"Our planet has immense power and yet that's rarely mentioned in our history books." "I'm here to change that." "I'm looking at four ways the power of the planet has shaped our history." "The deep Earth that provided the raw materials for our conquest of the planet." "Wind...that has influenced the rise and fall of empires." "Water." "Look at that!" "Our struggle to control it has defined the character of civilisations." "But this week I'm looking at fire. yet it's also the driving force behind human progress." "But our dependence on fire has meant that events deep in the Earth's past have changed the course of history." "The vibrate is a low-air alarm." "It'll let you know when you've got a quarter of a tank of oxygen." "you need to get out." " Get out." "OK. is absolutely terrifying." "These stickers are to measure the temperature it reaches inside the suit." "These will tell you how hot you're actually getting inside the suit." " So how hot does it go up to?" " 130 degrees Fahrenheit." " That goes over your head." " Mm-hm." "OK." "I'm fine. gold-plated glass." "And I.ve got my own air supply." "This is what it takes to survive just a few seconds inside the heart of a fire." "600 degrees Celsius." "fire is compelling - almost hypnotic." "my gosh!" "Argh!" "Argh!" "Get his gloves." "Get his gloves off." " Come on out." "Go on!" "Go on!" " Argh!" "Oh!" "right at the end." "That was scary." "though." "Ha-hargh!" "I'll move them around." "Ah!" "That that is not a place where humans should be. just the raw energy of it is absolutely entrancing." "But I'm burning." "my hand..." "Argh-ha-ha!" "...is burning." "actually. and yet we depend on it completely." "Fire generates our electricity." "It drives our machines." "We use it every day." "But the history of our relationship with fire reveals how the Earth has exerted enormous power over the fate of peoples and nations. there simply was no fire." "Ours was a barren planet of dust and rock." "There was nothing to burn. did fire first appear." "The key to this transformation vegetation." "The first land plants had just appeared and they provided fuel for fire." "But plants did something else as well. and the great thing about being grown up is the trees... and the ways to get up them just get fancier." "Vegetation supplied a second crucial ingredient for fire." "You can see how up here in the forest canopy." "Going on all around me is a chemical reaction - photosynthesis." "in the leaves." "And what the photosynthesis is producing as a waste product is an essential ingredient for fire... oxygen." "Flames cannot burn unless at least 13% of the atmosphere is oxygen." "But the Earth's early atmosphere had almost none." "Photosynthesising plants used sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into energy and in the process released oxygen. this process had raised the level of oxygen in the atmosphere to that critical 13%." "Now there was only one more thing needed for fire to start." "A spark." "Starting fire was actually the easy bit." "Lightning storms have raged on Earth for almost its entire history." "000 bolts of lightning hit the ground every hour. wildfires were controlled only by the forces of nature. spread freely and only stopped when they ran out of fuel or the rains came." "But then something changed." "We came along. early humans learnt how to control fire." "Our distant ancestors probably first captured fire fanning the flames to keep it alight." "It was the beginning of a relationship that would transform the planet... and us." "fire is the human signature." "It gave us immense power over our world." "Cooking greatly expanded the range of foods available to us." "It gave us warmth and light and protection against hungry predators." "It allowed us to quickly clear large areas of land." "Fire was the weapon that began our conquest of the planet. perhaps it's no surprise that it was worshipped by some early civilisations. grew up around the worship of fire." "the flame itself was sacred." "Humans have always been drawn to fire." "Flames have long been a symbol of a spirit far greater than ourselves - almost a divine presence." "the eternal flame is still a potent symbol for the world's great religions." "000 years ago." "The breakthrough centred on an extraordinary element - carbon." "This is carbon in its purest form diamond." "This particular stone is 25 carats and apparently it's worth ?" "3.3 million." "It's absolutely beautiful." "Diamonds are made under extreme pressures and temperatures deep in the Earth." "I've always loved the idea that the ultimate in glitz was to adorn ourselves in tiny pieces of the Earth's interior." "Geological bling." "But there are other forms of carbon that are far more valuable to us than this because carbon is the basis for all life on Earth." "And it's the key ingredient in fire." "it depends on photosynthesis." "Plants use the sun's energy and use it to create their living tissue. releasing the energy that originally came from the sun as heat." "the more heat it produces." "Normal wood fires burn at about 700 degrees Celsius." "our ancestors discovered the trick of burning wood in a low-oxygen environment. carbon-rich fuel charcoal." "100 degrees Celsius hot enough to melt metal out of rock. was one of the most critical turning points in human history." "The age of metals had begun." "Our mastery of metal gave us tools money and weapons." "It was the foundation on which human progress was built. the production of charcoal for iron smelting was a major industry." "But there was an inevitable problem." "People began to run out of wood. 90% of the ancient woodland had gone. the shortage of accessible wood meant that the price rocketed. similar fuel shortages developed." "the end of the 16th century was the world's first great energy crisis." "the demand for energy had reached the limits of what photosynthesis could provide." "A new source of carbon was needed." "And the planet had a solution." "wet places... in the western United States." "This looks like a perfectly ordinary - but these waters hold a secret." "Because down there is a lost world..." "and a very cold one." "Melting glaciers keep the water clear." "Ghostly shapes appear in the distance standing like sentinels." "But this is not their natural home." "000-year-old tree trunks the remains of a drowned forest." "They were submerged when lava from a nearby volcano dammed this valley and created the lake." "but they're actually the crucial first stage in an extraordinary transformation." "there is no oxygen to help rot them away." "and eventually buried in mud at the bottom of the lake the start of a long transformation which turns wood into something very different." "Oh!" "That was incredible." "though." "there are precious few places this was happening right across the globe." "It was just a lot warmer then!" "trees dominated the planet." "Many of these forests were in lowland swamps." "they fell into the water." "so many carbon-rich trees were buried that this period in the Earth's history is known as the Carboniferous - the Age of Carbon." "these drowned trees would be squeezed and cooked deep inside the Earth and turned into something new and different." "Coal." "Coal was to change our relationship with fire in a fundamental way." "coal gave us access to a huge new source of carbon from the Earth's past." "an immense store of fossilised sunshine. the planet began to play a new and crucial role in human history." "north-European island..." "Britain." "Britain was lucky. much of which could be easily collected from the surface. burning coal began to replace wood in homes and workshops." "It was the beginning of a transition that would end up changing Britain and the world." "in Gloucestershire. and down there they had a problem. would unleash the Industrial Revolution." "mining condemned millions existence as men and even children were sent underground." "This mine is the nearest I can get to experiencing what early coal mining was like." "who's spent all his life mining." "Is it falling down?" "I'm just putting this one back up." "This is a new one I'm putting in here." "So there we go." "like that." " I was only 13 years of age." " Oh!" "My two brothers had their own mine." "They used to drop me down a shaft 100 foot deep in a 40-gallon drum with two hooks in the side on a hand winch." "So where's the coal?" "That's what I'm looking forward to seeing." "the coal seam is actually on in there." "please." "OK." "Robin hacks out the coal by hand." "do you think I could have a go?" "Iain." "But there's not much room up here." "All right." "dear!" "I thought coal was supposed to be soft!" "Swing the pick instead of just tapping it." "You've got to pull the pick right back and they will prise off there." "Oh!" "Robin?" "you know." "you've only been up there five minutes." "I know!" "I have!" " You will gradually get used to it." " And you've been... but... spending 12 hours a day smashing lumps out of them... that coal isn't as hard as rocks." " No. you would not survive. the problem for Britain's miners was more fundamental than a lack of muscle power. the more likely they were to encounter a major obstacle." "and plenty of it. and solving this problem was the key to our industrial transformation." "their tunnels flooded and the coal became inaccessible." "It was impossible to pump the water out by hand." "A technological solution was desperately needed... engineers came up with one." "The steam engine. but it soon found other uses." "the combined power of steam and coal became the force integrated economy." "Coal fuelled the blast furnaces which smelted steel. which in turn burnt more coal." "we know this transformation in our use of fire as the Industrial Revolution." "being down here really focuses your mind." "Britain owes a tremendous amount to that distant geological age when trees ruled the world." "Think of the Industrial Revolution as the rise of carboniferous capitalism." "But the planet was fickle with its favours." "Britain was given huge reserves of coal and the geography to exploit it." "Not everywhere was so lucky." "There was another country blessed by the planet with huge reserves of coal. but its story played out rather differently." "That country was China." "China had been moulded into a vast empire." "It was rich and technologically advanced." "China seemed perfectly positioned to exploit its coal reserves." "There was one problem. but they were a long way from the country's cities on the coast." "running straight from the coalfields to the sea was the mighty Yellow River. transporting the coal to the market should have been possible." "a beautiful old town on the Yellow River." "It's right in the heart of coal country. it would have to pass through here." "Hello." "How are you?" "and he's been navigating these waters since he was 11." "His son runs a local ferry service." "The water looks very calm." "Very still - the water." "Cos I get seasick." "Can I get on?" "OK." "The Li family are going to take me down the river flat-bottomed boat - a design used for generations." "This is the route that coal from China's coalfields would have had to travel." "relaxing row down the Thames." "But just downstream from Qikou is an obstacle. are the last people who know how to ride these rapids." "These rapids are only here because the channel of the Yellow River gets constricted between these boulders over here and this hard rock here." "It's literally caught between a rock and a hard place." "It means it's really choppy." "And it would be even harder to get through if we were laden down with coal." "but... at the bottom of the river." "This is only the start." "there are many more rapids." "the only way to get the boat back upriver is sheer manpower." "What these rapids meant was but it was impossible to take it further." "these rapids were the end of the line." "So the only way to get the coal to market was to carry it overland to the coast... 000 kilometres away." "But its price doubled every 40 kilometres." "The geography of the Yellow River ensured and that meant that the empire was effectively cut off from the vast reserves that could have completely transformed it." "The British invented the steam engine to overcome the barrier posed by flooded mines." "But the Chinese failed to find a similar solution to their geographical problems." "It was one of those moments when human factors interacted with the opportunities the planet had to offer. the Chinese were building these enormous gardens at Chengde." "They were designed to celebrate the size and diversity of the empire." "There was a miniature replica of the Yellow River a smaller version of the Great Wall... and even a copy of the Dalai Lama's palace in Tibet." "These gardens symbolised China's preoccupation with managing its vast territory." "It was such a high priority the brightest minds were sucked into running the empire." "Not until the middle of the 20th century did China build extensive road and rail systems into its heartland and start its own industrial revolution." "China is now the biggest user and producer of coal in the world." "China's rulers might not have found a way but its people had a go." "which today is known across the world." "Chinese cuisine was renowned which took loads of time and loads of wood to cook. and this was it - the wok." "It's funny to think that a crippling wood famine gave us one of the most famous cuisines in the world - the Chinese stir-fry." "The story of coal shows how the planet played a crucial role in transforming the fate of nations at the time of the Industrial Revolution." "It turned fire into the energy that fuelled human progress." "And yet that was only the beginning." "the planet's stores of ancient carbon have an even greater impact on our world." "That impact hinges on another type of buried carbon." "I've come to an amazing cave on an island off southern Iran." " Do this one up nice and tight." " Cheers." " Is it straight down?" " Yeah. and then it opens out wide and you just drop into space." "you're in space." "my God!" "I have to abseil 50 metres to enter the cave system." "Inside is evidence that reveals where this other store of ancient carbon comes from and how it's made." "That is just plain weird." "Look at those colours!" "I'm heading for some caverns that are even deeper underground." "Phew!" "Oh!" "This...has got to be the toughest and scariest cave climb I've ever done. because ahead is one of the most unusual cave systems in the world." "Most caves are made from solid rock." "This cavern is different." "look at these!" "These are stalactites." "They're the weirdest ones I've ever seen." "stalactites are made of limestone they're made of small crystals that twist and turn." "You can check what they're made of really easily." "You just need to lick them." "Wow!" "Yeah... salt." "Written in the roof is a clue to where the salt came from." "striped banding is a real giveaway clue. leaving behind a thin residue of salt crystal." "This is all evidence that the salt rock was originally laid down in an ocean that dried up." "you need to evaporate an awful lot of seawater." "this happens in shallow seas which get cut off from the rest of an ocean." "leaving behind a thick layer of salt." "But it's not only salt that gets left behind when an ocean evaporates." "Shallow seas are the most biologically productive part of the ocean." "They.re teeming with life all made from carbon." "their skeletons build up on the sea floor." "these skeletons are transformed into a sludge of carbon and buried under sediment and layers of salt." "One of the best places to see what that sludge ends up looking like is in the republic of Azerbaijan." "Here they call it naftalan. hailed as a cure for everything from rheumatism to baldness." "Look at that!" "That looks disgusting! the Babylonians mixed this stuff with beer and drank it as a medicine." "But there is another way to enjoy its healing properties." "Ah..." "Ugh!" "It's so weird!" "Ah..." "Ugh!" "It's so clingy." "my God!" "Oh..." "Ah..." "People have been doing what I'm doing although Lord knows what made them get their kit off and start to bathe in this stuff." "it looked absolutely disgusting." "The feeling of it being warm and clingy was horrible. it still feels absolutely disgusting." "Just as well this isn't its only use. because... because this is oil." "I'm lying in a bath of petroleum." "Ugh!" "we.ve thought of a few more ways of using oil." "It's the ultimate source of concentrated carbon energy. and it's got a million different uses." "The use of oil is the pinnacle of our mastery of fire." "the first country to benefit from the exploitation of oil was the home of naftalan Azerbaijan." "oily sludge on a small-scale basis. and what had been a cottage industry turned into this." "these fields were the site of the first great global oil boom. entrepreneurs rushed to Azerbaijan to make their fortunes." "Some succeeded so well that their names are almost legendary." "and the Nobel brothers of Nobel prize fame built their business empire on Azeri oil." "This place oozed money! boasted more millionaires than anywhere else on Earth." "But Azerbaijan really owed its sudden wealth to a fluke of geology." "oil happens to be exceptionally close to the surface." "You can see how close at an unusual location in the south of the country. you don't have to look any further than these curious mounds. it's what's bubbling out of them - mud." "But not just ordinary mud." "Look what happens when I do this." "D'oh! which is formed along with the oil." "really... it's just mud." "and you can see which is exactly what I'm doing now." "look at this." "You can see it in here." "and then there's a little vent pipe where it spews out." "There were few places on Earth where it was easier to extract oil and gas than Azerbaijan. and new sources had to be found." "the Earth's distant past would play a decisive role in meeting our needs. but others didn't." "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the answer to that puzzle has shaped the global geopolitics of our age." "It's probably the most powerful way that the Earth has influenced human history. the Middle East became the key oil-producing region in the world." "It owes this good fortune to a chain of events that began almost 300 million years ago." "the two areas but they were on the move. both areas spent much of the time submerged by shallow seas." "So layer upon layer of dead sea creatures built up on the ocean floor. layers of salt were also deposited. where the heat and pressure turned the dead sea creatures into oil." "But the Earth played one final role in turning this area and to see what it is I've come to an unusual mountain range in Iran." "but in most areas the oil was buried deep in the Earth." "Too deep to be exploited. which is where salt returns to the story." "I've been lucky enough but nothing really prepares you for what you find here." "looking down on a glacier." "But that isn't made of ice - it's made of salt." "This whole mountainside is covered in salt that's oozed upwards from deep inside the Earth the remains of a long lost ocean." "this is such a surreal landscape." "What's hard to take is that virtually everything under my feet is moving." "You can see that - look at this here." "Look at these cracks that are opening up in the salt as it opens up and then closes again." "there's a bit." "This was carried down the glacier by the salt from somewhere up there." "this is exactly what ice does." "which is why it flows." "this means it can slide across the land like a glacier." "But even more spectacular is the role it played underground in the formation of oil reserves. layers of salt and oil-rich rock strata began to buckle upwards." "until eventually it cracked. kept in place by an impermeable layer above. which were perfect for trapping oil." "there are generally oilfields." ". it's easy to see why geologists searching for oil go looking for salt. to create an oil trap that we can exploit." "So it's not surprising that only a few countries have oil beneath them." "there's almost no limit to what they'll do to get it out of the ground." "Nowhere symbolises this determination more than this town in the former Soviet Union." "this looks like your typical Eastern European town. and the architecture has got a real industrial feel to it." "It was first started in the 1940s." "It's got a football team and even a mosque. 000 people live and work there." "then this is it." "Because what you don't see from the ground is that Oily Rocks was built in the middle of the Caspian Sea." "It's 50 kilometres from dry land." "more than 600 oil wells have been drilled from these platforms." "but it's past its peak." "And that about sums up our relationship with oil more generally." "we.re burning it far faster than the planet can make it." "It would take the Earth three million years to make enough oil for just one year of our consumption." "We've reached a turning point in human history." "Every major advance in human civilisation has been made possible by our ability to raid the Earth for ever more energy-rich forms of carbon." "But our love affair with burning carbon-based fuel is coming to an end." "Carbon itself has become the problem." "Burning it produces greenhouse gases which are changing our climate. we will have to break the link between progress and the burning of carbon." "a very different planetary force... us." "We are changing the surface of the planet more than all the forces of nature put together." "But are we threatening the Earth's ability to support human civilisation?"