Kind: captions
Language: en
millions of years after the birth of the
planet there's still no atmosphere as we
know
it but that is going to
change 4 and a half billion years ago
the earth would have been a very violent
place such that it's called the hadan
which comes from the god Hades the Greek
god of the underworld because it was
imagined to be a hellish kind of
place across the globe molten magma
surges up from
within rivers of fire unleash a cocktail
of
gases
carbon dioxide nitrogen and methane
explode out of volcanoes in thick
plumes these are the building blocks of
our early
atmosphere
and we can see Echoes of this young
Planet still on Earth
[Music]
today the volcanoes that we have here in
Iceland look very similar to those that
we had 4 and A2 billion years ago the
early Earth was dominated by volcanic
activity and this lasted for millions of
years those volcanoes acted as Pathways
for the gases that attract inside the
magma to escape into our
atmosphere but how do scientists know
what the atmosphere was like in the
past surprisingly Clues are hidden in
some of the Rocks we find
today throughout Earth's history and
evolution there's been a dynamic
interplay between the Earth's surface
and the Earth's atmosphere and because
of this interplay there are chemical
fingerprints that are trapped in
rocks the rock I'm holding in my hand is
3.4 billion years old and there are tiny
bubbles trapped in this rock that are
samples of Earth's ancient atmosphere so
we can measure the gases and piece
together evidence of what the atmosphere
was like in the
past