Iain Stewart stands on Victoria Falls’ lip, points to a 300-million-year-old fish fossil in an Indian restaurant, and explains why llamas crossed the Panamanian land bridge three million years ago. Across four episodes the geologist links diamonds in Sierra Leone, opal mines at Coober Pedy, the Andes’ granite spine and Turkey’s methane-fuelled “eternal flames” to the slow-motion smash-ups of Pangaea and Gondwana. Each hour-long film tracks a present-day continent back to its origins, forwards to its future collision in a new supercontinent, and never forgets the human stories financed by the geology: Aboriginal trade routes, Inca terraces, Soviet oil towns.
The crew travelled 180,000 km, shot from helicopters over the Serengeti, dove into an underground aquifer beneath the Nullarbor, and used lidar scans to peel modern cities off 400-million-year-old mountain roots. Stewart’s trademark is to let rocks speak: he rubs graphite from a New York skyscraper to reveal it was once Himalayan-scale peaks; cracks a beer brewed with Antarctic water trapped 1000 metres beneath Australia. Composer Niraj Chag’s score mixes didgeridoo, Andean panpipes and glitch electronics to echo the continental drift.
BBC Two stripped the series across four Sunday nights in June 2013, averaging 1.7 million viewers. A two-disc DVD followed a day after transmission ended, the fastest BBC earth-science release since 2009’s “How Earth Made Us”. Critics praised the photography; geologists praised the accuracy; llama farmers praised the llama facts.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 4 Episodes / 2013
Main Cast
Iain Stewart as Self - Presenter
