
likely 2,024,000 years old but almost as likely to be any date 62,000 years younger or
older than then. Its a spread of probability, with the quoted date in the middle of the
spread the most likely.

Setting the stopwatch

 Radiometric clocks in rocks are really more like

stopwatches. When rocks are forming there is a point when their chemistry stops
changing, like when some magma cools into basalt. At the point that the rock is
chemically static, the stopwatch is set. And if nothing disturbs it, that natural stopwatch
keeps ticking until scientists measure it in their mass spectrometer, like a timer in a swim
race that keeps going until the swimmer touches the plate at the end of the race.
Sometimes the rock can go through changes after its formation, like getting caught
up in a continental collision. If the temperature and pressure rise sufficiently, they can
make the minerals chemically mobile again, resetting the stopwatch. Scientists can exploit
this by using different isotopes that are more or less susceptible to those changes, to learn
what changes a rock has been through in its life, and when they occurred.
Spotting a faulty stopwatch
I dont want to get bogged down in math and graphs here, but the important thing
to know is that scientists measure not just the radioactive parent and daughter isotopes, but
also the quantity of a third element. This removes the need to know how much of the
original daughter was present when the rock formed. It also makes the technique selfchecking: if the radioactive clock has been compromised it will show up as scatter in the
data points, so scientists would know not to rely on those dates. Even better, it allows
scientists to calculate the initial quantity of the daughter isotope as one of the results,
which can be useful for other purposes.
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Choosing the right clock like choosing the right ruler

Because there are such a variety of environments that rocks form in (sediments,
reefs, volcanoes, mountain belts, and so on), scientists must pick the appropriate clocks
that form naturally with those rocks. They must also choose different radioactive clocks
for different time ranges. Its just like choosing the right kind of ruler for measuring you
can choose anything from micrometers to tape measures, but you would never use a tape
measure to make precise microscopic measurements, and you would never use a
micrometer to survey a large plot of land. In just the same way, you would never attempt
to use a short-half-life isotope like carbon-14 (the micrometer analogy) to measure dates
in rocks billions of years old, and you would never try to measure the date of recentlyerupted lava using the potassium-argon method (the tape measure analogy) which is useful
between around 10,000 years to billions of years.

Dating humans

Carbon-dating with 14C

In the most recent past, the time of modern humans, dates are measured using
isotopes with relatively short half-lives, like carbon-14 (14C). Carbon dating is the
technique most people have heard of and it starts with cosmic rays bombarding our
atmosphere. Every day some atmospheric nitrogen is transformed into 14C by cosmic ray
damage, and it reacts with oxygen to make CO2, which gets incorporated into plants and
then animals as food, or into seashells from carbon dissolved in seawater. 14C decays back
into nitrogen with a half-life of about 5,700 years, so provided an uncontaminated sample
of wood, tooth, bone, etc. can be found, the amount of 14C that has reverted back to
nitrogen can be measured to give a date.
Carbon dating is used extensively in archeology, but its short half-life limits it to
samples less than 50,000 years old, which is unfortunately right when modern humans
were spreading across the globe. Its cosmic origins mean that a correction must be
applied for the variable rate that 14C has was created in the past. To do this, a great many
samples have been cross-referenced to dates from stalagmites, varves, corals and treetings, creating a calibration curve going back 50,000 years. A bonus that falls out of this
wiggly curve is that it tells us about space weather in the past, which I will cover in the
next chapter. Carbon dating of marine samples is a lot trickier because it takes time to mix
the CO2 from the atmosphere into the oceans, and ocean currents create variable reservoirs
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of 14C, making marine carbon dates inaccurate. This does have a beneficial side-effect
it enables 14C to be used as a tracer for ocean circulation.
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14C false dates & contamination

Since the 1970s, many 14C dates were

measured either on contaminated samples or on samples erroneously assumed to be the
same age as nearby human remains. The problem was so widespread that some scientists
estimate up to 90% of middle to upper Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) dates are wrong. In a
30,000 year-old bone, 98% of the original 14C has decayed, leaving only vanishingly small
levels that are easily overwhelmed by carbon that seeped into the bone from the
surrounding soil over the ages. The problem stems mainly from collagen, a tissue in
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bones, which has an annoying preponderance for soaking up contaminants and throwing
off date analyses. This issue is now being addressed by far more rigorous sample
preparation to remove contaminated collagen, and scientists are busy reanalyzing
specimens to correct their dates. In one example, a human jaw from the UK, which was
previously dated at 35,000 years old, has now been shown to be more than 41,000 years
old . In another example, Spanish Neandertal remains were re-dated and found to be at
least 10,000 years older than previously thought, limiting the time Neandertals and
modern humans coexisted.
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Dating Sediba
When it comes to dating the bones of our ancestors like Homo erectus and
Australopithecus, we have to reach past the range of 14C. The work that went into dating
Sediba is a great illustration of the way Earth scientists have to work with the real-world
conditions they find, and employ a variety of methods to narrow-down the age of ancestral
human remains.
The Sediba fossils were found in a dirt-filled cave in South Africa. Scientists
began by identifying the sediment layers in the cave, then they collected over 200 fossils
(from hyenas, saber-toothed cats, wolves, zebras, etc.) from those layers and identified
them. Based on published dates when these animals appeared or went extinct, they could
bracket the Sediba remains between 2.36 and 1.5 million years ago. No suitable samples
for radiometric dating could be found in the layer with the Sediba fossils, so instead they
sampled a layer of flowstone (basically horizontal stalagmite) from below the fossils.
They sent those samples to two different labs for uranium-lead (U-Pb) radiometric dating.
The two dates (2.024 0.062 and 2.026 0.021 million years) were identical within their
error ranges and coming from the layer below the human remains they set a maximum age
limit for Sediba.
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So, based on the combination of radiometric dates and the fossils, Sediba was
between 2.047 and about 1.5 million years old a big range in the context of human
evolution. They had to narrow it down further.
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They turned to the international record of Earths magnetic field reversals. They
analyzed samples from the flowstone and the sediments above it for the remnant ghost of
Earths magnetic field preserved within them from the time they formed. They found that
the sediments where Sediba was found had normal polarity, so given the dates already
established, they assumed the Sediba layer had to be in the normal-polarity Olduvai
Subchron, which lasted from 1.95 to 1.78 million years ago. So now Sediba was dated at
1.95 to 1.78 million years old - an uncertainty of 170,000 years.
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But they were wrong.

As they continued to excavate, they found a new layer of flowstone capping the
layer that contained Sediba (so it was younger). The U-Pb date of the new flowstone was
2.19 to 1.91 million years old - straddling the Olduvai Subchron and an earlier magnetic
reversal. Magnetic testing confirmed that the new flowstone had reversed polarity, so it
had to be from before the Olduvai Subchron (so it was older than they thought). There was
a very short switch to normal magnetic polarity at 1.977 million years ago, which only
lasted 3,000 years, so Sediba had to be right in that magnetic time zone. This tightly-

constrained the age of the Sediba fossils to 1.977 0.002 million years old, an
uncertainty of just 2,000 years, or 0.1%.
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Dating human artifacts

In exploring the earliest Homo sapiens culture and survival, scientists found
pigments, stone bladelets and a quantity of seashells in a cave at Pinnacle Point in South
Africa. Those workers needed to pin their discoveries to a date, and they used techniques
that were different from those used to date Sediba. They used Uranium Series dating,
which is good for samples that are too old for carbon-dating and too young for U-Pb
dating, on a flowstone just above the artefacts. The results gave a youngest age limit of
92,000 years. They then used a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence
(OSL) on the sediments containing the artifacts, to come up with an age for the artifacts of
164,000 years. OSL requires samples to be kept in darkness from excavation to analysis,
and it exploits dirts ability to be a natural dosimeter the device on every nuclear power
plant workers coat that measures their radiation exposure. It works because while a
sample is buried, it is constantly zapped by natural radioactivity in the soil, which causes
microscopic damage to mineral grains in the dirt. The longer the burial, the more damage.
When that sample is recovered and stimulated by light, it glows, and the strength of that
glow curve gives the length of time the sample was buried! OSL is another technique
for dating in the relatively recent geological past from 1,000 to 500,000 years ago.
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Dating at your local nuclear reactor

For older remains, like those of Ardipithecus, workers have used a technique which
requires
sticking
samples
inside
a
nuclear
reactor!

You may be surprised how many

nuclear reactors are quietly working away on university campuses and other research
facilities. Samples are placed in the reactor to turn potassium-39 into argon-39 by being
bombarded by neutrons. Once the samples have been radiated, they are then analyzed in a
mass spectrometer. In the case of Ardipithecus they used this argon-argon (Ar-Ar) dating
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technique on volcanic ash deposits that sandwiched Ardis bones, and came up with an age
of 4.4 million years for Ardi.
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Dating fossils with SHRIMP

You may be wondering why they didnt just date the fossil bones themselves. As
we saw a few paragraphs ago, radiocarbon (14C) dating is sometimes used directly on
bones, but its of no use on fossils older than about 50,000 years. Direct dating of older
fossils is problematic because the process which preserves bones, teeth and shells as
fossils usually messes with their isotopic clock.
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Living bone and tooth is made up of calcium-phosphorous crystals

(hydroxyapatite), embedded in collagen fibers. When a body decays in dirt, the collagen
eventually rots but the bone crystals exchange chemicals with groundwater and are
gradually converted into fluorapatite, which is more stable and capable of lasting millions
of years. The new crystals are as tiny as the original bone crystals, so they collectively
have a large surface area in contact with groundwater. This means they continue to
exchange isotopes with groundwater over thousands or millions of years, so the
radiometric stopwatch is never set. Dating these specimens typically gives dates that are
far too young, sometimes half the true age, and with very large errors. In contrast,
mollusk shells have a tendency to absorb uranium from surrounding sediments, which
gives them an artificially old age.
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This difficulty in establishing meaningful radiometric dates directly on fossils (as

opposed to the strata enclosing them) has been a stick that Young Earth Creationists have
used to beat radiometric dating as a whole. In reality, meaningful dates can be extracted
for fossils when they have been isolated from chemical contamination. Examples include a
50-million-year-old shark tooth extracted from clay, a Jurassic dinosaur bone extracted
from a clay-rich limestone, and conodonts (those mouthparts from ancient eel-like
creatures). All these were dated using lutetium-hafnium (Lu-Hf) dating, and evidently the
sediments that encased the fossils protected them from contamination.
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High precision dates have also been obtained from pristine samples of coral using
uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating, and microscopic shells of forams have been dated using
strontium isotopes. Uranium-thorium-lead (U-Th-Pb) dating has also been successful on
Carboniferous and Silurian conodonts, and a Cretaceous dinosaur tooth. These analyses
used a microscopic probe known as a SHRIMP (Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro
Probe) to zap tiny spots within samples, to find uncontaminated parts of fossils.
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 Direct dating of fossils has also been used

to shed light on early humans. Antelope teeth have been used to date ancestral human
artifacts in South African caves using uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating, uranium-thorium
direct dating has been successfully applied to a Neandertal jaw bone from Spain, and an
important early Homo sapiens skull from Ethiopia has been dated directly using uraniumseries dating.
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These examples show that fossils can be dated directly in special circumstances
(so theres no fundamental flaw in the concept of dating fossils), but in most cases its
much more practical to date volcanic deposits or flowstones that bracket the strata were
fossils are found, because they give a much more robust, tightly-constrained age.

Ages of lavas and granites

Potassium-Argon (K-Ar) is the most widely-used dating technique for lavas and
other igneous rocks. Its good for rocks older than about 10,000 years, which contain
potassium-rich minerals, like feldspar. A variant of the K-Ar technique is the argonargon (Ar-Ar) technique that we met when we were dating Ardi, above. The advantage of
the Ar-Ar method is that by heating the sample in precisely-controlled steps, it can give
the date of original crystallization (called a plateau age), screening out effects of any
later part-resetting of the stopwatch. The Ar-Ar method gives very precise dates
(precisions better than 0.1%) only matched by the uranium-lead (U-Pb) method, and so
is behind many of the key dates in the story of the planet between about 10,000 years and
66 million years ago.
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The other workhorse of radiometric dating is uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating, often

using zircon crystals. Because of the long half-life of uranium, U-Pb dating isnt used on
rocks much younger than about 40 million years old, and it is the main method of dating
rocks older than the age of the dinosaurs. Zircon is a very resilient crystal which we met
as the holder of your first memories in Your Life as Planet Earth. When it forms, it
strongly incorporates uranium but not lead, so once the clock is set it isnt easily re-set,
which makes it a vital tool for dating old rocks that have been through complex histories.
Its also a mineral that forms in a range of igneous rocks, so it is widely applicable. In
some cases, zircon crystals can survive intact even when the rock around it is melted and
later crystallized a second time. This allows scientists to measure the original age of these
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inherited zircons, and therefore to see through more recent events to older periods.

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For those most ancient specks of early Earth - the Jack Hills zircons scientists
used lead-lead (Pb-Pb) and lutetium-hafnium (Lu-Hf) dates to reveal their origin 4.4
billion years ago. Theres a range of other radiometric dating techniques for igneous
rocks - like rhenium-osmium (Re-Os), and samarium-neodymium (Sm-Nd) - but Ill
spare you those details.
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Dating sediments
If you think about what sediments actually are, they are mostly bits of older rock
that have been broken off and washed into rivers, lakes and oceans. They are chimeras
assembled from bits of diverse mountains and plains upstream. So with that in mind, what
would it mean to date such a rock, other than to attempt to place a single date on myriad
pieces of older rocks?
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Except, it turns out you can in some cases.

Firstly, some sedimentary rocks (limestone, salt deposits and the like) are chemical
precipitates rather than grains of older rocks. So, provided they havent been
contaminated, its reasonable to date those. Secondly, the very process that converts loose
sand to sandstone, for example, involves the individual grains being cemented together,
and this cement can be dated. Its not the same date as the moment the sand grains
dropped out of the water, rather it is the slightly later date when the burial pressure and
groundwater turned it to rock.
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There is an exception. Rhenium-osmium (Re-Os) dating has been used to date

black shale from the age of Slushball Earth. Both Re and Os become concentrated in
low-oxygen muds on the seabed, and they get absorbed into decaying organic matter that
will become the black in black shales once the mud has been compressed into rock.
Because Re and Os come from the seawater they do indeed date the deposition of the mud,
rather than a later rock-forming event or indeed the date of the parent rock that the muds
were eroded from.
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Uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating can be used on marine limestones, cave flowstones

(as we saw with dating Sediba), and even fossil soils (paleosol calcite). Other dating
techniques for sediments include uranium series dating (for young rocks with silica
cement), thorium-thorium, thorium-230 (with proctactinium-231 as a check), and
rubidium-strontium (Rb-Sr - for marine sandstones that contain the mineral glauconite).
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So there are, in fact, techniques for dating the formation of sediments, but what
happens to those dates when rocks are subjected to the temperatures and pressures of
continental collisions and mountain building?

Cooking time dating metamorphic rocks

Rocks that started out as sediments or igneous rocks, but which were subsequently
changed by being squeezed and heated in continental collisions, are called metamorphic.
They are changed by the heat and pressure, growing new minerals to replace old ones, and
they change their appearance. So in dating metamorphic rocks, what we are really doing is
dating the metamorphic cooking event that transformed the original rocks.

 A common way to do this is to use the

argon-argon (Ar-Ar) method, to learn about the rocks thermal history. Many
metamorphic crystals are zoned, with the outside of the crystal more cooked than its
inside (like a holiday turkey in the oven, sizzling on its outside but defiantly raw in its
middle). Lasers zap tiny spots across these zones, which are analyzed to reveal the
equivalent of the oven temperature and when it was cooking. This is usually combined
with uranium-lead dating (using zircon if its available) to see through the
metamorphic changes to the original rock, and sometimes with rubidium-strontium (RbSr) dating to learn about its cooling history after it was cooked.
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Some metamorphic rocks are studded with dark red garnets. These semi-precious
gems form during the pressure-cooking of rocks, and they have high levels of lutetium,
making them suitable for Lu-Hf dating of very high-pressure-formed rocks, such as in the
Alps and similar mountain chains.
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So there are ways to date the cooking process that rocks have gone through, but
what about rocks that were cooked in space rather than on Earth?

Antiquity of meteorites and impacts

The time between the formation of the first solids in the Solar System and the
formation of the earliest protoplanet embryos was less than 10 million years. This
critical stage in our Solar System is crucial for understanding how our planet, our Solar
System, and others like it evolved, but its asking a lot to resolve dates at such high
precisions from so long ago. Luckily, lead-lead (Pb-Pb) dating does have this precision
and, as we saw in Chapter 1, it has been used to date Calcium-Aluminum-Inclusions
(CAIs) from meteorites like the Allende meteorite which fell to Earth in February 1969,
and basaltic meteorites called angrites. The CAIs and angrite meteorites yield dates of
4,568.2 million years give or take 400,000 years, which serves as the date for the origin of
the Solar System.
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Iodine-xenon (I-Xe) dating is another technique used on meteorites. It uses stepheating like the Ar-Ar method, to see through heating and shocks that happened in the
long lives of meteorites between their formation and their discovery on the ground here on

Earth. Measurement of the Allende, Bjurbole, Qingzhen and Kota-Kota meteorites all
cluster around the same early Solar System date of 4.56 billion years old.
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Rhenium-osmium (Re-Os) dating has helped tie down the timeframe of core
formation in the earliest proto-planets in our Solar System. Measurements across different
types of iron meteorites (shards from the cores of planets that were obliterated early in
their lives) reveal an osmium isotope evolution curve. The curve plots the earliest
evolution of planets in our infant Solar System, from the most primitive planets at around
5 million years after the start of the Solar System, to the most evolved (most complete
core formation) around 100 million years later.
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There is even a way to date when a meteorite arrived on Earth. Asteroid fragments
hurtling through space before they arrive on Earth are constantly fried by cosmic rays,
which convert any aluminum in their minerals to aluminum-26 (26Al). Once they land on
Earth they are (comparatively) shielded from those cosmic rays and the 26Al decays at a
known rate, so measuring the level of 26Al allows the calculation of the rough date of the
meteorites arrival.
Establishing the date of an asteroid impact on Earth is particularly challenging
because the asteroid, and so much of the site it hits, are vaporized in an instant. Moreover,
the instant melting and cooling hinders the proper setting of the radiometric clock,
resulting in ages that pre-date the impact. In craters that have an impact melt layer, RbSr, Sm-Nd, K-Ar and Ar-Ar dating can all be used. Fission track dating (see below) on
glassy melts can also be used, and the dates can be compared to the record of magnetic
reversals (like they did to date Sediba) for impacts in the last 200 million years or so. For
debris flung from the crater, its more complicated, but carefully chosen samples may
yield Ar-Ar or fission-track dates. Young crater walls can be dated using isotopes
generated in the rock surface by cosmic rays since they were first exposed to the sky. And
finally, the glassy droplets of impact melt that fall far from the crater can also be dated
using Ar-Ar or even U-Pb in zircons.
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The ups and downs of mountains

The ups
Fission-track dating is a little different from the other techniques described so far
because instead of relying on the decay of a parent isotope to a daughter, this technique
makes use of the natural damage radioactive decay (fission) inflicts inside crystals.
Radioactive elements like uranium-238 eject high energy particles when they decay, which
are like microscopic bullets that leave tiny 10-nanometer-wide (0.00001mm or about 3millionths of an inch) tracks of destruction in crystals, which can be seen under an
electron microscope. The trails of destruction are so tiny that they can heal themselves
given sufficient heat 120C for apatite, 200C for zircon, and 300C for sphene
crystals. What this means is that apatite crystals will not have fission tracks until they
rise to within about 3km (2mi) of the ground surface (where the temperature reduces to
less than 120C). The slower a mountain rises, the more fission tracks it will have, so
scientists can calculate uplift rates over the last few million years. This technique showed
that the eastern Alps have slowed their uplift, and the western Alps have sped-up, over the
last few million years.
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The downs
And to get a handle on how fast those mountains are eroding away, you can
calculate how long rocks at the surface have sat there, exposed to the atmosphere. Cosmic
rays hitting rocks on the surface slowly generate chlorine-36 (36Cl) from chlorine,
potassium and calcium in the rocks minerals. The cosmic rays dont penetrate into the
ground, so the levels of 36Cl are a measure for how long a rock has been exposed to the
sky. This can also be used to date glacially-deposited boulders and even asteroid
impacts!
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Bottom line:
The take-away from this chapter is that the rock record is full of natural clocks
that get set like a stopwatch when they are formed or reheated. Scientists have an
extensive menu of dating tools to apply to different situations, and several of these are
often combined to bracket the age of a sample. Radiometric dating has been proven valid
by comparing it with other dating methods, and by experiments in the lab, so we can be
sure that the Earth is over 4 billion years old, and be confident in the dates that form the
scaffolding of our planets story.

5. Dipping a Toe in Ancient Seas, Breathing

the Air of Lost Worlds

Throughout the story of Your Life as Planet Earth I described the climates of those
times. Its not as if we can time-travel to the Jurassic and set up a weather station, or sail
Ediacaran oceans to take their temperature. And even if dinosaurs were alive today, you
wouldnt want to take their temperature in the usual way! But Earth scientists do have
ways to reveal the climates of the past, and even the body temperatures of extinct
creatures.
Once again we have the mass spectrometer to thank for this. That versatile piece
of lab equipment, which revolutionized the dating of our planets history, also
revolutionized our ability to probe the climates of millions and even billions of years ago.
Through incredibly smart forensic science, we can use a variety of proxies that are
preserved in rock or ice to tell us the temperature, atmospheric, and oceanic makeup going
back to Earths earliest days. Many of these proxies are isotopes, and the mass
spectrometer serves to measure them in much the same way as radioactive isotopes used
in radiometric dating (described in the last chapter). But the proxies for ancient climates
are stable isotopes - they are not radioactive. And by learning about past climate
changes we can get a handle on what to expect from our modern climate.

Thermometers for times past

Water as a thermometer
Water can be used as a kind of thermometer for ancient times. More specifically,
isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen can. These are called stable water isotopes.
You may recall that isotopes are flavors of the same element differing only in their
mass. For instance oxygen comes in 3 isotope flavors: oxygen-16, 17 and 18. Almost all
of the oxygen we breathe is oxygen-16, but it is always accompanied by a tiny fraction of
the slightly heavier isotopes, including about 0.2% oxygen-18. The ratio between
oxygen 16 and 18 is widely used in a thermometer for ancient climates and goes by the
moniker of delta 18-O or more correctly: 18O. Hydrogen in water also comes in the
isotopic flavors of hydrogen 1, 2 or 3 (usually referred to as hydrogen, deuterium
(0.015% ) and tritium). The ratio of hydrogen to deuterium is another thermometer for
ancient climates - D.
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 Stable water isotopes work as a

thermometer because they get more concentrated or depleted through temperaturedependent changes like evaporation or condensation to rain or snow. Water made with
lighter isotopes evaporates more easily than water with heavier isotopes, and heavier water
(i.e. with oxygen-18 and/or deuterium) tends to condense into rain easier than lighter
water. So as the ocean temperatures rise, so do the levels of oxygen-18 and deuterium in
the ocean, as more of the light water evaporates into the atmosphere. Stable water isotopes
in marine fossils reflect the levels in the water they lived in, so they can tell us the ocean
temperature when they were alive. The same is true for marine sediments.
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Stable water isotopes measured in corals, tree rings, lake deposits and ice cores
have generated an annual (or nearly annual) record of temperature going back hundreds of
thousands of years, from locations dotted across most of the planet. Going further back in
time than those records allow, scientists have measured 18O in fossils and sediments all
the way back to the early part of the planets history. Fossil mollusks, forams, diatoms,
conodonts, other marine invertebrates and even fish bones can be used to generate dateindexed records of ancient temperatures.
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But the further back in time, the more uncertainties there are that the results reflect
real temperatures, rather than some other intervening process like warm groundwater
percolating through the sample at a later date. So climate estimates gleaned from Earths
earliest rocks, which tend to have been squashed and cooked multiple times over the last 3
billion years, are particularly challenging. Yet scientists have still been able to make
reasonable estimates of Earths very early climate, using a combination of painstaking
sample collection, comparing results from different techniques, and advances in lab
equipment.
Very careful geological fieldwork and sample screening can find small havens of
relatively unaltered rock, and advances in lab equipment allow increasingly tiny spots to
be measured from those samples. Comparing the 18O in one kind of mineral (like
phosphates) with those in another (like chert a flint-like rock) allows scientists to
triangulate a reasonable temperature estimate. For example, one study on rocks from
South Africa deduced ocean temperatures 3.5 billion years ago (at the dawn of life on
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Earth) to be 26-35C (79-95F). A different study using cherts from the same area and
time concluded ocean temperatures were less than 40C (104F), and a third study on
older rocks (3.8 billion years old) from Greenland studied serpentinite a product of
reacting sea water with ocean crust and concluded ocean temperatures were similar to
todays. So these 3 separate studies from 2 different parts of the world independently
concluded the ocean temperature at the dawn of life was not very different from our own
time. This was a surprise because the oceans were previously assumed to have been rather
hot back then, at about 55 to 85C (130-185F).
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But a couple of interesting things fall out of those temperature soundings of the
deep past. The first concerns a surprising loss of our ocean water, and the second is a
puzzle known as the Faint Young Sun Paradox.
Water world

Stable water isotopes tell us that the Earth

has been losing ocean water since those early days. While the non-ice-age average value
of 18O seems to have stayed the same for the last 3-plus billion years, the deuterium
component of water (D) has not. It went through an increase, which tells us that water
has been lost but where to? Since we know that the amount of continental crust has
grown since then, and it contains a significant proportion of hydrated minerals, scientists
can calculate how much water has been soaked up by continental crust. But its not
enough to explain all of the D increase. We know the planet is leaking hydrogen into
space and has been since its early days. Hydrogen is such a light gas that its atoms
bouncing around in the upper atmosphere can exceed their escape velocity and fly off into
space, never to return, and nevermore to bond with oxygen to make water. The planet
leaked more hydrogen when the atmosphere had more hydrogen, and again when it had
more methane, because sunlight breaks methane down in the upper atmosphere, freeing
hydrogen. Based on the D values, scientists calculated that oceans 3.8 billion years ago
had 26% more water than today!
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Faint Young Sun Paradox

And this is important because our Sun (a main sequence star) was about 30%
less bright back then, which means the planet should have been frozen solid. But we
know from stable water isotopes, the Jack Hills zircons and from marine sediments
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formed at that time, that it wasnt frozen. There were oceans of liquid water, and
temperatures were balmy. For a warm climate to exist under a faint Sun, there must have
been a thick warm blanket of greenhouse-gasses in the atmosphere. There was, but it
doesnt seem to have been quite dense enough to explain the balmy temperatures alone.
So scientists think that the extra warmth came partly from Earth being darker-tinted than it
is today (it had a lower albedo, as they say), and partly from the peculiar combination
of gasses in the atmosphere back then. A less-bright Earth absorbs more sunlight, the way
an asphalt driveway will melt snow cover long before a lawn. And the early, oxygen-free
and low-methane atmosphere seems to have absorbed more heat by the interaction of
hydrogen and nitrogen molecules, in a manner similar to Saturns moon Titan today.
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So even if there wasnt a super-dense atmosphere of CO2, the extra warmth to keep
the Earth temperate was provided by a combination of a hydrogen-nitrogen atmosphere,
26% more ocean (which is low-albedo) , and small continents devoid of mountain chains
(no reflective snowy peaks) because subduction hadnt started yet.
Moreover, in a
volcanically-highly-active, basalt-covered, oxygen-less world with no terrestrial life, any
dry land would be much darker than today, and so would absorb more sunlight. There may
also have been fewer clouds due to less dust and biological particles in the atmosphere.
Add-in the occasional ocean-boiling asteroid impact and throw in tsunami tides (from a
closer Moon and shorter days ) for good measure, and you may well have enough heat to
compensate for the faint young Sun paradox and explain why the Earth wasnt frozen
solid. It is also possible that the Sun was slightly bigger (by maybe 5%) in its youth,
which would have delivered more energy to the Earth despite a faint Sun, but it is fair to
say there is some mileage left in this paradox. As one scientist put it: it is a very complex
problem, with very few non-controversial limits that can be placed on it.

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Complicated thermometer
Unfortunately 18O, although a common currency for ancient temperature
measurement, is not a simple thermometer. To solve the equations that give you
temperature you have to know the oxygen isotope proportions of the water that your
sample (fossil, sediment, etc.) formed in. In ocean waters this depends on the volume of
water locked up as ice, so it is different in ice ages than warm phases. As far back as the
most recent ice ages, this value can be measured directly from water trapped in
sediments, but further back in time an assumption must be made for this value, within
the limits of what is physically reasonable.
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Working out the initial 18O in land deposits is harder than for oceans, as land
values are affected by altitude, latitude, distance from the coast and amount of
precipitation. It is a little simpler at high latitudes, but even there it can still be skewed
by long-term changes in atmospheric circulation or rainfall. In tropical latitudes it is
more a record of the rainy season, which means that in, say, Hong Kong, the 18O record
may have the opposite relationship with temperature than we find in, say, Switzerland.
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Scientists deal with these shortcomings in three ways. Firstly they get a handle on
the processes affecting stable water isotopes across the globe today, and use this
information to calibrate ancient temperature readings. Second, they repeat measurements
across a range of different substances and locations, to build a consistent picture. And

third, they try to use alternative temperature proxies if they are available.
We now have a detailed understanding of how stable water isotopes correlate with
temperature, latitude, rainfall and geographic location today because they have been
monitored since 1961 at more than 800 locations across 101 countries, and on the worlds
oceans, by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) and the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO), along with precipitation, pressure, and
temperature. These results can be used to calibrate temperatures measured from ancient
samples.

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When they use fossils to measure the stable water isotope temperatures, scientists
also have to correct for the creatures metabolic effects on the isotope levels. Calibrations
are based on laboratory measurements on a range of different species that are both alive
today and found in the fossil record. Care is also taken to ensure only pristine fossils are
sampled, and that enough samples are taken that the results are statistically valid and not
just a sampling artifact. In addition, scientists screen out any temperatures that have been
compromised by ground fluids, by analyzing trace metals in the samples, which betray
such effects.
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In the final analysis, when stable water isotope temperatures are compared with
instrumental records (which only go back 130 years), they do match, even when tropical
and land-based stable-water isotopes are included, which suggests they are indeed
reliable thermometers. But to be sure a temperature is valid, its a good idea to also use
alternatives from the growing toolchest of proxy thermometers.
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A toolchest of thermometers
There are many other ancient temperature-measuring tools in the scientific
toolchest, including microbe membrane chemicals (TEX86), Silicon isotopes (30Si),
microscopic bubbles of brine in ancient salt crystals, magnesium-strontium levels in
seashells, lipid chemicals in peat (MBT-CBT), crystal orientations in mother-ofpearl, and even worm poop! Atmospheric temperatures going back a few hundred
years ago can even be measured by logging the temperature profile in boreholes up to
600m deep.
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 One of the more widely used

temperature proxies is a class of chemicals extracted from dead algae. We try to avoid
saturated fats in our diets, but it turns out that saturation is the important temperature
proxy in algal chemicals called alkenones. Coccolithophores, those algae whose chalk
skeletons make up the White Cliffs of Dover, change the saturation level in their
alkenones depending on the temperature of the water they live in - when its warmer they
make more-saturated alkenones. The alkenone saturation index is abbreviated to the
symbol UK37, and tracks the temperature of the ocean at its surface because the algae
live in near-surface, Sun-illuminated waters. Alkenones happen to be resistant to
breakdown in sediments, so rocks going back millions of years may be analyzed for their
alkenone saturation index to derive sea surface temperatures for those times. Even in
sediments 4 million years old, they remain a very sensitive measure of the ocean
temperature at that time, having precisions as good as 0.2C (0.4F).
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This range of proxy thermometers in the scientists tool chest builds confidence
when different proxies agree on the temperatures in the same environment for the same
time period. But they all require their own calibrations, and their use becomes problematic
for extinct creatures and physical conditions outside the limits of their calibrations.
Capable clumps
One new technique stands out as it seems to give valid temperatures without
having to know the starting isotopic makeup of the waters in which the sample formed,
and it seems to be oblivious to the different organisms it forms in. Called Carbonate
Clumped Isotope Thermometry, which is a mouthful to be sure, it is exploits the fact that
the isotopes 13C and 18O in carbonates bond together in a mathematical ratio that depends
on temperature, and apparently nothing else. It seems to have problems in cave deposits
and in samples formed close to the freezing point of water, but apart from that it shows
great promise as an independent and versatile verifier of temperatures in times past.
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It has already been applied to ocean temperatures during Ordovician ice ages about

445 million years ago, the most recent ice ages, and in East Africa at the time of our
Australopithecus ancestors about 4 million years ago. But perhaps the most intriguing
use of this new technique has been to measure the living body temperature of extinct
animals like dinosaurs.
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Taking the temperature of dino blood

Carbonate Clumped Isotope Thermometry can be used on fossil bones and teeth to
work out the body temperature of land vertebrates. Scientists used this technique on the
teeth of large dinosaurs from the Jurassic and discovered their body temperature was 36
to 38C (97-100F). Human body temperature, by comparison, is a very similar 37 C
(98.6 F). This was a surprise, because previous calculations had estimated a higher body
temperature around 41 to 44 C (116-111F) based on the sheer size of the creatures, so
dinosaurs must have had a way to cool themselves down.
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The technique has also been used to measure the body temperature of ice-age
woolly mammoths, and Miocene rhinos and alligators (from about 12 million years ago).
To check the technique was accurate, scientists tried it out on modern teeth from a rhino,
elephant, crocodile, alligator and a sand tiger shark, and found the technique gave an
accurate body temperature for the modern creatures. The Miocene rhino body temperature
of 36.6C (97.9F) agreed well with the modern rhino temperature of 37C (98.6F), and
the woolly mammoth samples suggested a temperature of 38.4C (101.1F), slightly
higher than a modern elephant temperature of 37C.
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Plant thermometers
Leaves are remarkably good thermometers too. You may already be familiar with
the fact that cold-climate leaves are often toothed whereas warm-climate leaves tend to be
smooth-edged. It turns out that a number of other properties of leaves (size, shape of the
tip, shape of the base, shape and spacing of the teeth, type of lobes, and so on) vary with
climate too. Because leaves are the food-engines of plants, they are very sensitively tuned
to their environment. For example, the leaves at the top of trees tend to be smaller and
thicker than leaves that are shaded further down the canopy. A tree will vary its leaf
properties in its lifetime in response to changes around it, for example if surrounding trees
are felled. Rigorous sampling of leaves and a statistical process applied to their
characteristics called CLAMP, yield not just mean annual temperature, but also warm
month mean temperature, cold month mean temperature, length of the growing season,
growing season rainfall and even altitude.
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CLAMP can be applied to fossil leaves so long as there are many of them, from
different species, and they are preserved with sufficient clarity to meet the strict CLAMP
standards. When these results are compared with other proxy thermometers like 18O they
generally agree, which increases confidence that they reflect real climate values.
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Land temperature and rainfall changes in the past can also be estimated from plant
pollen records. Pollen is extracted from lake sediments and the species it comes from is
identified. Then scientists count the abundances of different species and construct ratios
(for example: (birch+spruce) / (oak+Hickory)), calibrated to different modern climate
zones, to yield values for summer temperature and annual rainfall. They plot the pollen
ratios for the sediments layer after layer, covering millennia, to reveal the advances and
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retreats of different woodland types in response to changing climates.

So, as wild as the idea first sounds, scientists do in fact have forensic techniques to
tell the temperature of past oceans and even the body temperature of extinct creatures. But
as we try to get a handle on modern climate change, one archive of temperatures and
atmospheric gasses is particularly important ice cores.

Ice cores

Sticks of ice drilled from ice

caps and glaciers are an incredibly detailed record of climates of the past. Being ice, they
are obviously limited to cold locations ice caps and glaciers. Most come from polar
regions like Antarctica or Greenland and other Arctic islands. But some are extracted from
glaciers across the globe, including places like Tanzania, Kenya, Peru, the Altai
Mountains, China and Tibet.
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They contain an annual record of atmospheric gasses, temperature, and impurities

going back as much as 800,000 years (EPICA Dome C in Antarctica), 400,000 years
(Vostok in Antarctica), or 123,000 years (North Greenland Ice Core Project). Outside
Greenland and Antarctica, age ranges are more modest, ranging from a few hundred years
to roughly 5,000 years. Collectively they preserve a meticulous record of Earths climate
from today through roughly one third of the Pleistocene ice age, covering 19 glacialinterglacial cycles.
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Frozen temperatures
Stable water isotopes in polar ice cores record not just the seasonal oscillation of
temperatures, but also the long-term drifts in temperature through ice ages and interglacial
warm periods. They show average temperatures over the last 800,000 years in Antarctica
were mostly around 8C cooler than today, interspersed with warmer interglacials up to
3C warmer than modern Antarctic temperatures.
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Stable water isotope temperatures are supplemented by isotopes of nitrogen and

argon (15N and 40Ar), which help quantify abrupt temperature changes. The D
record in Greenland ice shows a remarkably abrupt shift in the year 9,703BC. At this time
the D graph parts company with the 18O trace, in as little as 1-3 years. This tells
scientists that the source water for the snow on Greenland changed very abruptly at the
end of the last ice age. And it is this event recorded in ice cores - that formally defines
the end of the last ice age (technically the end of the Younger Dryas) and the start of the
Holocene period. Interestingly, the Antarctic ice cores do not show the same abrupt
shift.
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Bubbles of past atmospheres

Ice cores also contain tiny bubbles of air that was originally trapped between
snowflakes. When lumps of this ice are crushed or melted they release the trapped air,
which can be analyzed for the levels of gasses like CO2 and methane.
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What they show is a consistent pattern of methane and CO2 varying with
temperature warmer times have more of these greenhouse gasses, and colder snaps have
less. Over the last 800,000 years, CO2 has varied between about 180 and 280 parts per
million (ppm), compared with current values of around 400ppm. Methane spent most of
the last 800,000 years between about 350 and 750 parts per billion (ppb) now it is
around 1800ppb. These past variations in greenhouse gasses are crucial for
understanding global climate change today.
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27 Bubbles of past atmospheres: the tiny specks in the photo are air
bubbles trapped in ice. They can be sampled to tell scientists the levels

of gasses in atmospheres up to 800,000 years ago. Source: Centre for Ice

and Climate, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
DNA, desert dust and sea salt
A fascinating array of impurities gets trapped in the ice, and they reveal their own
secrets of past environments.
Dust trapped in ice cores is improbably informative. Dust particles can be analyzed
for their isotopes, and the results compared with dust from deserts all around the planet, so
scientists can tell where ice age winds were blowing from. This isnt idle curiosity the
wind patterns help our understanding of climate drivers back then. It also shows us that
there was up to 100 times more dust in the air during ice ages than today. This means
that not only was the climate colder, but it was also much windier, and far dryer, with less
rain to wash out the dust before it got to Greenland or Antarctica.
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Sodium chloride (sea salt) levels vary a lot in ice cores but exactly what this means
is not certain. All we know is that the salt content of the ice is about 5 times higher in
glacial periods. Modern pollution in the form of sulfates, nitrates and lead show up in the
ice, as does ammonia which seems to be linked to forest fires.
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Several ice cores have drilled right through

the ice until they met bedrock, and through the layer of dirty, silty ice that sits on that
bedrock. That dirty ice contains smeared frozen remains of life that existed just before the
ice formed. In one Greenland ice core, they analyzed the DNA and amino acids of this
frozen soup and were able to identify the remains of flowering plants including saxifrages,
dryas, daisies and peas; trees including alder, spruce, pine, birch and yew; and grasses.
They were also able to identify beetles, flies, spiders, butterflies and moths. This paints a
picture of a diverse open forest in the highlands of Greenland some 450,000 to 800,000
years ago, radically different from the bleak ice cap that exists today.
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Dating ice
Ice cores are striped with alternating clear and cloudy layers. Sometimes the layers
represent an individual snow storm, but the key is the identification of a hard surface or
melt layer that is at the top of each summer layer. Counting these markers of ancient
summers allows dating of ice cores year by individual year. There comes a point when the
ice is so compressed that it is no longer possible to do this visually, which is where other

techniques are employed. Our friends 18O and D are analyzed for summer-winter
(warmer-colder) wiggles to define the annual layers, as are seasonal peaks in dust levels,
other impurities and electrical conductivity. Ice cores are cross-referenced by volcanic ash
layers, their methane record, and even isotopes created by cosmic rays (which are also
interesting for what they tell us about space weather covered below). Volcanic ash can
also be used to match-up ice cores with climate information from sediments elsewhere on
the planet.
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So ice cores give us an unparalleled record of the climate going back nearly a
million years, but they are limited to that comparatively short time and to icy locations. To
figure out what was happening to the environment for the other 99.98% of the history of
the planet, scientists have had to find clues in rock.

Barometers for old atmospheres

Seeing red oxygen
Red. Its the color of blood, rust, and tropical dirt. Theyre red because they
contain oxidized iron, and it was that simple sign that gave geologists their first clues
about the emergence of oxygen on our planet.

In rocks older than about 2.5 billion years, you

dont see red. In places as far afield as South Africa and Australia, older sedimentary
rocks are the grays, greens and blacks of an unrusted world. They contain things that just
arent possible in todays oxygen-rich planet, like pebbles of pyrite (fools gold), uraninite,
and siderite. These just rust away in modern streams and beaches, but in those old times
they were washed into rivers, rolled around and swept downstream before being trapped,
still untarnished, in rock.
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But at around 2.3 billion years ago, traces of red begin to show up here and there,
and by around 1.9 billion years ago we have pebbles and sand grains with rusty coatings,
and red-stained sediments. These red beds contain iron oxide, only possible in
environments with significant levels of free oxygen, and their arrival signals the
fundamental change that was the Great Oxidation Event Earths big mid-life crisis. And
in later rocks you just dont find pebbles of pyrite, uraninite or siderite incorporated into
sediments.
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Banded Iron Formations are another sign. These important reserves of iron ore
are widely found in rocks younger than 3 billion years old, peaking at around 2.5 billion

years ago, and then they are absent after 1.85 billion years ago, save some small
occurrences linked to slushball Earth events. They werent possible without oxygen to
take the dissolved iron out of the sea water and precipitate it onto the ocean floor. The
Great Oxidation Event also triggered a huge diversification of mineral types in rocks
formed after 2.5 billion years ago as oxygen reacted with the geosphere, so its clear that
a fundamental change involving oxygen happened to the planet at this time.
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That cyanobacteria were responsible, rather than something purely geological, is

indicated by genetic molecular clock studies, fossil stromatolites, chemical fossils
(steranes), and also microfossils of cyanobacteria dating back to near this time. Another
clue is a major uptick of a tracer for organic carbon burial (13C) at this time, which
would be expected as cyanobacteria took over the world and their dead bodies rained
organic carbon down onto the sea floor. But other causes have been suggested, including
the loss of hydrogen from the upper atmosphere (leaving behind orphaned oxygen from
water vapor - H2O), a change in the chemistry of volcanic eruptions, or the evolving
chemistry of rocks as continents grew. They may all have played a role, but based on the
levels of carbon-burial and other chemical budgets, scientists have concluded that
cyanobacteria contributed the lions share.

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To better understand the link between life, Earth and oxygen, we want to know
quantitatively what the levels of oxygen were. While ice cores contain bubbles of
atmospheric air that we can sample for oxygen levels, they dont take us far into the past.
So we must turn, again, to proxies. Unfortunately most oxygen proxies are only good for
telling us that oxygen was above or below a certain level, rather than providing a
continuous scale. For this reason scientists work with multiple proxies to bracket the
estimated levels.

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For instance, in rocks from before the Great Oxidation event we see sediments that
had their iron and manganese leached out of them by water. That can only happen at levels
of oxygen less than 1/1,000th of present levels. After 1.9 billion years ago, when red
beds begin, we see very little solution of iron, so we can tell that oxygen was at least
1/10th of present levels. The oxidation state of iron in ancient soils looks like it may yield
more quantitative oxygen levels, especially for the early years of atmospheric oxygen, but
more work is needed on that technique.
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Sulfur isotopes (34S) can tell us when there was enough oxygen to dissolve
sulfate which needs more than 0.4% of present oxygen levels. They are the main
ingredient for calculating the oxygen levels I referred to most in Your Life as Planet Earth.
But that study used the difference in 34S between sulfate and fools gold, combined it
with carbon isotope data, and applied a range of corrections for rock weathering, erosion,
land area and mountain building changes over time, in million-year increments, using a
sophisticated computer model. So it far from a simple proxy for oxygen, yet its levels
do make sense in the context of all the other environmental changes at the time.
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Molybdenum (and vanadium and uranium) are metals found combined with sulfur
in black shales, which start life as muds in the bottom of lakes or oceans, and they are
black because they contain a lot of organic carbon that has been preserved by the absence
of oxygen. Even though the muds are devoid of oxygen, the tiny mud particles reflect the

oxygen levels on land where they first weathered from rock, and the chemistry of the
waters they settled through, in their molybdenum isotopic ratio. Molybdenum values also
show the rise of oxygen in stages through the Great Oxidation Event, and also the
increased oxygen levels in the Devonian, around 400 million years ago. Interestingly
uranium data suggest that oxygen levels dropped between the Great Oxidation Event and
the Ediacaran, about 1.8 billion years later.
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One quasi-quantitative oxygen measure uses our fossil Swiss Army Knives the
forams. The abundance of various foram species that live in high-oxygen water is divided
by the abundance of other forams that live in low-oxygen water, to derive an Oxygen
Index. But although this allows scientists to graph relative changes of marine oxygen
levels over time, it still doesnt give absolute oxygen levels.
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No fire without oxygen

Land plants have been plagued by wildfires

since they first appeared, and fossil charcoal can be found in rocks as old as 419 million
years. The charred remains of plants can retain some of their characteristic anatomy and
survive in soils where moist unburned plants would just rot. And since oxygen levels need
to be above 13% in air to support fire, charcoal in rocks tells us that oxygen levels must
have been at least 13% at that time. But the abundance of charcoal in sediments can also
be used to deduce the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere the more charcoal the more
oxygen, broadly speaking. By extracting fossil charcoal from rocks formed in swamps,
scientists have constructed a graph of the estimated oxygen levels since the earliest land
plants. So this would appear, finally, to be a proxy that can give us the absolute levels of
oxygen in a scale, but it is much more spiky than the computer-modeled, 34S and
carbon isotope-based study I referred to earlier.
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But it does highlight some interesting quirks of the oxygen record. It confirms the
high levels of Carboniferous oxygen that led to the giant insects of that age, but there are
also some swings during the age of the dinosaurs, and a couple of charcoal gaps that
suggest very low oxygen levels. One of these is in the early days of land life, 395 million
years ago (aged 91 in Your Life as Planet Earth). The other is right after the Permian
mass extinction (the Great Dying).
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Ocean death and global warming

Even when the atmosphere had plenty of oxygen, there were times when large
portions of the worlds oceans became stale and oxygen-less, from the shallows all the
way to the ocean depths. These Ocean Anoxic Events are particularly important to
understand, since they seem to be associated with times of high atmospheric CO2, global
warming and mass extinctions. In fact warmer oceans do hold less dissolved oxygen
(Henrys Law), but anoxic events seem also to be related to nutrient imbalances spiraling
out of control. One such time was at the Great Dying event at the end of the Permian. On
three separate occasions the deep oceans lost their oxygen, a fact that is revealed in levels
of cerium, uranium and thorium present in the fossil mouth parts of eel-like creatures
called conodonts. Other major anoxic events occurred 93.5, 120, 200 and 183 million
years ago, all associated with global warming events and large volcanic eruptions.
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Carbon dioxide (CO2)

The Earth breathes.
As assuredly as you and me, our planet inhales and exhales from the thin bubble of
air that surrounds this planet in its travels through the vacuum of space. We see this annual
cycle of inspiration and expiration in the air at the top of the Mauna Loa volcano at
Hawaii and other monitoring stations around the world. They show that every winter the
planet exhales CO2 from decaying leaf litter and other soil processes, and it inhales CO2
with the re-greening of every northern hemisphere summer. This cycle is dominated by the
northern hemisphere because there is less vegetated land area in the southern hemisphere.
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The annual zigzag (inhale/exhale) of the Mauna Loa CO2 record is pegged to an
incessant background rise, from around 310 parts per million (ppm) in 1958, to around
400 ppm today. This trend is the same in air sampling programs all over the world, from
pole to pole. Back in 1750 the pre-industrial levels were only about 280 ppm. And it is
this, combined with the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that makes it the most
controversial gas of our age. We need to understand how the planet will respond to rising
CO2, so its crucial for us to be able to gage CO2 levels through the climate changes of the
past.
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As with oxygen, we can sample ice cores to get us a CO2 record that goes back
hundreds of thousands of years, but no further. Once again we must turn to proxies for
CO2 levels in older atmospheres.
Carbon dioxide in the oceans
When marine proxies are used to deduce atmospheric CO2, its important to
understand that CO2 in the atmosphere doesnt automatically equal CO2 in the oceans.
There is some chemistry, which I wont go into in detail, that links atmospheric CO2 with
6 separate chemical parameters: dissolved CO2, acidity, salinity, temperature, how
saturated the seawater is with calcium carbonate, and depth in the ocean. The point here is
that to establish what ancient atmospheric CO2 levels were from ocean-based proxies,
scientists need to know at least 2 of those chemical factors when they use ocean-based
proxies for CO2.
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For two widely-used CO2 proxies, scientists sample the remains of plankton from
sediments for alkenones (those membrane chemicals we saw used to deduce temperatures)
and the calcium carbonate in their shells. With the alkenones, instead of using the amount
of saturation as they do to measure temperatures, they instead measure the proportions
of carbon isotopes 13C and 12C. They do the same for the shells. They apply a formula that
takes account of factors like growth rate, cell size and other physiological factors,
temperature, phosphate and nitrate nutrient levels, and use that to calculate the
concentration of CO2 in the water at the time the sediments were laid down. The formula
has been derived from lab experiments with live plankton, and by comparing analyses
from pre-industrial samples with the values of dissolved CO2 for those times.
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The number of factors that have to be accounted for in the formula can cause
problems. For instance, different species react in different ways to short term changes
and long term changes in CO2 levels, and also phosphate and oxygen levels.
This
again underscores the need to have data from several different proxies agree before
scientists can be confident of their conclusions.
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So, to complement other proxy measurements, scientists often analyze boron

isotopes (11B) found in the shells of plankton. Boron isotopes are actually a way to
measure ocean acidity (pH). Scientists apply a formula which calculates pH after
adjusting for the biochemistry of the plankton, ocean temperature, and salinity. The ratio
of boron to calcium in plankton shells is then used to calculate the levels of carbonate ions
in the water when the plankton were alive, and thus armed with 2 chemical levels (pH and
carbonate), they can calculate CO2 levels.
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Land-based CO2 proxies

Plants breathe too.

At least, they need to get air inside

their leaves to make food by photosynthesis, and they have tiny pores on leaf undersides,
called stomata, that they use to do this. It turns out that plants tune the number of these
stomata in concert with CO2 levels. The lower the CO2 in the air, the more stomata the

leaves grow to compensate. Scientists count the number of stomata per square millimeter
on fossil leaves using computer-aided counting systems to derive CO2 levels. But leaf
stomata as a proxy suffer their own complications. For the stomata density to give
accurate CO2 levels, the temperature and humidity of the air the plant lived in, and also the
microscopic shape of the stomata themselves, must be factored in, and this may be one
cause of the large scatter in those data. There is also evidence that some plant species
respond differently to levels of CO2. For instance, araucarian conifers are less affected by
high levels of CO2, making them useful for estimating CO2 at times when levels were
much higher than today.
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It may be a stretch to say that soils breathe, but they do exchange air with the
atmosphere. They are an amazing mixture of broken rock, life, air, rain and ground water.
Some soils become fossilized, and these fossil soils (paleosols) are another land-based
proxy used for assessing levels of CO2 through the last 400 plus million years. This proxy
involves analyzing carbon isotopes (13C) in carbonates found in fossil soils. These reflect
a balance between the CO2 of the atmosphere when the soil formed, and the CO2 given off
by the totality of life (microbes, plants, and fungi) that lived in the same soil at the time.
The value used for the atmospheric 13C is measured from either marine limestone or
fossilized terrestrial organic material for the same time period. Again, this proxy is
complicated by uncertainties in the value of the life-produced CO2 in the soil, and CO2
values can vary greatly between soils or even within the same soil. Nevertheless, the soil
carbon record of CO2 does broadly agree with other proxies (like leaf stomata, plankton,
boron isotopes), and with computer modeling of the expected CO2 levels (based on
broad-brush calculations of expected CO2 levels based on factors like land area,
weathering rates and so on).
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There are other proxies for CO2 including soil goethite (an iron mineral), carbon
isotopes in corals and tree rings, and even a new one that uses 3 different isotopes of
oxygen in fossil teeth and bones! Taken together, the data from leaves, algae alkenones,
fossil soils and boron isotopes are converging, but a twofold variation between some
techniques remains. Recent work has focused on improving the calibration of soil CO2
proxies in different soil types and improving the calculation for the amount of CO2 given
off by the living component of soil, so hopefully the scatter in these data will diminish in
the future.
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Proxies link CO2 to climate change

Combined, CO2 and temperature proxy measurements confirm the link between
CO2 and climate for most of the geological record.

 For example, even as far back as

the Carboniferous-Permian ice age (300-260 million years ago, aged 93-94 in Your Life as
Planet Earth), CO2 levels sank to values about as low as they did in the most recent ice
ages (around 220ppm). Much later, in the time of the dinosaurs when there were ice-free
poles and a mostly greenhouse climate, the proxy record shows CO2 levels were over
1,000ppm. There were brief cold periods even then, and those too correlate with drops in
CO2 levels. Present day CO2 levels (around 400ppm) were last seen in the Pliocene,
about 3 million years ago, but are higher than the general trend for the last 30 million
years.
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There is one ice age that does, at first blush, seem to break the link between CO2
and climate. The last 2 million years or so of the Ordovician period, 443 million years ago,
saw an ice cap cover much of what is now Africa and South America, which were at the
South Pole at the time. This was a period of climate upheaval and sea-level change,
with a temperatures dropping 5C even in the tropics, and mass extinction. The puzzle is
that we had an ice cap when CO2 levels were apparently 8 to 16 times higher than recent
levels. But those high CO2 values were extrapolated from a single data point which may
well pre-date the glaciation, and there is good isotopic evidence for high rates of rock
weathering drawing down CO2 levels at exactly this time. Moreover with the Sun being
4% less bright back then, the CO2 threshold for glaciation was at a much higher value of
CO2 than today, and the ice cap probably started above the snow line at high elevations
at the South Pole, the way it did again in the later Carboniferous-Permian ice ages. In
other words, despite appearances, the Ordovician ice age does not actually break the CO2climate link.
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Unsurprisingly, given the complexity of our planet, there are other significant
factors that affect the climate, not just CO2. During the late Miocene (around 12-5 million
years ago), oceans remained warm despite low CO2 values, apparently due to ocean
currents and the thermal structure of the Pacific Ocean at the time. The Pliocene (5.3 to
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2.6 Million years ago) saw summer Arctic temperatures some 8C (14F) warmer than
today (even through cycles of orbital wobbles), but with CO2 values around todays levels.

This suggests present CO2 levels are out of
balance with the modern climate, and we have already emitted enough CO2 to drive the
planet to Pliocene conditions.
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Some people have claimed that CO2 doesnt rise ahead of (or cause) global
warming, but rather it follows warming. We would indeed expect CO2 to rise in response
to rising ocean temperatures because warmer water can hold less CO2 dissolved in it than
cold water (Henrys Law again). Until recently the dating and precision of the proxies
wasnt fine-grained enough to delineate what lead and what followed, suggesting CO2
may have lagged warming by maybe hundreds of years, based especially on Antarctic ice
cores. Recent studies with much more precise correlation of ice cores and temperature
proxies have shown that temperature and CO2 changed synchronously in Antarctica
during the end of the last ice age, and slightly before global temperatures.
Calculations show that increased warmth from the Sun due to Earths orbit, especially in
the northern hemisphere, is linked to the southern hemisphere through deep Atlantic
Ocean currents, which results in northern and southern hemisphere temperatures rising
out of sync with each other. This orbit-induced, ocean-current-enhanced warming
released more CO2 into the atmosphere which caused further warming, and so on, to end
the ice age.
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So knowing that global climate and CO2 levels have been correlated in the past,
allows us to test our understanding of current climate change, providing signposts to
where our modern planet may be headed.

28 400 million years of CO2 levels from proxies. Source: Dan Breecker,
University of Texas.

Fingerprinting fossil fuels in ancient extinctions

Carbon isotope ratios (13C) do more than tell us past CO2 levels. The 13C value
is also a tracer for times when large reserves of dead vegetable matter (coal, oil, natural
gas) get turned into atmospheric CO2. Since plants prefer carbon-12 when they
photosynthesize, the carbon in their cells and woody tissue is mainly carbon-12. This
mainly-carbon-12 bias stays with the plant matter as it is fossilized into coal or oil. If large
quantities of these fossil fuels are burned into CO2, the proportion of carbon-12 in the
atmosphere goes up, and the proportion of carbon-13 goes down as it gets diluted by all
that carbon-12.
This kick in 13C values over time can be logged in rock successions associated
with mass extinction events. We see a big negative swing in 13C values during the
Permian Great Dying extinction event a result of all the Siberian methane emissions and
coal burning, and the release of Brazilian methane after the small asteroid impact there.
We see similar negative 13C swings in the Triassic extinction event when oily muds
were baked into methane, and again in the modern era from our burning of fossil fuels.
Interestingly, we see a big swing in the opposite direction during the Great Oxidation
Event, probably as a result of a boom in photosynthesizing cyanobacteria locking away
lots of 12C in sediments.
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A brief history of space weather

Its easy to think of the planet as a ball spinning in inert space (apart from asteroid
encounters), bathed in the constant, benign light of the Sun. But the Sun is not constant
and space not inert. Earth is, in fact, subject to space weather.

Inconstant sunlight
I mentioned the slow increase in brightness over the life of the Sun and the faint
young Sun paradox earlier. But the Sun also goes through more rapid changes: small but
measurable fluctuations in brightness, which affect the Earths energy budget.
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The most obvious fluctuation of the Sun is its sunspot cycle - the 11-year cycle in
the number of sunspots. This has been observed ever since telescopes have been pointed at
it, and archived photographs of the Sun taken through sunspot-revealing calcium K
filters extend back to the 1890s. But accurate measurements of the quantity of solar
energy arriving at the planet (Total Solar Irradiance) have been around only since 1978.
These show a small increase and decrease in irradiance with the sunspot cycle, but this
variation amounts to only 0.1% of the total energy (more in the ultraviolet part of the
spectrum) and changes Earths climate directly by perhaps a few hundredths of a degree.
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29 Sunspot cycles observed back to the 1600s and can be used to

calculate variations in the Suns brightness (Total Solar Irradiance).
Based on (clockwise) Arlt & Abdolvand, IAU 2010; NASA 2013; Foukal,
Solar Phys 2012; Meuden Spectroheliogram from LObservatoire de Paris.

 The Sun may have a larger

indirect effect on Earths energy budget. When the Sun is most active, ozone in the lower
stratosphere warms as it absorbs the extra ultraviolet light. This seems to expand large
scale atmospheric circulations (Hadley Cells) shifting the jet stream northwards a little.
When the Sun is least active theres a corresponding reduction in stratospheric warming.
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But its important to note that both the direct Total Solar Irradiance and the indirect
effects are on a cycle, so they cancel-out over 11 years, so they cant explain longer lasting
climate change by themselves.
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The Sun also goes through longer fluctuations which can vary the Suns light we
receive by up to 0.3% over centuries. There have been prolonged periods with few if any
sunspots, like the Maunder Minimum in the 17th century, when the Sun was virtually
without sunspots for 70 years. Observations from other Sun-like stars suggest that they all
undergo quiescent periods like this for less than 3% of the time. The Maunder Minimum
and similar solar variations do show up in temperatures recorded by tree rings in Eastern
Europe, from the oldest record in 1040 AD until 1850. After that, the tree rings show the
climate warmed markedly in line with greenhouse gasses, and not in line with solar
changes.
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Cosmic rays, clouds and shifted weather

Our planet is incessantly zapped by high-energy particles from space. Some come
from the Sun, like Coronal Mass Ejections (massive solar eruptions), which are more
frequent when the Sun is most active (when it has most sunspots). Others are cosmic
rays, which mostly comprise extremely energetic protons from supernova explosions
very far from Earth. Paradoxically, when sunspot activity is high and the Earth is
battered by increased solar wind, this shields the planet somewhat from cosmic rays. But
when there are few sunspots and less solar wind, more of those cosmic rays make it into
our atmosphere, with subtle but interesting effects. Cosmic rays are more energetic than
solar particles, so they penetrate deeper into the atmosphere where they trigger the
formation of water droplets, and therefore may increase cloud formation a little. They may
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also affect the electric charge of the atmosphere around thunderstorms, which in turn may
affect precipitation a little.
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Cosmic rays and energetic solar particles ionize atmospheric molecules which then
eat away the ozone layer,
triggering a cascade of knock-on effects. Reduction of the
ozone layer cools the stratosphere, which moves the jet stream and expands the polar
vortex (the persistent low-pressure areas at the poles), which in turn changes cloud
distribution and storm paths. This cosmic ray effect lasts through solar quiet periods,
whereas the effect from solar particle events is short-lived.
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The equatorial Pacific climate has a bigger correlation with solar activity than
elsewhere, which may be due to cloudiness. Its possible that this is a climate
amplifier, taking a relatively minor solar effect and enlarging its effects on climate, but
observations show that any amplification is no more than about 20% on top of the very
small Total Solar Irradiance change.
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Measuring space weather before modern man

Cosmic rays are energetic enough to mess with the atomic nuclei of gasses in our
atmosphere. They convert nitrogen into carbon-14 (14C) and they shatter oxygen, nitrogen
and argon nuclei to create beryllium-10 (10Be) and chlorine-36 (36Cl). The energy level
needed to make these cosmogenic isotopes is so high that they can only be formed by
galactic cosmic rays (and rarely by solar proton events) so they record the level of
cosmic rays (and therefore periods of low solar activity) in times before we had
instruments to measure solar variations directly.
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14C is the same isotope we use for carbon-dating, and while for dating we have to

correct for its variable production by cosmic rays, for a space weather proxy we are
interested in the opposite the variation itself. 10Be in ice cores from the poles gives a
stronger signal than in lower latitudes because the Earth is less shielded from cosmic rays
at the poles. The 10Be proxy record shows that even in periods of no sunspots (the
Maunder Minimum) there is still a detectable 11-year cycle in cosmic rays showing that
the Suns magnetic field still fluctuated regularly in that time. In addition to the 11-year
cycle, proxy data reveal a 22-year cycle caused by the Suns magnetic field reversals, and
there are also 88-year and 207-year cycles. These all show up in the 10Be and 14C proxy
records, but there is no evidence in those records for solar cycles of the order of 1,500
years that would explain (as contended by some) the climate fluctuations known as Bond
Events (since the last ice age) or DansgaardOeschger Events (during the last ice
age).
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As with other proxies, space weather proxies have their challenges. In particular
they are affected by variations in the Earths own magnetic field over timescales longer
than 500 years, so its hard to separate the Earths magnetic signal from the space signal.
An atom of carbon can remain in the atmosphere as CO2 for 7 or 8 years, which smears
out the 14C signal from a single cosmic event, whereas 10Be only hangs around in the
atmosphere for a few weeks to 2 years. This makes 14C a better indicator of space weather
fluctuations on 11-year or longer cycles averaged across the globe, where 10Be is better at
pinpointing the date of a single cosmic event.
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 Some ice cores show a correlation

between local temperature and Sun cycles (using 10Be for the Sun cycles and 18O for
temperature), but other locations fail to show this correlation, so it seems not to be a
global phenomenon. Other data do show a correlation between 14C and rainfall (recorded
in cave stalagmites) going back around 9,000 years. In general, proxy records show that
during times of high cosmic ray flux (times of lower solar irradiance) monsoon rains are
slightly weaker in Oman, India and Southern China, high latitudes are a little colder with
more sea ice in the Atlantic, and Europe is wetter and cooler. Rainfall patterns also shift in
Africa, Central- and South America.
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There is solid evidence that solar cycles have been stable at least over the last 1.2
billion years. Geologists studied lake deposits from Devonian and Proterozoic periods in
Scotland. They are, in fact, well-preserved varves with a layer per year for thousands of
years. Geologists measured the thickness of every tiny layer and analyzed them for
repeated cycles. They found cycles of approximately 11-years, 22 years, and, curiously, 60
years, showing the same rhythm we see today.
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Violent galactic events

Supernovae and gamma ray bursts near us are very rare, and potentially extremely
destructive. A large and very sharp increase in both 14C and 10Be shows up in Japanese,
American and European tree-rings, and Antarctic ice cores, corresponding to the year 774775AD. The magnitude of the increase is some 20 times the normal solar cycle, and 10
times larger than the normal galactic cosmic ray signal. It may have been caused by an
exceptional solar flare, the debris from a supernova washing past us, or a gamma-ray
burst from two black holes or neutron stars colliding. The fact that roughly 300 times
more 14C was produced than 10Be, tells scientists that that event was most likely a short
gamma ray burst. A direct hit from a nearby gamma ray burst could fry the planet
causing mass extinction, but scientists estimate the 774AD event occurred roughly 3,000
to 12,000 light years away, so was mercifully weak enough to not extinguish life on
Earth! Intriguingly this celestial calamity may have been seen by Anglo-Saxons as a red
crucifix in the heavens!
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Fossil raindrops and packrat urine

I dont have space to go into them all here, but there are proxies for many other
environmental parameters used to understand the history of the Earth. These cover such
diverse factors as rock-weathering rates, monsoon rainfall, ocean acidification, ocean
mixing and connections, ocean salinity, hurricane activity, drought, stream flow and
many others. They are mined from diverse sources like lake sediments, tree rings, corals,
cave deposits, deep-seabed drill cores, maize harvest records, ice cores and even peat
bogs.
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It sounds far-fetched, but scientists even used fossil rain drops to calculate the
density of the early atmosphere! 2.7 billion-year-old slabs of South African rock were
found covered with small circular pits that bore all the hallmarks of rain pits from a
passing shower over freshly-fallen volcanic ash. Scientists performed experiments with
water droplets on various ash deposits, and used the results to calculate the density of the
air through which those ancient raindrops had fallen to make the observed pits. Their
results showed that the atmosphere could not have been more than twice the density of our
modern air, and most likely was just slightly denser. These results poured fuel on the
faint young Sun paradox debate that I mentioned earlier.
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Perhaps the most bizarre proxies are from

packrat middens, ancient nests of packrats containing plant and animal remains
encased in crystallized packrat urine! The vegetation entombed there is a treasure trove
of information about shifting vegetation with climate change, and the leaves have been
used for stomata-counting for CO2 levels. The crystallized urine itself is a record of
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chlorine-36 (36Cl), which as I mentioned in the previous section, is a tracer for cosmic ray
levels, forming a valuable supplement to the cosmic ray record from polar ice cores.
Evidently scientists will go to extraordinary lengths to get their data!
Yet there are some things we have no proxies for, such as methane. This is a shame
because methane is implicated in several climate shifts in Earths history.

Rock-solid evidence of ancient climates

The most fundamental, rock-solid evidence for different environments in the
Earths past is the science of geology itself. The very makeup and structure of sediments
betray the environment they formed in. The same rippled sands found on sea beds today
can be seen preserved in ancient rocks; ancient river floodplains have the same silty layers

that we find beside todays rivers; and the same can be said for desert dunes, reefs,
estuaries, glaciers and all the other modern environments.
For instance, at the low CO2 time of the Carboniferous and Permian glaciations,
we find diamictites (also called till - a sediment diagnostic of glacier deposits) in
Argentina, Antarctica, South Africa and Tasmania. These are associated with sediments
containing isolated stones that are identical to modern dropstones that fall into soft
sediments from melting icebergs. Glacial sediments like those tell us about the
Slushball Earth events of the early Earth, but hummocky cross-stratification, which
betrays stormy influence on seabed sediments, shows the worlds oceans were exposed to
wind at those times. We also see dust deposits called loess in Australia at that time,
indicative of glacial times when ice-ground rock flour is uncovered by summer melting
and blown away, to be deposited elsewhere. Both the loess and the hummocky crossstratification tell us that the planet was not completely frozen over (so more a slushball
than a snowball). Large, thick loess deposits are also found across Europe, the US
Midwest and China resulting from the most recent ice ages.
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Desert sands are another example. Sands from modern deserts have grains which,
if you look at them under the microscope, are nicely rounded, frosted (sand-blasted) and
all a consistent size. The same is true for ancient desert sands like the Coconino sandstone
in the Grand Canyon area, even down to the slanting outlines of 270 million-year-old sand
dunes.
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30 Jurassic desert dunes in Zion Canyon, Utah. Their drifting outlines

captured like frames in a stop-motion film, sliced through by recent
erosion. Photo by the author.
Other rocks have tell-tale signs of an estuarine environment (like flaser
bedding), others have desiccation cracks that show muds have dried in the air, and still
others have salts indicative of arid soils. There are many, many more but I wont subject

you to them here! The point is that the same physics that results in sediments today can be
inferred for identical sediments through Earths history.
The present is indeed the key to the past, as Sir Charles Lyell observed back in
1832.

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Bottom line:
Even though we cant directly stick a thermometer in ancient oceans, or directly
measure the concentration of CO2 in Jurassic air, there are a range of indirect measures
proxies - for ancient environments. Proxies are complicated and are not infallible, but their
precision has been improving, the menu of them keeps expanding, and the differences
between them has been narrowing in recent years. Fundamentally, when we compare
the proxy record with the physical rock record we find they make sense together. And by
revealing what has happened to our environment in the past, we can put this knowledge to
work to assess what is in store for our modern planet.
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6. The Future According to the Past

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to
see

Churchill
So what can we learn from our planets past?
First, this is real.
This is not fiction there is solid scientific evidence behind this terrestrial
chronicle. Yes, there are uncertainties, which I highlighted in the previous chapters, but the
great majority of our understanding of the planets past stands on firm scientific ground.
Science now has a good handle on many of the changes of Earths past, their causes and
their effects.
Second, the Earth has always been dynamic, so theres no reason to expect it to be
static now.
Change has always been a part of Earths story. Orbital changes have imprinted
their rhythm on ice ages and climate oscillations throughout geological time. But
there have also been much bigger changes, whether caused by massive volcanic eruptions,
life innovations, ocean circulation changes, or asteroid collisions. Every significant change
triggered a proportional reaction, like the appearance of cyanobacteria, which filled the
atmosphere with oxygen and caused the planet to freeze, or the evolution of worms that
churned the sea bed and caused ocean chemistry to change, or the greenhouse gas
emissions from Large Igneous Province eruptions, which triggered global warming, ocean
anoxic events, and mass extinctions.
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We should therefore expect similar causes now to enact similar results. It just
doesnt make sense for the Earth to work any other way.
Third, humans today are changing the planet the way Large Igneous Provinces did
in the past.
Abrupt climate changes were highly destructive in Earths past. The creatures of
those times didnt get off lightly many went extinct. Several mass extinctions were
caused by huge greenhouse gas emissions from Large Igneous Provinces, and some (like
the Permian) came perilously close to extinguishing all complex life on Earth. The
parallels between past greenhouse gas-driven extinctions and our activities today should
give us cause for concern.
And as we saw in Your Life as Planet Earth, modern-looking humans evolved
some 200,000 years ago, but it wasnt until the climate stabilized after the helter-skelter of
the ice ages, that agriculture, then civilization began.
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The power of humans

The 2004 tsunami-generating quake in the Indian Ocean released 23,000 times
more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Even the largest hydrogen bomb ever
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tested (The Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton device) was just a tenth of the energy in that
single quake. By those measures human power may seem puny.
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But our ability to change

the Earth lies less in moments of explosive power than in the relentless accumulation of
small unwitting acts on a personal scale.
In just the same way that the oxygen released by a single cyanobacterium is
inconsequential, but oxygen from trillions of them transformed the planet in the Great
Oxidation Event, there are so many of us now on this planet that the sum of all our
individual contributions can fundamentally change our Earth.
The smoke stacks from individual power stations and factories, the exhausts of
individual cars, airplanes and so many other discrete sources have combined to nearly
double the heat energy trapped in our atmosphere compared to pre-industrial values.
This extra energy in our atmosphere has built to the point where in 2013 it was the
equivalent of 561 million Hiroshima atomic bombs, or 224 thousand Tsar Bombas,
being detonated in our atmosphere each year!
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[B]

But less than half of Americans believe modern global warming is caused by
humans. For sure, the science of climate change is immensely complex, and uncertainties
remain, but lets touch on what we do know.
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31 Building energy: radiative forcing by greenhouse gasses in the

atmosphere, relative to 1750 levels. Simplified from: NOAA AGGI, 2014

The global climate is warming beyond reasonable doubt

The planet is warming. Study after study has established this beyond doubt.
Instrument drift, heat-island effects, poor quality data, selection bias and other spurious
causes have been ruled out. The effect is stronger in the northern hemisphere than
the southern hemisphere, and it is pronounced at high northern latitudes. Some
90% of this excess heat has been absorbed by the oceans. Land temperatures have risen
faster than ocean temperatures, on average by 1.5 C (2.7F) in the past 250 years, with
about 60% of that occurring in just the past 50 years. If you include the oceans, global
average temperatures have risen by about 0.8 C in the last century and are rising about
0.17C per decade (faster in the northern hemisphere), despite a recent flattening of
surface temperatures since the millennium.
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Side effects
Arctic sea ice is melting at 13% a decade, and ice-loss in Greenland and west
Antarctica is accelerating, although curiously, Antarctic sea ice has actually been
increasing by 1.4% per decade. Sea levels are rising and ocean salinity is changing.
Ocean acidity has increased by 30% (pH dropped 8.2 to 8.1) in response to CO2 levels,
more acidic than any time in the last 2 million years and they are getting even more so.
Ocean acidification is already affecting shell-forming creatures, reducing marine
organism egg production, delaying larval development, causing abnormal fish behavior
and problems in oyster hatcheries. Some shelled plankton species are actually dissolving
alive.
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These effects are dj-vu of the Large Igneous Province eruption-driven climate
changes in the past.
In Alaska the thawing ground has rendered tundra roads unusable for twice the
number of days per year compared to 30 years ago, while trees rooted in no-longer-solid
ground have become drunken forests. Warmer winters have led to an epidemic of pine
bark beetles causing destruction of forests in Canada and the western United States
while the Arctic has experienced vegetation changes equivalent to a 6 degree change in
latitude (400 miles or 700 km) in just the last 30 years.
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Across the world extreme heat waves are more frequent, high temperature records
are being broken, and weather agencies have added new colors to their charts to depict
temperatures previously considered off the scale. Many areas have experienced a
greater frequency of heavy downpours, with more frequent flooding an inevitable
consequence. The Thames Barrier a gateway to protect London from storm surge - has
been deployed with increasing frequency in the last 2 decades.
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Weather is not the same as climate

One of the most frequent

dismissals of climate change goes like: they cant predict the weather in a few days, how
can they possibly predict climate change? But weather is not the same as climate, any
more than the stock price for an individual company is the economy. Like that stock price,
weather has all kinds of short-term variability whereas the climate is more like the
economy the underlying long-term trend. Weather has always been variable, so its
impossible to pin one hot day, or one massive downpour on climate change. But over time,
climate change makes heat waves and downpours more likely, in just the same way that an
improving economy tends to see rising stock prices, but not all stocks rise and short-term
variability continues.
A pause in warming?
Its true that average global surface temperatures, which had risen rapidly from the

1970s to the millennium, have not risen much since then, despite ever-rising CO2 levels.
So the question is: is this a short-term wobble within the natural variability of the climate,
or is it an actual pause in climate change? In fact, looking at the land temperature record
(which is not as affected as global temperatures are by variation caused by ocean currents)
the pause is statistically insignificant over the natural ups and downs of the climate
during the last 50 years. Also, ocean probes show that extra heat is being absorbed by
the oceans, and there was also a small reduction in the solar energy received during the
pause timeframe.
So the pause seems to be just a short-term wobble in the
continuing global warming trend. It reduces projected warming for the middle of the
century by only about 10%, and does not materially affect projections for the end of the
century.
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Despite the so-called pause, the years from 2001 to 2013 still rank among the 14
warmest in 133 years of instrument records, 2013 was tied for the fourth hottest year on
record globally, and hot extremes of temperature are still becoming more frequent.
And despite recent headlines gleefully declaring global cooling based on a return of
some Arctic ice, the reality is that even in 2013, the extent of Arctic ice was still much
less than the average for each of the last 3 decades. The 2013 sea ice recovery is an
example of weather, whereas the decades-long decline in Arctic ice is a reflection of
climate.
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So why the obsession with CO2?

A planet at our distance from the Sun should be a ball of ice. Deep frozen. Lifeless.
A simple calculation of the energy received from the Sun by the Earth tells us its
average temperature should be -19C (2F). Clearly reality is different why?
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Its due to the blanket effect of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, trapping
the Earths heat. Sunlight shines mainly in the visible part of the spectrum. You can see
your neighbors house, a view on a clear day, and the road ahead when you drive, because
the atmosphere is transparent to visible light. The warmth of sunlight on your face is the
sensation of the Suns rays generating heat in your skin, which glows in invisible thermal
infrared light. Roads, trees, rocks everything does the same thing, they all warm up in
sunlight and that warmth glows with thermal infrared light. But the atmosphere is opaque
to thermal infrared, so that warmth cant escape. It gets absorbed and re-radiated within
the atmosphere, keeping the planet warmer than it would be without greenhouse gasses.

 Its like a 2-way mirror in a police

interrogation room. The detectives can see into the room (like sunlight penetrating the
atmosphere), but the suspect looking back just sees his own image reflected back to him
(like Earths trapped heat).
99% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen, which are not greenhouse gasses.
CO2 is in the remaining 1% along with argon, nitrous oxide, methane, CFC gases (the
ozone-hole-making refrigerants), and water vapor.
CO2, nitrous oxide, methane and water vapor are all greenhouse gasses because
their atomic bonds resonate with thermal infrared radiation, and CO2 happens to absorb
infrared at the peak wavelength of Earths heat glow. It dominates the greenhouse effect,
and 80% of the increase in greenhouse effect (radiative forcing) from 1990 to 2013 has
been due to CO2. CO2 and nitrous oxide levels continue to rise unabated, while methane
levels have been variable.
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A simple combination of CO2 and known volcanic eruptions is sufficient to

calculate practically all the temperature variation in the last 250 years. Since volcanoes
produce short-lived cooling from their sulfur emissions, practically all the warming in that
trend is explained by CO2 levels. Thats why were obsessed with CO2.
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Water vapor
Water vapor is a powerful but highly variable greenhouse gas that some believe is
behind climate change. But a single molecule of water vapor lasts only about 9 days in the
air on average, so it doesnt hang around long enough to be a primary driver of global
warming, because the Earth takes much longer to change (thermal inertia), and the
amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is limited by temperature. This means it is a
slave or feedback that only rises in response to warming caused directly by other
greenhouse gasses, but in this way it amplifies the warming caused by those other
gasses, doubling their warming effect! Scientists have proven that water vapor is
controlled by temperature, rather than the other way around, by watching its response to
the short-lived global cooling triggered by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
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The two faces of CO2

As I mentioned in the last chapter, we know that CO2 and temperature have moved

in lock-step throughout most of Earths history. CO2 is both a driver of warming, and also
rises in response to warming. When warming is caused by orbital changes, we see CO2
levels rise simultaneously because warmer oceans can dissolve less CO2 than cold ones.
We also know that when massive volumes of CO2 have been added rapidly into the
atmosphere in the past, this has driven global temperature rises, like in the Triassic and
the Permian extinction events.
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Basic physics (Plancks equation for blackbody radiation, absorption spectra for
gasses, StefanBoltzmann law, Boyles Law) tells us that extra CO2 in the atmosphere has
to have a greenhouse effect. If CO2 was not operating as a greenhouse gas, the Earth
would be that ball of ice, so rising levels of CO2 must have a global warming effect
unless something else negates it. And, as Ill explain below, even though there are some
climate processes that work to reduce the effect of CO2, they do not negate it. So, aside
from orbital wobbles, CO2 is the principal control knob on climate change.
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We are the cause

How do we know humans are to blame for rising CO2 levels now?
For a start the quantities match. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere matches the
measured industrial CO2 release, and global oxygen levels have been going down
as you would expect from burning fossil fuels.
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Second, the isotopic fingerprint of the CO2 shows it came from fossil fuels, rather
than volcanoes.
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Third, the timing of the changes matches the timing of the industrial era. For
instance temperature and CO2 levels are largely explained by orbital wobbles and volcanic
eruptions (with minor solar cycle influence) up to the industrial era, and then CO2 and
temperatures increase regardless of the orbital or solar parameters. Warming in the
oceans is still mostly confined to the near-surface showing its a relatively recent
phenomenon.

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The magnitude of warming we have seen greatly exceeds natural climate

variability, so its virtually certain that we are to blame for the CO2 which is driving
global warming.
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Its not the Sun

Some scientists have claimed that global warming is caused by solar activity or
cosmic rays. Although the amount of sunlight (total solar irradiance) has fluctuated since
satellite measurements started, overall there has been no net increase while the Earths
climate warmed. Solar activity rose and then fell in the 20th century, but global
temperatures kept rising, so there isnt a direct causal relationship. The cosmic ray flux
decreased in the early 20th century, and from the second half of the 20th century to recently
it has been high. If cosmic rays were a significant factor in climate change, then the latter
half of the 20th century should have been cloudier and cooler than it was, so cosmic rays

are clearly not a major factor.

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10Be isotope data led some scientists to suggest

that the Sun has much more influence on our past climate than mainstream science has
it, but recent research has refuted those conclusions, so the most up-to-date and
widely-accepted understanding is that solar variation is only a minor contributor to climate
fluctuations. There was also a suggestion that the cold climate in the second half of the
17th century was caused by low solar activity during the sunspot-free Maunder
Minimum, but temperature records show that the climate began warming 20-30 years
before the end of the Maunder Minimum, so solar activity was also unlikely the main
climate driver in those times.
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Most scientists studying the link between solar activity and climate agree that the
solar effect on climate accounts for only 0.1% of the observed temperature changes.
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Accepted science
You may not get this impression from some sections of the media or the
blogosphere, but the reality is that scientists are not debating the evidence for man-made
global warming. That is accepted science - scientists with expertise in climate science
are virtually certain that recent global-warming is due to human activities. That is also
the official position of a many venerated scientific bodies, governments and corporations,
including:
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The Geological Society of London , The American Geophysical

Union , the Geological Society of America , the National Academies of
Science , The Royal Society , The Australian CSIRO , the AAAS , The
American Chemical Society , The American Physical Society , American
Meteorological Society , NASA , EPA , National Center for
Atmospheric Research , Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic
Society , Science Council of Japan , Russian Academy of Science ,
Brazilian Academy of Sciences , Royal Society of Canada , Chinese
Academy of Sciences , French Academy of Sciences , Deutsche
Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, Germany , Indian National
Science Academy , Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Italy , Academia
Mexicana de Ciencias, Mexico , Academy of Science of South Africa ,
Australian Academy of Sciences , The Chinese government , the Indian
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Government , and even major corporations such as DuPont.

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These position statements include phrases like: The evidence is incontrovertible:

Global warming is occurring, and Global warming is unequivocal and primarily
human-induced. What scientists are debating is the extent, timing and regional
distribution of changes, and the most accurate methods for predicting these.
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Hoax, climategate, and lobbying

Even though human-caused global warming is accepted by most scientists, it isnt
by more than half of Americans, because they have been misled by a small but vocal
community of climate change deniers that attract disproportionate attention from the
media. The deniers seize on short term weather events and misuse scientific uncertainty in
a kind of smoke-and-mirrors exercise to cast doubt on the reality of climate change.
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This phenomenon was illuminated by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their
book: Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues
from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. They detailed the exploits of a well-funded
lobbying industry whose aim is to keep the controversy alive and deliberately sow doubt
in
the
minds
of
the
public
and
government.
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Oreskes and Conway

concluded: in creating the appearance of science, the merchants of doubt sold a plausible
story about scientific debate. They erected a Potemkin village [a fake village for show]
populated, in only a few cases, with actual scientists. They found that journalists feel
obliged to balance mainstream science with the views of the extreme minority, inflating
the latters importance, effectively resulting in a media bias against mainstream science.
The Guardian newspaper of the UK has also uncovered evidence that Secret
funding helped build a vast network of climate denial think tanks, and: anonymous

billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit
climate change science.
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This manufactured appearance of doubt (as distinct from genuine scientific debate)
taints the opinions of politicians, the decisions of government and even the courts. In
2011, the US Supreme Court ruled on a case of American Electric Power v. Connecticut,
concerning CO2 regulations. The Supreme Court Justices apparently placed equal weight
on the unfounded opinions of climate change deniers as on the evidence-based
conclusions of the overwhelming majority of scientists. As one commentary in Nature
one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world - put it: That the nations
highest court would repeat this misleading refrain, and seemingly endorse Dysons views
as equal to those of the IPCC and the EPA, simply takes the breath away.
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So its not surprising that some scientists may feel defensive in the face of this
manifest conspiracy. The so-called Climategate affair involved emails from the
Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the UKs University of East Anglia, which were hacked
and uploaded to the web in 2009 and 2011. They were seized upon by climate change
deniers who claimed that they showed CRU scientists had manipulated and falsified
climate data. Some of the emails gave the impression that CRU scientists may have tried
to abuse the peer-review process to prevent publication of papers that conflicted with their
views, and may not have complied with data requests.
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We rightly expect the highest standards of intellectual honesty and transparency

from scientists, so claims of misconduct and fraud were investigated by several
independent inquiries. They concluded that the CRU scientists rigour and honesty as
scientists are not in doubt, declaring: exoneration, and finding: no evidence of any
deliberate scientific malpractice. Across the pond, the US Environmental Protection
Agency declared that: EPA reviewed every e-mail and found this was simply a candid
discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large
complex data sets. Finally, UK legislators concluded: it is time to make the changes
and improvements recommended and with greater openness and transparency and move
on.
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The criminal who hacked the emails and released them suspiciously shortly before
the UN climate summit in Copenhagen was never found.
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The point is that the only hoax here is the unrelenting stream of manufactured
doubt and denial that is neither supported by the evidence nor by the consensus of the vast
majority of scientists. As the AGU President, Michael McPhaden, put it: That consensus
is rooted in a foundation of scientific knowledge gained through careful, thoughtful, and
thorough research, not political or ideological rhetoric.
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Or as US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, Everyone is entitled to

their own opinion, but not to their own facts.
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The last time we were this warm

True, the Earth has been this warm before.

 We were on a cooling trend over

the last 6,000 years, scheduled for the next ice age by around the year 3,500AD, due to
changes in our orbit around the Sun. But that all changed when we reached the industrial
era, which has reversed 6,000 years of cooling in a century. The planet is hotter now
than the Medieval Warm Period (AD 800-1300)
or the Roman Warm Period
(500BC to 400AD), or any time in the last 6,000 years. Even 6,000 years ago, during
the Mid Holocene Warm Period, when the warmer climate was caused by the same
orbital change that ended the ice age, global temperatures were about the same or just
slightly warmer than the 2000s.
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Beyond then, you have to go back to interglacials warm phases between ice ages
- to see temperatures like today. During the last interglacial (known as MIS5or the
Eemian around 130,000 years ago), even though Arctic temperatures were around 5C
to 8C warmer than today, globally the temperature was only about 1C warmer.
The Earth was warm then because our orbit was delivering about 11% more solar energy
to the Arctic. Sea levels were 9 meters (30 feet) higher than today, as a result of drastic
reductions in Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets all in a world barely warmer than
today. To find the next time as warm as the 20th century, you have to go back 400,000
years ago to MIS11. That anomalously warm interglacial, again caused by orbital
changes, was in the same temperature ballpark as MIS5, with the Arctic sea ice at least
partially melted, just as we have seen in the last few years.
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But in those orbitally-driven interglacials, with temperatures just slightly warmer

than today, CO2 levels rarely rose above 280ppm, compared with modern levels of about
400ppm. So they were fundamentally different from today driven by slow orbital
variations in solar energy, rather than rapid CO2 rise. To find sustained global
temperatures to match those projected for the end of this century, with CO2 at todays
levels, we have to go back before the ice age, all the way to the Pliocene epoch around
2.5 to 3 million years ago.
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Thats a time before the emergence of Homo.

Speed of change
How do we reconcile CO2s control on climate with the knowledge that life thrived
at much higher levels of CO2 in the deep past?
Its all about the speed and volume of those CO2 emissions.
Our CO2 is rising faster than in previous mass extinctions
You may recall from my description of CO2 proxies that atmospheric CO2 is linked
to six chemical parameters in the oceans: dissolved CO2, acidity, salinity, temperature,
carbonate saturation, and depth. Slow changes to CO2 (longer than about 10,000 years)
can be absorbed in the oceans without causing an environmental crisis because the excess
CO2 is buffered by those other parameters throughout the vast reservoir of the deep
oceans.
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32 How changes in seawater chemistry process CO2 emissions. Slow

changes allow ocean chemistry and atmospheric CO2 to remain in
equilibrium. Fast changes, such as those caused by LIPs and humans,
are too fast for the ocean chemistry to process, turning surface water
more acidic and allowing a big buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere,
causing more warming. CH4 = methane, CO32- = carbonate, CO2 in
seawater is mainly bicarbonate, CCD = Calcite Compensation Depth,
below which calcite (shells, limestone) dissolves faster than it accumulates.

Based mainly on Zeebe, Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 2012, with
additional input from A. Ridgwell (personal communication).

Human CO2 emissions, in contrast,

have happened mostly in the last few decades. In this timeframe, the atmosphere interacts
with the biosphere and the surface layer of the oceans. This reservoir is only about 4
trillion metric tons (4.4 trillion US tons) of carbon about the same as our fossil fuel
reserves - so we have the capacity to completely overwhelm this short-term natural
compensation system. The surface layer of the oceans has so far been able to absorb
about a third of our CO2 emissions, but this has knocked ocean chemistry out of kilter by
making it more acidic. In fact ocean acidity is rising about a hundred times faster than any
time in the last 56 million years. Worryingly, there are signs that the ocean surface may
already be becoming less effective at absorbing our excess CO2.
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On a thousand-year timeframe, extra CO2 gets absorbed into the vast reservoir of
deep ocean waters. At these timescales the ocean is still more acidic than before all that
extra CO2 was introduced, and the warmer ocean is in balance with higher atmospheric
CO2 levels and temperatures, because warm water dissolves less gas than cold water. In
other words, climate change continues on this timescale, even if the CO2 emissions stop.
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Over several thousand years those extra CO2 emissions begin to be removed by
chemical reaction with deep-sea carbonate sediments and carbonates on land. Over even
longer timescales (100,000 years or more) carbon burial in sediments as a result of silicate
rock weathering is the major long-term remover of CO2, balancing volcanic CO2
production, so preventing a runaway greenhouse like on Venus. It was these long-term
adjustments that kept the world habitable in the warm, high-CO2 world of the dinosaurs,
and before the ice ages.
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33 Some feedbacks are slower than others: The time frames of inputs
(forcings) compared to climate feedbacks. Partly based on Schmidt,
PAGES news 2012 & Zeebe, Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 2012.
Its when CO2 is produced too fast for the oceans to absorb it, that excess CO2
ramps up in the atmosphere, producing the rapid global warming, ocean acidification,
seal-level rise, oxygen starvation events, and the mass extinctions we saw several times in
Your Life as Planet Earth.
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Its true that rapid temperature changes have occurred before humans, for example
Dansgaard-Oeschger events during the last ice ages. These large, sudden temperature
fluctuations occurred in as little as 20 years (changes of about 0.5C per year), but they
are not a good guide for our modern times because they were mainly in the north, and
were not driven by CO2 but instead were probably caused by ice shelf collapses due to
ocean currents, and possibly the opening and closing of the Bering Strait.
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Glacial-Interglacial cycles took much longer over thousands of years. The

surface ocean was able to process the relatively small rise in CO2 that accompanied these
cycles (it rarely rose above 280ppm ) by adjusting its chemistry in a non-destructive way,
with cold times having a slightly more alkali ocean with higher levels of carbonate
ions, causing some marine creatures to grow thicker shells than in warm times.
Throughout the cold-warm, glacial-interglacial cycles of the ice ages, calcium carbonate
saturation state (and therefore the depth in the ocean where calcium carbonate dissolves)
varied by roughly 20% to buffer the CO2 changes.
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In other words, the oceans and atmosphere remained in balance (in equilibrium)
through the ice ages.

Its just too much, too fast, for our oceans to catch up
The annual release of 35 billion tonnes of human-produced CO2 is 3 to 7 times
larger, and 70 times faster, than at the end of the last ice age, overwhelming the surface
oceans ability to process it harmlessly, and it will be many thousands of years before the
oceans and atmosphere will return to equilibrium.
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Volume of change
Our CO2 dwarfs recent volcanic emissions and rivals those of past mass
extinctions
Its a surprise to most people that human CO2 emissions have dwarfed volcanic
emissions over the last couple of centuries. Globally every year volcanoes (including
undersea volcanoes) only emit about as much CO2 as a state like Ohio or Michigan does.
The combined volcanic output of CO2 averages at around 260 million tonnes per year
compared to about 35 billion tonnes of human-produced CO2 annually. Even the major
volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 only produced about 50 million tonnes of
CO2. Human CO2 emissions are equivalent to an extra 11,200 Klauea volcanoes or
about 360 more mid-ocean ridges!
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Of course a Large Igneous Province eruption would rival or exceed the CO2 we
emit, but we havent had a LIP eruption in the last 16 million years.
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Uncertainty in climate change

Uncertainty is a much-misunderstood
scientific word. In everyday language uncertainty means tentative and unreliable, with
negative connotations. That is not the way the word is used in science, and this difference
confuses the media and the public, something the manufactured doubt industry exploits to
the fullest extent.
Uncertainty in science is just another way or expressing how confident we can be
in a conclusion. A scientist expressing uncertainty is not saying they know nothing,
rather they are stating in a precise way how confident they are in what they do know. We
wrongly assume scientists are either 100% certain, or know nothing at all. But certain is
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like perfect an ethereal ideal rarely attainable. If you think about it, there are many
things we treat as certain in everyday life but which arent so. You cant be 100% certain
you wont be struck by lightning in the next minute, but you can be very confident (unless
you are reading this on top of a mountain in a thunderstorm, in which case all bets are off).
We cant be certain we wont be struck by a car as we cross the road, but we cross anyway.
When doctors give an expectant mother her due date, its a guide rather than a 100%
certain prediction.
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There are almost always uncertainties in science. No measurement has perfect

precision, and when you start combining data, these errors add up too. The Earth sciences
are particularly challenged by less-than-perfect and sparse data sets scientists have to
work with the real world as they find it. The data imperfection creates uncertainty, which
is measured and included with the results, often expressed as a number (plus or minus)
another. The first figure is the average value, and the value (confidence interval) is
usually set so that 95% of the data fall between those numbers. The bigger the spread
(uncertainty), the bigger the value will be.
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) represents the consensus
view of an international panel of scientists. They call conclusions virtually certain if
they are 99% to 100% likely (a very high bar), very likely if the likelihood is above
90%, and just likely if it is above 66%.
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Uncertainties compound into the future when we attempt to predict climates in the
coming decades. Starting with projected greenhouse gas emissions and climate sensitivity,
we already have a significant spread of possibilities. Adding-in feedbacks like water
vapor, methane, additional CO2, precipitation, clouds, and so on, each with their own
uncertainties, widens the spread of possible outcomes. Then factoring-in uncertainties for
population growth, development, adoption rates of clean technologies, and so on, and you
can see that the cone of uncertainty will get quite large into the future.

34 Compounding uncertainties when predicting climate change (left) is

a bit like compounding uncertainty predicting a hurricane path (right).
Sources: IPCC AR5, NOAA
Its similar to the projected path of a hurricane that we see on TV. A curved cone of
uncertainty starts with its apex at the present storm center, widening as the eye is projected

into the future. The curve is continually revised, but anyone in the footprint of the curve
takes notice and acts accordingly.
Computer models and projections
Climate science, in common with other areas of science that deal with large
amounts of data, often encapsulates its understanding of the way the climate works in a
computer model to handle the many complex calculations. Models are inevitably a
simplification of the real world, a likeness that cant possibly capture every aspect of it.
But if the computer model can reproduce actual, measured climate changes, then the
model is at least a good approximation for how the climate really works. The more times
that model is tested with new data and successfully reproduces reality, the more consensus
builds that the calculations in the model are a true reflection of the way the real climate
works.
Climate models have in fact been found to do a pretty good job matching
instrumental observations so far, even if they have generally predicted more surface
warming over the last decade than actually occurred. Their results also match values
calculated independently from past climate changes, so they do seem to represent the
inner workings of the real climate fairly well.
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Uncertainties remain
The intricacies of all the feedback loops, like the loss of organic carbon from soils,
the effects on the ozone layer and the stratosphere, and the future uptake rates of
CO2 by oceans (because of uncertainties in how marine organisms will adapt), are not all
well-quantified. In combination they are generally agreed to generate a net warming, but
the uncertainty lies in by how much. Rainfall changes and regional specifics are also
hard to pin-down as are the expected changes in ocean currents in response to all the
other changes.
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The role of clouds in climate change

is still poorly understood, and this is a big blind spot since some have suggested clouds
may be natures way of combating global warming (Thermostat Hypothesis). But
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recent studies have instead found the opposite - a small net warming (amplifying) effect as
clouds change with temperature. Hopefully our understanding of clouds will improve as
new satellite data come on-stream in the next few years.
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Of course, its possible that some new discovery will change our understanding,
but overall the uncertainty surrounding climate change has diminished. In 1990 scientists
concluded global warming was about as likely natural-caused as human-caused. By 1995
they agreed there was discernible human influence, by 2007 it was very likely due to
human-produced greenhouse gas emissions, and by 2013 it was virtually certain, a
greater than 99% probability. Thats odds better than 100-to-1, not wise to bet against!
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A sensitive question
In order to predict how much the Earth will warm in response to greenhouse
gasses, we must account for all those intricate feedback loops in the climate that stand
between the input greenhouse gas emissions and the output future temperatures. The
number that predicts the output from the input is called Climate Sensitivity. Sensitivity
is like a car gear lever for a given engine speed, higher gears turn the wheels faster. If
the climate is more sensitive (like a higher gear), the temperature rise will be larger, if it is
less sensitive (like a low gear) then it will be smaller. Real sensitivity is much more
complex than that, of course, because the effect is not instant, different feedbacks work on
different timescales, and can either amplify or diminish the effect, and a warming world
generates further feedbacks - as if the wheel motion is fed back into the gearbox.

35 A gear lever as a simplified analogy for climate sensitivity. The

engine represents the energy input from greenhouse gasses, the gearbox
represents all the different feedbacks, and the speed of the wheels
represents the amount of climate change. Climate sensitivity is like the gear

lever changing the speed of the wheels.

The timescale of that output matters. We need to know how the planet will respond
in the lifetime of our grandkids (which Ill call the short-term sensitivity, but climate
scientists call it Transient Climate Sensitivity). And we would also like to know the
legacy we are leaving for our grandkids grandkids to deal with in the coming centuries
(which Ill call the long-term sensitivity but is more correctly called Equilibrium Climate
Sensitivity and sometimes Earth System Sensitivity).
Calculations of climate sensitivity that are based on the modern instrument record
have the advantage of well-constrained numbers, but they tend to deal only in the fastest
feedbacks, so they may be unduly influenced by short term fluctuations like the flattish
surface temperature trend since the millennium. They also need their computer models
to accurately represent all the feedbacks so are hostages to the uncertainties surrounding
those.
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An alternative approach is to calculate sensitivity from how the Earth actually

responded in the past. This has the advantage that it automatically includes all the Earths
feedbacks, but it is hostage to proxy uncertainties for the exact volumes, timing and
durations of past climate changes. Theres probably no single magic number for the
long-term sensitivity of the Earth, because each past climate change was a little different,
begun from a different temperature, CO2 level and ice cap status. So sensitivity values
from Earths past may be an imperfect analogue for our future because of the peculiarities
of human-generated climate change, but they probably provide the best guide for
whats in store for our children, their children and succeeding generations.
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Sensitivity based on recent observations

The IPCC calculated long-term sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 since preindustrial times as 1.5-4.5C (2.7-8.1F). This was based mainly on modeling from
instrument data, but did include some observations from Earths past.
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They also calculated the short-term,

transient sensitivity as 1-2.5C (1.8-4.5F). This short-term number predicts a global
warming between 2.6 and 4.8C (4.7-8.6F) by the year 2100, assuming business-as-usual
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Sensitivity based on Earths past

In contrast, studies grounded in how much the Earth actually responded in the past
suggest our planets longer-term (equilibrium) sensitivity may well be much higher.
One recent study of the last 65 million years of natural climate changes arrived at a
long-term sensitivity of 2.24.8C (4.0-8.6F), marginally higher than the IPCCs range.
But that study drew heavily from the glacial cycles of the last 800,000 years, when the
causes of change (orbital wobbles) were operating slowly enough for all the compensating
feedbacks to keep up. As I explained earlier, current climate change is quite different,
operating much faster than natural compensating processes can cope.
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Other studies have found that the climate of the past may have been much more
sensitive than the IPCCs value. These calculate long-term sensitivity to be around 68C for a doubling of CO2, values more in line with past LIP eruptions and mass
extinctions. Even the IPCC acknowledges (with medium confidence) that actual long
term sensitivity may in fact be double its quoted Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity.
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In other words, calculations of Earths responses in the past suggest the effects of
modern global warming may end up being far larger than we can calculate just from recent
measurements.
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Not just CO2

Even though most of the recent warming has been due to CO2, humans are
responsible for a zoo of other emissions that affect the climate in other ways as well.
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Soot (sometimes called black carbon) has recently been found to have a
warming effect second only to CO2. It comes from transport tail pipes, coal and wood
burning, burning trash, wildfires, grass fires, and slash-and-burn forest clearing. In
contrast, fine particles (aerosols) like smog and dust offer temporary cooling.
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Our transformation of the landscape also has an effect. Developing green land into
cities and roads, overgrazing, irrigation and desertification, erosion and clearing forests all
have an effect. They change how the land absorbs sunlight (albedo) and they change the
total amount of CO2 that gets absorbed into plants and sediments, and they generate other
climate-changing pollutants. Agricultural activity generates methane and nitrous oxide
(both greenhouse gasses), and this is likely to increase strongly as global population
increases and more 3rd world citizens are able to afford more meat. Fertilizers in run-off
and eroded soil affect ocean productivity, dead zones and coral reefs, each with knock-on
effects of their own.
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Methane is generated from sources as diverse as cow digestion, natural gas

production, coal mining, landfill sites, wetlands, permafrost, mud volcanoes, submarine
earthquakes and even termites. About half of current atmospheric methane comes from
human activities, and even though it only persists in the atmosphere for about 12 years,
in relatively small concentrations compared to CO2, it is roughly 25-32 times more
powerful as a greenhouse gas.
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The point here is that while the main focus is correctly on the main climate driver CO2 - even if we manage to return greenhouse gasses to pre-industrial levels, we would
not have removed all the human influences on the climate system. We have many fingers
in the machinery of Earths climate.
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Signposts from the past

As we saw in Your Life as Planet Earth, there have been many episodes of rapid
greenhouse-gas-driven global warming in Earths history. These were generally caused by
enormous Large Igneous Province eruptions like those in the Permian and Triassic
periods, and even the Deccan Traps eruptions at the end of the Cretaceous. Large Igneous
Provinces (LIPs) emit far more CO2 than modern eruptions because they are absolutely
huge, and they release prodigious quantities of greenhouse gasses as they inject their way
through the crust.
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In order to be conclusive about the comparison of LIP-caused mass extinctions and

our own time, we need to be able to date the carbon emissions and the eruptions to a
decade- or century-level of precision. Unfortunately the most precise dates using the latest
techniques are still at the multi-thousand year level at best. But as each new date comes
out, the trend has been to shorten the timeframe for those ancient emissions, and therefore
to push them closer as analogs for modern climate change. And their symptoms are eerily
similar to whats happening on our planet today.
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The Permian mass extinction saw at least 100 trillion tonnes of CO2 and methane
emitted into the atmosphere, and the initial phase of emissions may have lasted as little
as 2,100 to 18,000 years. Thats at least 5 times the volume of our entire fossil fuel
reserves, emitted over a much longer timeframe than human emissions, so the rate of
emissions might have been comparable. As we saw in Your Life as Planet Earth, the result
was catastrophic climate change and the extinction of 90% of species. The Permian
extinction was probably made worse because key calcifying plankton groups
(coccolithophores and forams) had not yet proliferated they improved the oceans ability
to buffer CO2 changes from around the Cretaceous onwards. Even if the volume of
Permian carbon emissions and its ocean chemistry are very different from today, if our
rates of emission are comparable, then the Permian Great Dying serves as a warning for
whats possible at the extreme end of global warming.

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The end-Triassic
extinction saw around 40 trillion tonnes of CO2 and methane released in perhaps a few
thousand years or less. Thats around double our fossil fuel inventory emitted over
maybe 10 times longer. Subsequent eruptions spread over 600,000 years exacerbated
the situation and its hard to pin down the exact timing and volumes of gasses involved,
but this mass extinction event, one of the 5 biggest in Earths history, is considered by
some scientists to be a closer analogy to the next few centuries.
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The 183 million-year-ago Toarcian extinction event seems to have been caused by
the release of about 15 billion tonnes of CO2 per year over about a 650 year period.
Thats less than half modern emission rates, but spread over a longer timeframe. This
was a time when sea surface temperatures increased by around 10C (around 18F) for
around 300,000 years, and the environmental effects included extinction, dissolving reefs,
ocean acidification, ocean dead zones devoid of the usual sea-bottom fauna, and increased
chemical weathering on land due to the heat and acid rain. The similar Aptian and
Cenomanian/Turonian extinction events also seem to have involved slower releases of
CO2 than today.
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The 56-million-years-ago PETM event may be a better analog for modern times,
but its still an area of active research. It released the equivalent of all our fossil fuel
reserves over millennia (perhaps as little as 13 years but thats not generally
accepted). The volcanic cause of the PETM is not universally accepted, and some
scientists believe large quantities of methane clathrates (a kind of methane-ice in deep
sediments) were destabilized. But that begs the question: what destabilized them?
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Still more recently, the Ethiopian-Yemeni eruptions between 31 and 29 million

years ago occurred just after the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) started up. As
such, this was the first large CO2 emission event in a world with ocean currents and
carbon sinks similar to our modern configuration. These eruptions may have released
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a little less CO2 than our fossil fuel inventory and they are associated with a short-lived
spike in CO2 values and a corresponding blip in ocean temperatures by maybe 2C, but
again the rate of CO2 emissions was far slower than todays.
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Even the warm Miocene climate 16 million years ago, triggered by the eruption of
the Columbia River Basalts in the USA, had slower emissions. Hundreds of eruptions
were spread over a few hundred thousand years, causing atmospheric CO2 to increase and
melting Antarctic ice to around 10 to 25% of its current size. Somewhat less CO2 than our
fossil fuel inventory was released, but CO2 peaked at levels similar to todays, with
global temperatures rising by 2 to 4C and sea levels rising roughly 50m (160ft).
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Some scientists believe that we

are less likely to create the kind of lethal hothouse climates that occurred in the Permian
and the Triassic, because unlike then we are today starting from a lower CO2
concentration, with ice caps to melt, and with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which is
efficient at drawing down CO2. Instead, those scientists see us generating a climate
similar to the Miocene with hot tropics and oceans warm even into the deep sea,
widespread ocean dead zones, shifted weather patterns, and melting of most northern ice
and perhaps half of Antarctic ice (causing sea level rise of maybe 50m (160ft)) within a
few hundred years.
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But other scientists point out that, because we seem to be releasing carbon at rates
much faster than LIPs in the past, and we are already seeing large changes in ocean
chemistry, we cant be complacent about the possibility of arriving at an end-Triassic-like
or even an end-Permian-like environment in that same timeframe.
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Why care? - Prognosis

So the diagnosis is clear: we are already suffering from a major case of global
warming due to human activity, of which the main driver is CO2. But the prognosis is less

clear, with a range of outcomes possible, from moderate disruption to severe impacts on
society and the economy. Scientists ability to predict the future is imperfect, but policy
makers routinely respond to military threats or economic hazards with similar or even less
certainty than we have for global warming. The question should not be do we know
everything? but should instead be do we know enough?
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I dont want to be alarmist, but I do think alarm is an entirely appropriate

response to scientists projections of Miocene-like or maybe even end-Triassic-like
conditions for our grandkids world and beyond, albeit with uncertainty. I truly hope they
are proven wrong, and that our climate proves to be less sensitive than more. I fervently
wish for some unforeseen cooling feedback to swoop in like a fairytale hero, saving us
from destructive climate change. But Earths past shows no sign of that. We must
remember that were dealing with nature, red in tooth and claw, so its important we face
reality with a clear-eyed, rational assessment of the risks it holds for future generations.
Even using conservative climate sensitivities, we are talking of average
temperature rises for the end of the century of 2.6 to 4.8C (4.7-8.6F), and for the year
2300 of roughly double that if CO2 emissions are not curtailed until the latter half of this
century. That may sound tiny compared to the weather variations we experience day by
day, but that is about the same jump in global temperatures that resulted in the Triassic
Mass Extinction, albeit from a climate already much warmer in the Triassic than we are
now. Global warming is like inflation, building little by little every day. It adds up over
years and decades, relentlessly accumulating a whole lot of extra energy to drive the
climate to new, inhospitable extremes.
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The IPCC issued a full and authoritative account of their prognosis, which is freely
available on their website, and which I dont want to duplicate here. Instead, Ill briefly
touch on some key points, based mainly on evidence from Earths past climate changes.
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Sea level rise

Current sea level rise will accelerate as

more heat is incorporated into the oceans, which will rise due to thermal expansion and
melting ice. The latest IPCC estimate is a rise of 0.53 to 0.97 meters (1ft 8in 3ft 2in) by
the end of this century, based on continuing the current trend of emissions. But past
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climate changes have resulted in far more rapid sea level rises: rates of 1.2 meters (4ft) per
century to as much as 5m (16ft) per century. Other recent projections for this century
that cluster around the 1 to 1.5 meter range (3 to 5) are more consistent with the expected
Pliocene-like climate at the end of this century. Those levels were at least 10m (33ft)
higher than today, but it could take centuries to melt that much ice so Pliocene levels are
probably what our grandkids grandchildren will have to deal with.
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Because land by the sea shore is often fairly flat, 1 meter (3ft) of sea level rise
can easily mean 100 meters (330ft) or more of inland encroachment by the sea. The
practical implications of this vary by location, but this would result in millions more
people experiencing coastal flooding with associated damage to near-coastal roads, rail,
electricity distribution and so on. Although current sea level rise is much slower, if it does
soon accelerate to 1 meter per century, then about 400,000 homes in the states of New
York, New Jersey and Connecticut alone may be vulnerable to occasional storm surge
flooding by the mid-century. By comparison, Hurricane Sandys storm surge inundated
about 170,000 homes in that same area.
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That rate of sea level rise would also displace 3.8 million people in the most fertile
part of the Nile Delta in Egypt, with similar effects in coastal communities around the
world. Some estimate a sea level rise of 2 meters (6 feet) is possible by the year 2100,
which could displace 187 million people globally. Even those extreme projections are
still just half the fastest rate of sea level rise observed in Earths past, at 5m (16ft) per
century. Unfortunately the spread of these projections is so large that it makes planning for
them difficult, but the point is that Earths past suggests that sea level rise is more likely
to be at the faster end of projections.
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Heat, drought and rain

With temperatures rising and heat waves becoming 10 times more frequent,
crop-stress could reduce yields by as much as 15% and extreme droughts will occur in
some places, especially the mid-latitudes, but other areas will experience more frequent
torrential downpours. We could well see a doubling or quadrupling of wildfire
frequency. Vegetation zones will change, with a northern US state like New Hampshire
resembling the growing conditions of the Carolinas by the end of the century. Plants
currently absorb about 25% of fossil fuel emissions, but as drought and heat waves take
their toll, plants will become a less effective carbon sink, making matters worse. Some
animals, birds and insects (including pests) will migrate in response, whereas less
adaptable species will die out.
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Some major rivers may see reduction in flow, and groundwater reserves in
already water-stressed regions like the Middle East look likely to become severely
depleted, placing additional strain on relations between upstream and downstream
countries.
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Oceans
The trends already seen for acidification and temperature rise will worsen. Acidity
is expected to increase by up to 150% (pH drop to 7.7) by the end of the century, turning
surface waters of the Southern Ocean, the Arctic and the Baltic corrosive for calcium
carbonate (shells, corals, limestone). Since acidity (pH) is a factor in many biochemical
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reactions, entire ecosystems may be decimated. Corals will be bleached more frequently
by warmer sea surface temperatures, which will eventually kill them off. This process is
expected to spread to most of the worlds reefs by mid-century, with a quarter of reefs
hanging on 20 years longer. If were lucky that extra 20 years may enable reefs to adapt
by encroaching into previously cool waters as we saw them do in the Jurassic.
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Fish in warmer oceans have a higher metabolic rate so they will need more
oxygen, but warm water holds less oxygen. Warmer oceans are also more stratified, with a
warm surface layer stubbornly refusing to mix with deeper layers. This restricts circulation
of nutrients which, added to the oxygen limitations, could stunt fish growth to about 75%
of current sizes by 2050 and severely reduce fish stocks relied upon by a billion people
in many parts of the planet.
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Storms
Studies of the Atlantic Ocean have found a significant increase in the frequency of
tropical-storm-strength storms since 1923, and the frequency of the most intense
hurricanes has been twice as frequent in warm years. These observations support
projections of an increase in hurricane intensity and an increase in the annual number of
intense hurricanes by 50% for each 1C increase in surface temperatures. Some suggest
that Europe can expect formerly rare destructive hurricanes (like Hurricane Lothar in
1999) to be 25 times more frequent by the end of the century. In contrast, the IPCC has
low confidence in any increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones or
hurricanes outside the Atlantic.
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Methane a carbon bomb?

As global temperatures warm, methane release from landfills, soil and wetlands is
expected to increase as a feedback. Its uncertain exactly how this methane will react with
other chemicals in the atmosphere, but it looks like methane levels could double by the
end of the century, amplifying global warming considerably.
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But thats not the biggest worry about methane.

In the permafrost that covers about a quarter of northern land and extends beneath
Arctic seas, there is a reservoir of carbon about 4 times larger than all the carbon emitted
by humans so far. The remains of plants and animals have been accumulating in frozen
soil there for thousands of years. Thawing permafrost encourages microbes to digest those
remains, and they release the carbon partly as methane. The rate is uncertain, but it is
already happening. Since 1900, 4.5 million square km (1.7 million square mi) of
permafrost area has begun to thaw, and the southern limit of permafrost has already
retreated northward by 80km (50mi) since 1975. Ignitable concentrations of methane
are now bubbling from some tundra lakes and from parts of the Arctic seabed.
Widespread thawing of the Siberian permafrost is expected if Siberian temperatures
increase another 0.7C from now, which is likely this century. Calculations suggest
this permafrost methane and CO2 could add the equivalent of another 5-8% of our total
inventory of fossil fuels by the end of the century, even further accelerating global
warming.
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 On top of that, scientists are

concerned that vast reserves of a kind of methane-ice, called methane clathrate or
methane hydrate, trapped in sea beds will become unstable as oceans warm, adding their
reserves of many billions of tonnes of methane to the atmosphere, on top of everything I
have mentioned so far. According to the IPCC, the rate of clathrate release into the ocean
is expected to be slow, and then the rate it would be released from the ocean into the
atmosphere will probably also be slow. But destabilized methane clathrates have been
implicated in large climate perturbations in the past, like the PETM, and disturbingly,
there are signs in the North Atlantic that about 2.5 billion tonnes of methane hydrate are
already destabilizing. The prospect of these vast methane reserves being unleashed on
top of human emissions, like a slow but unstoppable carbon bomb, with catastrophic,
irreversible consequences for the Earth, is a nightmare scenario for scientists.
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The carbon-bomb is definitely a worst-case scenario, but if it comes to pass it

suggests parallels with the more extreme climatic events like the end-Triassic or even the
end-Permian catastrophes.
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So yes, alarm is an entirely appropriate reaction to this climate sword of

Damocles hanging over us, especially considering that if you have kids in elementary
school now, your grandkids will experience strong effects of this by the end of the century,
and their grandchildren may have to contend with extreme environmental catastrophe a
century later, unless something is done about it now.

What to do about it
Faced with all that doom and gloom, you would be forgiven for throwing up
your hands and abandoning the situation as hopeless. But it is not yet hopeless, and failure
to act will only make it worse. We can all take steps to reduce the chance of inflicting
those worst-case scenarios on our grandkids.
Some steps dont have to be painful or very costly. Since heating and cooling
consume the lions share of energy (and so emit most CO2) at home, it makes sense for

individuals to invest most effort and money there by improving attic insulation, sealing
drafts, and installing energy-efficient appliances, light bulbs, thermostats and windows.
Sourcing food and other products locally helps too, as does reducing the consumption of
meat. We all could, and should do more, like installing solar panels, switching off lights
and vampire electronics when theyre not in use, carpooling, switching to electric or
hybrid vehicles, and so on.
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But these measures, as important as they are, are still small change in reducing
global CO2 emissions. The millions of people across the globe who are coming onto the
grid in the coming decades will have a far larger quantitative effect. China, for
example, now emits around twice the CO2 of the USA and that trend is rising sharply.
The populations of developing nations have as much right to a comfortable lifestyle as you
or I, but even if they all come on stream with exemplary energy efficiency at home and
their commute, just their coming onto the grid will explode global energy consumption
and CO2 emissions in the coming decades.
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36 Rising fast: world energy consumption. Source: U.S. Energy

Information Administration Jul 2013.

Decarbonization and its limits

Its very clear we must decarbonize the world economy, quickly. To decarbonize,
we must either reduce economic growth, reduce population, increase efficiency, or switch
to low-carbon energy, or some combination of those - a formula known as the Kaya
Identity.
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Bill McKibben in his book: Eaarth shows how we can live lightly, carefully,
gracefully in our food and energy use, to significantly reduce our CO2 emissions. This
requires our whole economy to back off a focus on growth and instead focus on
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resilience. But the problem with this is that each time we are faced with a choice between
economic growth and decarbonizing, we pick growth every single time. This is what
Roger Pielke has described as an Iron Law of economics, and any attempt to break it has
so far proved futile.
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If we cant break the Iron Law (reduce economic growth) and population keeps
rising, that just leaves efficiency and switching to low carbon energy for us to concentrate
on.
According to the IPCC, renewable energy in the form of bioenergy, direct solar
energy, geothermal energy, hydropower, ocean energy and wind energy, can meet up to
77% of the worlds total energy demand by 2050, a big ramp up from 13% in 2008,
requiring a huge investment of between 3 and 12 trillion dollars between now and 2030.
But although renewable energy costs have been getting more competitive, they are still
generally more expensive than traditional sources, so were going to be slow to adopt
them unless they get much cheaper, or the market is skewed in their favor by regulation.
Currently the market is skewed in the other direction, through generous subsidies and by
allowing CO2 emissions with impunity.
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Pielke calculates that in order

to reduce CO2 emissions to half of 1990 levels (required to stabilize the climate) using
nuclear power alone, we would need to build more than 12,000 new nuclear power plants
across the globe. Thats about 1 per day coming on stream from now to 2050, which is
clearly unrealistic. And thats without allowing for the 1.5 billion people who currently
dont have access to electricity coming onto the grid (thousands more nuclear plants). In
broad terms it takes 7 solar thermal plants, or 200 wind turbines to generate the electricity
of 1 nuclear power plant, so the numbers get even crazier if you substitute those
renewable sources for the nuclear power plants.
[C]

In the interim, converting power stations across the globe from coal to natural gas
would halve CO2 and cut nitrous oxide emissions to one third from that sector, which is

the biggest emitter. But moving from coal, a cheap and plentiful source of energy
employing many, is political poison, and much of the gas would come from controversial
fracking.
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37 No let-up in fossil fuel use for electricity generation. Source: U.S.

Energy Information Administration Jul 2013
Energy efficiency also needs to improve sharply because it allows growth and
decarbonization simultaneously. Edisons incandescent light bulb technology lasted 130
years, but now we have LEDs that use a fraction of the electricity. We need more of those
kinds of innovation across every energy-consuming sector, from fridges to cars, from
computers to ovens to green buildings.
Even so, the world will still need vastly more energy (Pielkes words) than we
are able to generate even with pedal-to-the-metal burning of fossil fuels, ignoring climate
change. So, as Pielke observes, this is an energy crisis as well as a climate crisis, which
demands radical, out-of-the-box thinking in energy generation and conservation. The
problem with his undeniably true deduction is that it is pie in the sky were still
emitting too much CO2 while we wait for salvation by those elusive revolutionary energy
sources.
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So we wont be able to mitigate climate change by decarbonizing alone because

we cant afford to wait for new energy sources to come on stream, the scale of the
challenge is too big, global demand for energy is rising too fast, and because excess CO2
already in the atmosphere today will remain there, warming the planet for many centuries,
unless it is removed through geoengineering.
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Geoengineering and its limits

Geoengineering seeks to reduce climate change by tinkering directly with the

climate. There are two very different kinds: one seeks to manage the climate by direct
intervention, and the other seeks to remove CO2 (remediation). Intervention is fraught
with issues, but remediation looks essential.
801

Climate intervention the Thalidomide of climate change

Climate intervention includes things like building reflectors in space, spreading
aerosols in the stratosphere, enhancing rock weathering, changing the reflectivity of land
or clouds, and even fertilizing the ocean. These are best left in the realms of speculation,
and heres why.
864

The pharmaceutical industry spends between 4 and 11 billion dollars per drug to
bring it to market. It costs so much because drugs go through rigorous safety testing (on
animals, on healthy volunteers, dosing studies, double-blind randomized trials, etc.) before
they can be prescribed to patients. This costly system of presuming a drug harmful until
proven safe was introduced after a relatively untested drug called Thalidomide was
widely prescribed to pregnant women in the early 1960s to combat nausea.
Unfortunately it caused birth defects in many babies, and it was withdrawn in 1962. But
that was too late for the affected families - the cost of not testing thoroughly was infinitely
greater.
865

866

Climate intervention is like prescribing an untested experimental drug, because

there is generally a limited understanding of the causal link between the intervention and
its assumed effect. The effects are so intertwined with natural processes that they are not
separately measurable (scientifically, the experiment has too many dependent variables
and no control). This means there is no way to assess their true effectiveness.
801

801

For example, one experiment to whiten clouds showed that it had both desired and
undesired consequences, sometimes generating a net warming, not cooling. Another
experiment which injected iron into the ocean successfully fertilized a diatom bloom,
which then died and half the creatures sank to the deep ocean, taking captured CO2 with
them, but there are important uncertainties in that study, even without considering
knock-on effects on the marine ecosystem.
867

868

We dont have a lab-rat-planet to try these

things out on, and like Thalidomide, the unforeseen consequences may far outweigh
their good. Even new software is rigorously tested before it is released to users and it can
often be rolled back should something unforeseen occur. Climate intervention has no
undo, no roll back, and no test planet.
801

Remediation
But remediation, which involves removing greenhouse gasses from the
environment, is a more promising enterprise.
A main contender is Carbon Capture and Storage, capturing CO2 in power plant
smokestacks and injecting it underground. This sounds attractive until you consider the
scales involved. The International Energy Agency proposed an ambitious plan in 2009 to
mitigate a large but unclear quantity of CO2 emissions from smokestacks by 2050. The
numbers they envisioned have been criticized for being wildly impractical spending $5.8
trillion, completing 85 projects per year (1 every 4 days), and developing 3400 carbon
capture reservoirs using enough steel pipe to make 9 trips around the planet! Since CO2
scrubbing projects reduce power plant efficiency, add cost, and lower energy output,
there needs to be an economic and regulatory incentive to implement them, but so far the
incentives have not been sufficient to outweigh the costs. Because of this, the technology
has been limited to demonstration projects.
869

801

869

869

869

Capturing CO2 from the ambient air is more promising, and several startups are
working on it. But again, these are in prototype mode and seem a long way from largescale deployment.
801

870

Capturing CO2 from ambient air is what plants have done through geological time,
with demonstrated effects on the climate as we saw in Your Life as Planet Earth. The good
news is that forests can be a substantial sink for CO2 but the bad news is the required
area of planting is huge, and the effect is slow. With rising population the challenge will
be to find land for forests that isnt needed for agriculture. Some progress has been made
planting trees in arid regions in Africa with economic gain for the local population, but
this would need to be replicated on a huge scale. In short, we cant just plant our way out
of this climate crisis.
871

872

873

872

Adaptation and its limits

Adapting to the effects of global warming can take many forms, like protecting
cities from rising sea levels, relocation away from vulnerable shores, and shifting
agriculture locations and practices.
It could cost $32 billion to build coastal defenses to protect just the New York
Metro Area from rising sea levels. Applying that figure to just 30 of the worlds largest
coastal metropolises comes to $1 trillion, without protecting hundreds of smaller coastal
cities and towns. A simple sea wall costs about $35 million per mile, with perhaps $3
million per year in maintenance. The Dutch government alone spends about $1.3 billion
per year on flood control, a figure likely to be replicated by more and more cities as they
seek to adapt to rising sea levels and more frequent storm surges. In Alaska today, 6
coastal villages need relocation at a cost of $30 to $50 million each, and a further 160
874

874

875

villages are threatened by coastal erosion. To make matters worse, with rising population
and prosperity we keep building in coastal areas, which increases the financial and safety
risk, even without factoring-in climate change. By 2050 many of the worlds coastal
metropolises will experience around a 20% increase in annual financial losses due to
flooding over 2005 figures. Thats around $1 billion to $3 billion depending on the city,
every year.
876

877

But we have to adapt to more than just rising sea levels.

According to The Economist, plausible scenarios for the end of the century
could see agriculture and manufacturing shift northwards by about 10 degrees of latitude,
equivalent to moving Dallas to Chicago, or Frankfurt to Oslo. Some parts of the world
may become unpleasant or uninhabitable, whereas other areas may remain oases of
moderate change or even benign improvement.
878

878

38 Shifting climate: the state of New Hampshire could experience a

summer climate formerly associated with South Carolina by endcentury, if business-as-usual emissions continue. Source: EPA/Global
Climate Change Impacts in the United States, Karl, et al, Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
If the rate of change is slow (if climate sensitivity is at the low end), it is possible
that a smooth geographic adjustment - mainly through human migration may be able to
preserve economic stability. But moves still cost money. A firm leaving say, lower
Manhattan for an upstate city, will incur relocation costs, and a general pull-out would
leave investors in the abandoned area with large losses. As more people migrate to new

areas, a significant investment in new infrastructure will be required, even as old

infrastructure in vulnerable areas is abandoned. Given sufficient investment, innovation,
and determination we can protect coastal cities for a while, but eventually these defenses
will be outflanked, overtopped or breached. This means that such cities need to incentivize
people to leave vulnerable areas in the medium term, even as they invest in coastal
defenses.
878

The cost of global warming adaptation will depend largely on how easily people,
and even whole cities, can relocate. Economists project that northern countries agriculture
and manufacturing will grow, trading with needy southern nations whose economies will
do worse. Pressures of migration from southern nations northwards are likely to provoke
geopolitical instability.
878

In the most extreme global warming

scenarios, adaptation will be impotent. Economists project that those worst-case
temperatures would reduce agricultural productivity in many areas to zero a catastrophe
for humankind and a cost too high to contemplate.
878

So even in this cursory glance at adaptation to global warming, even for moderate
warming scenarios, the projected costs are into trillions of dollars, without counting
migration costs or losses from extreme events. Clearly adaptation alone, without
addressing remediation and decarbonization, is not going to be practical.

The need to do them all

As the saying goes: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!
We cant just carbon-capture our way out of global warming because of the cost
and scale of the projects involved. We cant rely on climate intervention because of its
risks. We cant only rely on adaptation because there are limits to our ability to adapt, and
its costs are high. And while we wait for revolutionary new forms of energy to appear, we
still lack the political will to decarbonize if it slows growth.
801

We also know we dont have the capacity, either in fossil fuels or clean energy, to
meet the demand of the worlds growing population, and the improved living standards of

formerly off-grid populations. As Pielke observes: for those millions and millions of
people, this isnt about climate change but rather its about accessing the energy they need,
but that the current energy sector is incapable of delivering, irrespective of climate change.
801

So we have to do them all smart decarbonization, remediation and adaptation.

801

They each have costs, but the cost of inaction is far greater. The economic burden
of inundated coastal cities, diminished agriculture, restricted fresh water, and large
sections of the global population becoming nonproductive environmental refugees, would
be unsupportable. And denying energy to the people of developing countries is untenable.
We need regulatory and financial incentives to innovate clean energy, and
efficiency. We need more nuclear power (with newer, safer designs and safe nuclear
waste disposal) and we need much more renewable energy. We need to grasp the
political nettle by replacing coal-fired power stations with natural gas stations, with an eye
to replacing those too with renewables in the medium term. We urgently need to reverse
deforestation, and we need to plant forests in every available area of land, especially in the
tropics. We need smart power grids to allow a decentralized multitude of small energy
sources, including home and workplace energy generation and storage (through solar,
windmills, flow batteries, etc.).
801

801

Population growth urgently needs to slow, since it is people that drive demand for
land, resources, energy, goods, food and the general carbon-emitting economy. Voluntary
family planning, and also improved economic standing for traditional societies is vital
for bringing the population down, and therefore slowing energy demand in the long run.
On current trends population growth is expected to slow by mid-century, but not before
reaching 10 billion, compared to 7 billion now and just 2 billion as recently as 1930.
879

879

We need to deploy carbon capture in every feasible location where it can be

powered by clean energy. We should be as concerned with reducing our nitrous oxide
footprint, our methane footprint, our soot footprint and our fluorocarbon footprint as our
CO2 footprint. Just reducing those four pollutants would help reduce the rate of
warming. The Montreal Protocol succeeded in controlling ozone-eating gasses a
similar treaty could tackle those.
880

801

Each step represents a bite out of our climate change elephant.

 But even if we do, miraculously,

stabilize CO2 emissions, the warming effect of greenhouse gasses already in the air will
continue for many years. As McKibben observes, we are already living on a strange new
planet. So we must also adapt, with strategies to enable migration away from adversely
affected regions to more benign areas. We do indeed need to invest in a more resilient, less
centralized economy. Delaying action only multiplies the costs, and the cost of inaction
may well exceed our ability to adapt.
859

We cannot afford to wait for every uncertainty to be resolved. Mobilizing now is

an insurance policy against an uncertain future.
876

Bottom line:
The greatest danger to our future is apathy. Jane Goodall
Surviving climate change requires more than our own individual incremental
energy efficiencies. It requires strategic thinking and actual action by governments. It
requires whole sectors of the economy to approach energy use differently. It requires the
kind of transformation in the energy generating sector that the assembly line or computers
delivered to businesses in the 20th century. But none of that will happen unless you as a
voter, consumer and shareholder insist on it.
And climate change is just one of the Earth hazards that humanity faces.
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, sinkholes and asteroid impacts can only be
understood, predicted and ultimately mitigated through science. We rely on science to find
and recover the mineral resources that are the raw materials for manufacturing everything
from buildings to electronics, many of which are projected to be exhausted by the end of
this century.
881

It takes political leadership to act on scientific information, and science needs our
support to assess these hazards for the sake of our own prosperity and our grandchildrens
future.
But too many of our current crop of political leaders have a complete disregard for
science. In the last few years alone, we have seen elected officials in America go on record
with bizarre pronouncements that have no basis in fact, even claiming proven science is
882

lies straight from the pit of Hell! Its not just in America judges in Italy recently
jailed scientists because government officials failed to grasp the meaning of their advice.
883

884

For the sake of our grandchildren and theirs - we need to release the brakes on
our progress caused by pseudoscience and political propaganda created by the
manufactured doubt industry and fundamentalists for ignorant politicians to regurgitate.
Making allowance for religious tolerance or political opinion should not extend to denying
or distorting scientific fact. Carrying the burden of ignorance in the upper echelons of
power constitutes an enormous drag on societys ability to respond to the most profound
economic and security challenges of our time.
After all, as the saying goes: We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we
borrow it from our children, or in the case of climate change, our grandchildren.
885

###

[A] Incidentally, my father was at the first excavation of Kenyapithecus wickeri by Louis Leakey at Fort Ternan in
Kenya.
[B] I wouldnt blame you for being skeptical of these figures, so heres where they came from. The energy build up in
the atmosphere comes from NOAAs Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI). 741 For 2013 the additional heat energy
since 1750 was calculated by NOAA to be 2.916 watts for every square meter on the planet, which is the same as 2.916
joules per square meter per second. All that remains is to multiply that by the number of square meters covering the
Earth and the number of seconds in a year to get 4.69x1022 extra joules globally over a year. The Hiroshima bomb was
equivalent to about 0.02 megatons of TNT, which in joules is 8.37x1013. Dividing NOAAs extra energy figure by this
number arrives at about 561 million Hiroshima bombs. This does not allow for the cooling by various feedbacks doing
so reduces the energy imbalance to something like 180 million Hiroshima bombs per year. Still a lot.
[C] Using rough representative values of 1,000MW for nuclear, 150MW for solar thermal, 5MW for wind turbine

Acknowledgement
I am indebted to a number of people who answered questions, suggested papers to
include, or provided feedback on early drafts, including: Emily Pope, Bill Ruddiman,
Eelco Rohling, Oliver Jagoutz, Rachel Wood, John Cook, Luis Aldamiz, Piet Martens,
Duncan Murdock, Robin Wordsworth, Daniel Breecker, Scott Jasechko, Guillaume Suan,
Robert Gaines, Eberhard Faust, Hartmut Aumann, Graeme Stephens, Roger Pielke, Erik
Asphaug, Dana Royer, Clara L. Blttler, Lev Horodyskyj, Richard Roberts, Margaret
Collinson, Henrik Svensen, Andy Ridgwell, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, and Gerta Keller.
I couldnt have written this at all without the encouragement of Henry Kavett, and
without the patient support of my wife, Mojgan.

Sources
First Edition. Visit ylape.com for citation list and most up-to-date links.
Geological time scale:
International Stratigraphic Chart 2012, International Commission on Stratigraphy,
Available at: http://www.stratigraphy.org/index.php/ics-chart-timescale
Global chronostratigraphical correlation table for the last 2.7 million years, v 2010,
International
Commission
on
Stratigraphy,
Available
at:
http://www.stratigraphy.org/index.php/ics-chart-timescale
Some devices truncate this table of references. If you are experiencing this problem, please
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About The Author

HOWARD LEE B.Sc M.Sc FGS
Howard is a freelance Earth science writer and blogger on past climates. He earned
his B.Sc in Geology and his M.Sc in Remote Sensing at the University of London, and he
is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London (FGS). Howard draws upon years of
experience in diverse Earth Science industries (seismic hazard, geothermal exploration,
mining and radioactive waste disposal, oil and gas exploration) for his writing.
He decided to write Your Life as Planet Earth after a rafting trip through the Grand
Canyon with his sons Boy Scout troop. In explaining the geological wonders that
unfolded around them every day, he realized there was a need to present the story of the
planet in an approachable way, connecting the past to the world of today, particularly with
respect to climate change.
His other interest is Ancient Persia, and his first book for children: Jamshid and
the Lost Mountain of Light, earned Howard a Persian Golden Lioness Award as Best
Childrens Book.
Howard is a Kenya-born British-American who lives in New Jersey with his wife
and their two sons.