Geology

Space isn't vast and empty space but a dynamic, cosmic storm. It's a storm that could kill us, but without it we wouldn't be here at all. This is a story about the weird connections, the near misses, the lucky breaks that created this amazing world. For 4.5 billion years our planet has been battered and bruised and punched and pummeled but we're still standing. It's actually the battle that's built us and this is the tale of the tape.
Ever wonder how our planet got here? It was born in a cosmic storm. The violence could have destroyed us, but instead it made us.

We sure lucked out with Planet Earth. Blue skies, rolling hills, water everywhere. But our home didn't come like this out of the box. Earth was a real fixer-upper, and it took some seriously hard work to build this paradise. Nearly four billion years of renovation. Some tiny, some huge, to make this house a home. Creatures on Earth don't just live and die. They actually change the world around them.
The story of how for nearly 4 billion years, microbes, plants and animals have emerged and sculpted the planet's surface and atmosphere in the strangest of ways.

This episode is centered around how science, in particular the work of Clair Patterson (voiced in animated sequences by Richard Gere[33]) in the middle of the 20th century, has been able to determine the age of the Earth. Tyson first describes how the Earth was formed from the coalescence of matter some millions of years after the formation of the Sun, and while scientists can examine the formations in rock stratum to date some geological events, these can only trace back millions of years. Instead, scientists have used the debris from meteor impacts, such as the Meteor Crater in Arizona, knowing that the material from such meteors coming from the asteroid belt would have been made at the same time as the Earth. Patterson also examined the levels of lead in the common environment and in deeper parts of the oceans and Antarctic ice, showing that lead had only been brought to the surface in recent times. He would discover that the higher levels of lead were from the use of tetraethyllead in leaded gasoline resulting in government-mandated restrictions on the use of lead.

Beneath Yellowstone National Park, lies the biggest volcano on Earth. An eruption in the past was so big it plunged the earth into a volcanic winter that lasted years. A super-eruption would be more than millions of Hiroshima bombs going off all at once. It would be even worse than an asteroid impact: Entire cities lost beneath ash, people and animals crushed alive, power networks destroyed, sun dimmed across the globe, harvests failed, widespread famine. Could this nightmare really happen? We will use the latest scientific data to uncover the danger beneath us, as we see our planet like never before.