"and for most of human history it has dominated us. wind fire and water have all had major impacts on human history." "But now the relationship between us and the planet is changing." "We.re no longer at its mercy." "We have now become a major planetary force. but now we ourselves are a force of nature to be reckoned with. you can't escape our human influence." "The question is what does that mean for our future? then this vast expanse of mud is the place to come." "This is no ordinary mud." "The towering column of steam shows that this mud is emerging from within the Earth at boiling point. one of the most volcanically active countries on Earth." "Which is a clue to the origin of this strange phenomenon." "what's happening down there is one of the most unusual eruptions on Earth." "but it's not spewing out molten lava." "That is a mud volcano. it's been a disaster. 000 homes have been destroyed. and many of them are half flooded with the mud..." "like that there." "completely burying these trees here." "there's a real sense of desolation. a mosque that was once the centre piece of a village that now lies entombed in solid mud beneath me." "Such an eerie feeling." "It's as if the planet has decided to reclaim this place from humanity." "Life has been completely smothered." "But there's something that makes this eruption unique." "And that is what it was caused by. because it's almost certain it's not natural at all. when an underground probe for natural gas went horribly wrong. they withdrew the drill. which sucked in hot water from surrounding rock." "This caused fractures in the rock." "Water burst through and shot upwards mixing with layers of mudstone to form a liquid mud that boiled to the surface." "enough mud emerges to fill more than 40 Olympic-size swimming pools." "enormous levees have been constructed." "Wallowing machines are still trying to channel mud away from the surrounding villages." "Concrete blocks have even been thrown into the centre of the volcano in an attempt to "plug" it." "But every effort to hold back this relentless tide has failed." "this eruption symbolises our strange relationship with the planet today. capable of triggering volcanic eruptions." "we're not really in control of that power." "Much of the effect we have on the planet even takes us by surprise." "it's easy to see our impact on the planet in a negative light - the story of an Eden destroyed." "But our relationship with the Earth is far more intriguing and surprising than that." "We have a much longer history of transforming the planet than you might think." "And not all of those changes have been bad news." "I'm off to Canada's Rocky Mountains. to our history." "It's the cycle of the ice ages." "the Rockies have been a battleground for immensely powerful geological forces." "creating these dramatic peaks and cutting deep valleys out of the rock. our planet's been swinging back and forth between long ice ages - when mountains like these were embedded deep in the ice - like we're in now. and that influenced the amount of heat" "falling on different parts of the Earth's surface." "The ice age cycle is pretty well understood. but what it means is that scientists can predict when ice ages should begin and when they should end." "geologists had been missing something." "New data has provided a more accurate understanding of temperature changes between ice ages - periods known as interglacials. temperatures steadily declined. we would now be heading into a new ice age." "From here you get a good idea of what that would have meant. that ice would have crept down and smothered the whole valley. temperatures would have started to fall." "the glaciers of the Alps would have spread out across alpine meadows." "If the cycle of the ice ages had continued to follow then human history would have followed a very different course." "But it didn't happen." "It was the ice age that never was." "a great escape." "So what prevented the ice from following the same rhythms that it always followed in the past?" "There's a clue in the timing. a major change to the planet was under way." "Farming." "000 years ago in what's known as the Fertile Crescent." "000 years ago across Europe and Asia. farming had a big impact on the planet. which increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." "which produce a lot of methane." "Both carbon dioxide and methane are powerful greenhouse gases." "This new theory suggests that the gentle rise in greenhouse gases they stayed steady." "The rise of farming was enough to halt the onset of the next ice age." "000 years ago we had already made an impact on the planet at a global scale." "This was the beginning of our role as a force of planetary change." "human progress has been defined by our ability to find ever more inventive ways of exploiting the planet's natural systems." "our ancestors discovered that trapped within certain types of rock were metal ores." "These mineral-rich rocks were formed deep inside the Earth over millions of years. the foundation of civilisation. people had found ingenious ways to intercept the water cycle." "They tapped fresh water underneath deserts and used it to create some of the first cities. sailors learnt how to exploit the power of the Earth's wind systems." "They used them to develop global ocean trade routes." "we discovered that the fossilised remains could become major sources of energy." "Each of these discoveries was a landmark in our ability to use planetary systems for our own purposes." "the way in which we use the Earth's resources can be summed up by this..." "It's just great to be able to get up close to one of these beautiful machines." "They're so elegant and streamlined." "A kind of fusion of precision engineering and raw power." "It's absolutely beautiful." "I can't help seeing these planes through a different lens." "Just look at what goes into making one... comes from a mineral called bauxite. which has been concentrated within rock over millions of years." "oil." "It's made inside the Earth over hundreds of thousands of years from dead organic matter." "loads of copper from a mineral like malachite." "you get the picture." "This thing comes from the Earth. but actually we.re linked to it in hundreds of subtle and surprising ways." "This plane is a huge conglomeration of natural resources moulded and connected by us." "And what's staggering is the scale on which we do this." "000 planes." "Many of them will never fly again." "this is a vast accumulation of the planet's minerals. but also in what that transformation leaves behind." "I.ve come here because rivers carry and deposit sediment." "This is what forms the rocks of the future." "The old geological hammer's not much use here." "Urgh!" "there's a lot of things in here that I would expect." "some pollen grains." "I see a few snail shells." "But in amongst all that just here." "but it's not." "It's made of plastic... plastic bottles." "there's another one." "it's a plastic seal of a bottle." "that may not be so surprising when you consider exactly where this river is... home to around four million people and all that goes with them." "But the impact of plastics reaches much further than major cities." "around 26 million tonnes of plastic where it becomes part of something much bigger." "plastic from America is swept into a large revolving ocean current known as a gyre." "it also picks up material from East Asia." "these plastics accumulate in enormous flotillas." "One of them is so big it's even got its own name - the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch." "the plastic is broken down by the sun's ultraviolet rays where they are buried." "It's the first stage in their transformation into sedimentary rock." "The Grand Canyon is a striking example of the scale this process operates on. as layer after layer of sediment built up." "these layers were cemented together to form the rock strata we see today." "The plastics that lie at the bottom of the ocean will eventually form part of the rocks of the future - our geological legacy. the thing that marks out the modern human age will be the dead weight of millions of tonnes of different kinds of plastics." "Our ability to take the Earth's resources and transform and deposit them in vast quantities means we've now made an indelible mark in the planet's 4.5 billion-year history." "We can slice the tops off mountains and dig holes big enough to bury a city." "we now move more earth and rock than all the natural processes of erosion put together." "Our machines have transformed the planet." "So great is our impact on the Earth that it has been used to define a new geological epoch... the human epoch." "If you add together all the landscapes we've altered - villages and farmland - then 75% of the Earth's ice-free landmass owes its appearance to us." "This truly is a human planet." "Sometimes our intervention in the planet's natural processes can have surprising and far-reaching consequences." "This is South Dakota in the United States. up to 300 people living here in its heyday. but that's exactly what it was." "this was a boom town." "Farmers poured into the Great Plains of the western USA to develop new land." "You'd think this place would be fantastic for farming. blown or washed in after the last ice age." "Soil is a mixture of minerals from broken-down rocks and nutrients from organic matter." "It takes more than 500 years to create just 2cm of it." "What keeps that fine sediment here is the vegetation - the grasses bind the topsoil together." "But the first settlers ploughed over those grasses and that dried out in the sun." "the ploughed-up soil was exposed to the full force of the wind." "The result was devastating." "It became known as the Dust Bowl." "Half a million people in the Great Plains were made homeless." "100 million acres of farmland turned to wasteland." "The homesteaders of the Great Plains had upset the delicate balance of the landscape." "that delicate balance is one we still find hard to keep." "deforestation and overgrazing means soils are being degraded 30 times faster than the planet's natural processes can replenish them." "clearing large areas of bush for farmland 000 square kilometres." "25% of the world's farmland has now been degraded as an inadvertent consequence of our drive to increase food production." "There's now an extraordinary contrast between the Earth's natural environments and the ones that we've created." "To fully appreciate the extent take a look at one of the Earth's most fundamental cycles the water cycle." "Rain that falls over mountains makes its way into streams and rivers." "This is the Lena River. where rain and snowmelt set the cycle going." "500 kilometres across Siberia... on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. and the cycle begins again." "The Lena is one of the few major rivers that still completes the water cycle from source to sea without a single man-made interruption." "we.ve created an alternative water cycle." "This is part of the Colorado River system." "it has over 20 dams." "So much water is diverted to the cities and farmland it no longer reaches the sea." "The biggest city it supplies is Los Angeles." "Fresh water is delivered across hundreds of kilometres of desert canals and pipelines." "This system delivers 90% of the city's fresh water." "LA wouldn't exist." "The veins and arteries of our water supply are the lifeblood of our civilisation." "And the human version of this planetary cycle operates at a global scale." "We have altered the planet's water cycle to such an extent that five times as much fresh water is stored in reservoirs as flows in all the world's rivers." "This change in the balance of power between us and the planet is based more than anything on our ability to exploit one particular resource." "in the heart of Alberta in Canada." "but today this is a fresh frontier in one of the great geological quests of our age - the hunt for oil." "Oil is central to our lives." "It fuels a mechanised world." "easily transported." "Every year we burn around 31 billion barrels of it - 000 barrels a second." "The problem is..." "it won't last forever." "The amount of oil we're burning each year takes the planet over three million years to make." "Thanks..." "Finding more oil is getting harder. with supply unable to keep pace with demand." "But others say that's a load of rubbish - it's just a case of finding it." "one of their prime exhibits is here." "this is what I've come to find." "Look at this." "doesn't it?" "This place is just full of oil... the thing is..." "Look at that - ugh!" "it would come out." "but all the sand grains are just coated in oil." "We've got a name for this - we call it tar sands - and this is just about the dirtiest oil around." "The whole cliff is just full of it." "This kind of oil doesn't come shooting out in a great fountain." "And you don't get at it by drilling down into the ground." "This is a very different type of oilfield." "you have to go up high." "my..." "Look at that!" "It's like we've gone into a different world." "This oil deposit is thought to contain almost a trillion barrels of oil." "000 square kilometres. just industry for miles upon miles." "To get at the tar sands involves scraping the surface off vast tracts of land." "This is strip mining for oil." "you can see both the huge attraction of tar sands and their Achilles heel." "there's just vast amounts of oil - those fields seem to go on and on forever. a hell of a price." "it's much harder to extract than conventional oil. and that's expensive." "you'd expect around 25 barrels of oil back for every one barrel of energy you use to extract it." "it's more like one barrel of energy in and only five barrels back. but we still get more energy out of them than we put in." "they're one of our best prospects." "is it?" "Can't help but think... that we really are scraping the bottom of the barrel." "The tar sands illustrate that the oil is still out there." "And new sources are being discovered." "It's just they tend to be exceptionally hard to reach. so it's easy to think that trend will continue." "History tells us that we don't tend to run out of resources." "we find new ones." "But that is a lesson from human history." "The planet's history has perhaps a more important lesson for us." "It's a lesson about the most dramatic human influence on the planet - the speed and scale at which we're changing the atmosphere." "Levels of carbon dioxide and methane are higher than at any time in the last 15 million years." "We can already see some of the effects." "The thickness of the Arctic sea ice has almost halved." "Some of the extra carbon dioxide we've pumped into the atmosphere has been absorbed by the oceans. like corals. the frequency of extreme hurricanes has doubled in some areas." "We're at the beginning of a dramatic period of change. a global warming caused by the gases we release." "how will the planet - and our civilisation - respond to this change?" "the best way to answer this question is to look back into the Earth's past." "Which is why I.ve come to the coast of California." "There's something really strange going on in the ocean over here - the whole water looks as if it's fizzing away like mad." "I've never known anything like it." "This promises to be an unusual dive." "The point is to take me back to the last time the Earth experienced a rapid and extreme increase in greenhouse gases." "It's amazing." "It's like... it's like swimming in champagne. you're surrounded with bubbles." "These bubbles are the key to unlocking one of the Earth's great events." "the atmosphere went through something very similar to the changes happening today. which is leaking out of a fault line deep below me and heading up there to the atmosphere." "And it's this speed and intensity of bubble release that's a critical factor." "only relatively small amounts of methane bubble out from seeps like this at the bottom of the ocean. methane started to erupt from the ocean in massive quantities. but huge areas of the ocean would have been bubbling like this. they would have been belching out." "It would have had a devastating effect." "Methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. runaway global warming." "That burst in methane levels 55 million years ago was the closest experience we've got of what continued global warming might bring." "So what was it that happened to the planet during that ancient surge in global warming?" "And what did it mean for life?" "The answer can be found on the Svalbard archipelago." "It's well within the Arctic Circle." "60% of Svalbard is covered in glaciers." "It's a landscape dominated by ice." "it was rather different." "The clues are in the rocks." "Let's see what we've got." "Ooh!" "look at this." "It's what I was hoping to find." "These rocks are stacked full of ancient leaves." "there's a frond of a plant there." "There's another one here." "There's a stem with branches going out." "These rocks are packed full...of leaves." "Better keep going." "Look at this!" "Would you believe it?" "!" "These fossil leaves originate from a time just after the methane surge in the oceans. a broad-leafed deciduous tree." "Some of these trees are preserved in the permafrost in other parts of the Arctic." "It's amazing." "You can just imagine these falling down from trees onto an ancient forest floor." "today... you don't get trees here." "You don't get trees like this for hundreds of miles." "Svalbard was a very different place. global temperatures would have been 10 degrees warmer than they are today." "It caused immense upheaval." "Plants and animals were forced to migrate towards the poles." "I would have been walking through a completely different landscape - subtropical swamps and forest." "Less High Arctic - more Florida Everglades." "It would have been inhabited by ancestors of creatures like the hippopotamus and the crocodile." "The lesson from the Earth's past simply by raising the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." "But the remarkable events of 55 million years ago lesson for us." "Clearly this extraordinary warm period 55 million years ago didn't last " "I wouldn't be dressed like this." "ice came to the Arctic." "So what happened?" "What happened was the Himalayas." "The creation of this mountain range helped return ice to the Arctic." "When the tectonic plates of India and Eurasia collided the result was a mountain range that grew to become the biggest on Earth." "the planet unleashed its most formidable global-cooling weapon weathering." "The process begins when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is dissolved in rain and snow." "This reacts with minerals in the rock to form a solution that's carried by rivers to the sea." "the carbon is absorbed by marine creatures. locking the carbon away. they were perpetually exposing new rock to the elements. cooling the planet and eventually leading to the re-freezing of the Arctic." "So the planet had an entirely natural way of reducing greenhouse gases." "and that is and we don't have the luxury of that sort of time." "Yet the lesson from history is not entirely wasted. but there's no reason why we can't have a go at doing the same thing ourselves." "We are now developing ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere." "One method is to stimulate the growth of immense blooms of algae that use photosynthesis to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere." "there are plans to create artificial trees that replicate photosynthesis." "But the biggest challenge is to stop carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere in the first place. filtering it from industrial chimneys and then burying it." "Scientists are planning to try this out on Svalbard. the geology here is particularly helpful." "That cliff behind me is a layer cake of sandstone and shale." "And that arrangement is perfect for burying carbon. because there's lots of spaces in the pores between the grains." "impermeable shale provides the ideal lid that stops the carbon escaping upwards." "The plan is to drill a number of shafts through the dense shale lid and into the sandstone. where it will be locked within the pores of the rock. but it might at least buy us some time to develop cleaner forms of energy." "Burying and locking away carbon is an attempt to accelerate massively what the Earth has done for millions of years. deliberately transforming it to try and preserve the conditions for our survival. have been accidental and unintended. we never set out to create these changes." "Science has given us an understanding of how the planet works that allows us to protect ourselves against Earth's unpredictable nature." "we're on the brink of a new era." "We can now take control of our impact on the planet's natural processes and maintain the conditions for civilisation to flourish." "which involves global co-operation." "But there's an example of what can be achieved here in Svarlbad. but locked inside this mountain is something incredibly precious." "And that...that's the way in." "It's got a front door!" "It looks like something out of James Bond!" "this facility in Svalbard has been built high enough to be above any future rise in sea level." "It's been excavated so deep into the mountain that it would survive a nuclear explosion." "This is apocalypse planning for our future survival. it's preserving the future of the world's food supply." "The temperature is a constant minus 18 degrees Celsius to protect the precious contents stored here." "000 years of agricultural development." "It's a global seed vault." "take this - different resistance to disease." "This is the genetic diversity of rice for the future." "But of course it's not just about rice." "This vault will one day store every variation of every staple crop from every country on the planet." "It's a heck of an insurance policy. makes a really important point." "we're taking conscious control over an uncertain world." "this whole place is like a symbol if we put our minds to it." "we've seen how the fate of past civilisations has been shaped by the planet's natural forces." "The Khmers of Angkor Wat thrived on their ability to exploit the monsoon until their growing population outstripped their most precious resource - water." "The Anasazi of Chaco Canyon came to ruin prolonged drought." "The Minoans of Santorini flourished in blissful ignorance of the volcano beneath them that would one day destroy their civilisation." "our relationship with the planet is a different one." "We are now a geological force to rival the Earth's natural forces." "The ultimate test will be how well we use that power." "we like to think that we're special." "this is our chance to prove it."