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Time Travellers (1/8)

This is also part of this series: Earth Story Series (8)

Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeology, Environment, General Interest, Geography, Natural History, Nature, Ocean, Science

Grade Level: JrH-Adult
Producer: BBC
Closed Captioned: No

Running Time: 50 mins
Country of Origin: Great Britain
Study Guide: No

Copyright Date: 1998
Available in French: No

This film sets out to answer a simple, but profound, question: how old is the planet and what was it like when it first formed? Geologists have been striving to find the answer to this question for the last 200 years – before that, people had thought that the Earth could be dated by adding together the ages of Adam and all his descendants listed in the Bible and working towards the present. The search begins in the Barbeton Mountain Land, a remote corner of South Africa, down one of the world's deepest mineshafts. Other locations visited include the fossil-laden beaches of Lyme Regis; and the oldest place on Earth: Isua – at the edge of the great Greenland Ice Cap. With the aid of computer graphics, the programme travels back nearly four billion years, to re-create the landscape of that distant time, when the planet was covered with a single vast but shallow ocean, dotted with thousands of volcanic islands, and bombarded by meteorites. Astonishingly, life was already flourishing. The oldest-known object in existence may look like any old lump of rock but it is 4,566 million years old and may provide a vital clue to the age of the Earth.

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