NOVA

S43E11 Life's Rocky Start

Four and a half billion years ago, the early Earth was a tumultuous environment marked by meteorite strikes, erupting volcanoes, and violent lightning storms in a scorching atmosphere. Amidst this chaos, life spontaneously arose, a phenomenon that has baffled scientists for years. In this episode of NOVA, mineralogist Robert Hazen travels the globe, from a historic market in Morocco to the rugged Australian Outback, to present a provocative theory. He suggests that the minerals beneath our feet were crucial in igniting life, and in turn, that early microorganisms contributed to the formation of many essential minerals we rely on today, redefining our understanding of Earth's evolutionary history.