Original subtitles

Since its creation, the Earth has never stopped changing.

Colossal forces have hurled ocean floors upwards and made them into towering mountain ranges.

Incredible collisions have created entire continents.

These tectonic forces are still at work today.

We see them in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

Tectonics sculpt our landscapes, change our climates, dry up our oceans, and can destroy life.

The geological history of Europe is mysterious.

With the help of experts, we'll discover how huge tectonic events created a world of strange

shapes and vivid colors.

In the past, Europe has been entirely underwater.

It has been invaded by strange creatures, and some of them have changed the very shape

of the continent.

These transformations in time and space are part of the never-ending voyage of the continents.

The history of Europe began soon after the Earth was formed.

Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was a fiery ball of liquid matter.

Small bits of crust formed, but soon melted back into the surrounding lava.

This went on for millions of years until the planet cooled enough for stable ground to form.

The town of Kirkenes in the far north of Norway is part of what's called the Scandinavian

Shield.

This region is ancient and stable.

One of the first bits of land to survive the destructive forces of the Age of Volcanoes.

In fact, many geologists believe that the Scandinavian Shield is the very first piece

of the European continent.

The rock formations in this region are made of nice, a rock that was formed deep in the

Earth about three billion years ago.

Pavel Kepizinskas is convinced these rocks hide a precious secret.

Pavel isn't just a geologist.

He's a prospector.

He travels the world in search of the oldest rock formations and the diamonds they may

contain.

To find out if the Kirkenes rocks have diamonds, Pavel is looking for traces of a particular

type of ancient lava called kimberlite.

This is a type of lava that can literally spew diamonds from the depths of the Earth

right up to the surface.

What we're looking at is a very important indicator of presence of kimberlites in the

area.

These are feeder channels, feeder pipes that allow basaltic magma to come to the surface

from the depth of approximately 150 kilometers.

It's very important for us because it tells us that kimberlites are somewhere nearby in

this area and it's just a matter of time for us to discover them.

Diamonds are still the most precious stones on Earth, but they're also scientific treasures.

Diamond is a beautiful record of the early Earth, what was going on 3.5, 3 billion years

ago, and that's absolutely amazing.

This is just a great piece of geological history.

We're going to get to these two spots here.

Pavel is traveling up the Bok Fjord in Fjord, hoping it will lead him to kimberlite deposits.

But success in diamond hunting is rare.

Most prospectors, no matter how hard they try, fail to strike it rich.

However, Pavel thinks his scientific training will make all the difference.

Freddie, can we go inside there just nearby just to see these things?

And something catches his eye.

Look at that.

Absolutely gorgeous, Dike.

Look at that.

I mean, this is the channel.

This is how the magma is coming up.

Find the crack, find the empty space, and just boom, go all the way up.

And maybe if they're lucky they get out, they deserve this form like lava flow or big eruption.

This is a beautiful feature.

I mean, it's very rarely consist of like that.

These basalt walls were created when flowing lava cooled almost instantaneously when it

came in contact with cold water.

Pavel hopes the basalt contains diamonds, or at least has rocks that can be accurately

created.

The older the rocks, the more likely they've experienced kimberlite eruptions.

These eruptions have to break through the granite in one fell swoop.

And then, can the diamonds reach speeds faster than the speed of sound?

Hundreds of millions of years of erosion have worn down the surface, revealing precious

diamond dust.

Pavel has a card up his sleeve, his knowledge that the glaciers which dug the fjord may

also have transported bits of kimberlite, depositing valuable clues all along the shore.

He explores a beach where sediment transported by glaciers has accumulated.

If Pavel's lucky, this shoreline will hold diamond dust.

Pavel and his team examine the beach with a fine toothed comb.

We're taking a sample of this sand, because we hope that kimberlite minerals will show

up in the sand.

Specifically, if you look at the sand, it's white, but then there are some black things

here.

It's dark, so kind of a blackish.

Black typically means we might have some spinels here, some chrome-rich spinels like chromite,

which is a very good kimberlite indicator mineral.

Some of this sand probably came from some of the mountains.

Once the sample taking is finished, the stones gathered in Kierkenes will be transported to

a laboratory in Finland.

The lamb technician split the samples into fragments using electromagnetic shocks.

It takes time, money, and energy to find kimberlites and the diamonds in them.

But most of all, it takes luck.

It's actually amazing that kimberlites can be right next to each other.

One can be diamondiferous, and the other can be completely free of diamonds.

So we know that the sampling is actually quite by chance, and that there's no rule about

which kimberlites can be diamondiferous and which is not.

After the samples are cleaned, they're examined under the microscope.

Unfortunately, the Kierkenes samples contain neither kimberlites nor diamonds.

But it's not all bad news.

Although he hasn't found diamonds, Pavel has found a zircon crystal almost four billion

years old.

The rocks that protected it all those years are the oldest formations in Europe.

In fact, this remarkable discovery means that Europe is 200 million years older than scientists

previously thought.

It's a proof that the Scandinavian shield is the cornerstone for the construction of

all of Europe.

500 million years ago, the Scandinavian shield is part of a continent geologists call Baltica.

To the west of Baltica lies the second mass of the Earth's crust, Larentia, which later

becomes North America.

More than 400 million years ago, tectonic forces pushed these two giants together.

The result is the first major stage in the building of the European continent.

Rob Butler of the University of Aberdeen is studying the collision that left gigantic

pieces of America in what's now northern Europe.

Coming to Larentia, these nices are 1.8 billion years old.

Sounds old, but they're actually the youngest part of the Larentian continent.

And it's this continent that collided with Baltica.

We've come here to find out what happened when Larentia met Baltica.

These are the highlands of the northwest of Scotland.

The dramatic landscapes here have long mystified geologists.

But Rob Butler is able to read these rock formations and to recreate the collision between Europe

and America.

An event that created a once towering mountain range, the Caledonian.

Collision between continents is about one of the most dramatic things that can happen

in tectonics, and it can change the face of the Earth and make great mountain ranges.

But the trouble with ancient mountain ranges is they're gone.

So we need to look for the geological clues for how those mountain ranges formed.

And that's why we come up here to L'Occlain Coole.

The way it usually works is that younger rocks are deposited on top of older ones.

But at L'Occlain Coole, something completely different happened.

Those are the quartz sandstones, and they're forming a layer coming up from the sea all

the way up to the top of the mountain there.

Now they're half a billion years old, and they're sitting on top of the Laurentian

Nicese.

Those are really old Laurentian Nicese.

Those are three billion years old.

It's quite a difference.

But what's that on top?

It's the Laurentian Nicese again.

Look at them, all the way back here, all the way back, all the way back, and they've been

carried right over the top of the quartzite, of the quartz sandstone.

How can we explain the strange sandwich of rock layers?

When Baltica and Laurentia crash into each other, tectonic forces push part of the American

plate on top of Europe, heaving pieces of North America tens of kilometers over the surface

of Scotland.

Evidence of a geological collision like this is normally hidden far under the Earth's surface.

But proof of this can be seen in the open air not far from here.

Discovered in the 19th century, the moine thrust belt extends for almost 200 kilometers.

Here we can see the front line between the continents of Laurentia and Baltica.

But unlike the Laughlin Cool Fault, here, Europe lies on the edge.

On top of America.

Well these cream-colored rocks, they're the top of the Cameron sequence, about 500 million

years old.

Those green rocks on top, that dark mass, that's a unit called the moine.

It's a thousand million years old.

So older rocks on top of younger.

But more importantly, those moine rocks have been cooked and sheared deeper in the crust,

deeply buried and have been brought up across the sedimentary rocks of Canberra in age that

are part of Laurentia.

And the contact is the moine thrust.

It's up here.

So that's the moine thrust.

A thousand million year old moine on top of 500 million year old Canberra in sediments,

older on younger.

And it's happened on this knife edge contact, this knife edge thrust.

And it's moved, this thrust has moved 100 kilometers.

Probably took a few million years.

It all happened about 420 million years ago.

It was the final act in when the Laurentian continent met Baltica.

It was here in the Scottish Highlands that scientists first understood that the highest

mountains in the world are created by horizontal movements of tectonic plates.

The Caledonian mountains are now just a shadow of their original selves.

But the rocks that form this range are still here.

And they can be found not only in Scotland, but also in the mountains of Scandinavia and

the Appalachians of North America.

420 million years ago, the collision between Baltica and Laurentia not only raises up mountains,

it creates a whole new continent, Lurasia, which combines Northern Europe and North

America.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Earth's crust forms a single continent, Gondwana.

Soon tectonic forces begin to push these two mammoth formations toward each other.

On a tiny stretch of land off the coast of Brittany and France, we can still see vestiges

of this second great collision that profoundly changed the continent of Europe.

The island of Gua still bears witness to the massive buckling, twisting changes that occurred

when Lurasia and Gondwana came together.

This was a cataclysm of an unprecedented scale, and it formed the heart of Europe as we know

it today.

Geochemist Pascal Filippo has come to Gua to look for rocks that tell of this extraordinary

encounter between Europe, America and the rest of the world.

L'Inde groix is the best place to study the history of the collision of Gondwana and Lurasia.

The collision closed the ocean between the two continents.

As Gondwana and Lurasia come closer together, kilometers of ocean floor sink below the Earth's

crust.

Some minerals turn into precious stones and are later pushed up to the surface.

There are many signs on Gua of the interchanges between the inside and the outside of the

Earth.

These vertical voyages created garnets, precious stones, and other minerals that were crystallized

many kilometers under the Earth's surface.

Come and look at this.

There's garnet here.

Come closer and you'll see the blue shift, a matrix of glycophane studded with garnet,

the red crystals.

You can see how the molten glycophane swirled around the garnet.

This shows the direction the two plates were moving.

So here, on a tiny scale, are traces of a process that must have gone on for tens of

millions of years.

Luras garnets have allowed scientists to figure out what happened next in the tectonic history

of Europe.

These stones reveal that after the disappearance of the ancient ocean that lay between Lurasia

and Gondwana, the two supercontinents collided.

And it happened about 300 million years ago.

The collision of Gondwana and Lurasia created a huge mountain chain called the Hercinian

Belt.

It's around 800 kilometers wide and several thousand kilometers long, and runs across

Europe from Poland through Germany and France, and down to southern Portugal, then over to

North Africa.

It also runs along the eastern seaboard of present-day North and South America.

For millions of years, the Hercinian Belt rose, eventually becoming as tall as today's

Himalayas.

Not much of it is left today.

Evidence of these old mountains can be seen in granite formations found in Pluminaq in

the north of Brittany.

These rocks were formed when tectonic forces pushed minerals deep into the earth, where

they melted into magma.

That magma crystallized and solidified into granite in the underlayer of the Hercinian

Belt.

When the mountains eroded, the granite was exposed, becoming natural artworks, and virtually

all that remains of the ancient Hercinians.

The collision between Gondwana and Lereja brings together all the land on the globe

into a single supercontinent, Pangea.

Many of these land masses are situated at the South Pole and covered by ice.

But Europe, located closer to the equator, had a different history.

Life that had been confined to the seas rose above the water and developed at a dizzying

speed.

In the Champ-Clois-en-Forest in the south of France, Jean Gaultier, professor emeritus

at France's National Center for Scientific Research, imagines what it would have been

like here in prehistoric times.

If I were walking in this forest 300 million years ago, the trees would be completely different.

They'd be as tall as these or even taller.

But we wouldn't see any pines or walnut trees.

Instead, there would be trees with large spiny leaves called sigillaria, many varieties

of fern, and whole groups that no longer exist.

The ancient forests were so lush because Europe was almost at the equator, so the climate

was tropical, very hot, and plant life was perfectly adapted to that environment, nothing

like the plants we know today.

Underneath its vegetation, Champ-Clois-en is a graveyard for the remains of a tropical

forest that grew hundreds of millions of years ago during the Carboniferous Period.

While the plants of the Carboniferous Period were developing at full speed, plant remains

accumulated, and they formed the seams of pit coal that would be mined hundreds of millions

of years later.

What I find most remarkable are these ancient tree trunks, several meters high, still standing

where they grew when they were alive.

This fossil forest was created when a sudden massive mudslide encased the trees and hardened,

taking an imprint of their surfaces.

Over millions of years, the original trees rotted away.

The space then filled up with clay, which solidified.

Much later, the surrounding sediment eroded, revealing perfect three-dimensional replicas

which can tell us a lot about the biology of these trees that could tower up to 20 meters

tall.

This sigillaria trunk is one of the largest in the quarry.

It's part of a tree that is almost a meter across at the base.

The tree trunks of Champ-Clois-en have been preserved for an astonishing 300 million years.

The remains of a tropical forest in the northern hemisphere are undeniable proof that our continents

have drifted around the planet's surface.

During this same period, the once mighty Hercinian Belt ceased to rise and quickly began to erode.

After 50 million years of this intense erosion, an ancient sea called Tethys finds a way into

the southeast of Pancrasia.

This sea, which eventually becomes the Pacific Ocean, floods the heart of Europe.

The waves of the Tethys carried with them huge quantities of sediment, which formed beaches

on the shores.

In the red peaks massive on the Swiss-French border, time has turned the former sandy beaches

into clay.

Around the Amazon Valley, the power of tectonics has pushed these clay beaches right up the

sides of the mountains.

Lionel Cavern and his colleague walk towards a former beach that is now located at an altitude

of 2400 meters.

The site is so well preserved that we can still see the undulations made by waves 240

million years ago.

It's not uncommon to find rocks with ripple marks, but what is rare, particularly in the

Alps, is finding these little depressions among the ripple marks.

These are dinosaur footprints.

Here we see a three-toed footprint, three toes pointing in this direction, left by an

animal who walked along this beach 240 million years ago.

There are no bones at this site, so we have no direct evidence of what the animal looked

like.

To figure out what kind of dinosaur or reptile could have left these footprints, we have

to compare the footprints to bones collected at other sites.

The researchers who did that 20 years ago determined that it was some sort of very primitive

dinosaur.

We're looking at these findings again, and we now think it may have been a proto dinosaur,

a line of reptiles that eventually evolved into dinosaurs, but not technically a true

dinosaur.

Tectonic forces, climate, and erosion all had to act together perfectly for these traces

of early dinosaurs to survive until today.

When the reptiles left these footprints on the beach, the sand was very soft, and a lot

of factors had to fall into place for these prints to be preserved for over 240 million

years.

First, the sand had to be the right consistency, soft but not mushy, so it could hold the prints

for a couple of hours.

Then the surface of the beach had to dry out and harden quickly, in order to preserve them

for a few days.

And then, the biggest stroke of luck, the entire surface was covered by another layer of mud

and sand that completely sealed in the footprint layer.

The pressure of the overlying layer turned the surface with the footprints to clay, and

the hardened clay has preserved the footprints in the sand for millions of years.

Some of these are nice, but the best ones are down there.

Between the Ice Age, glaciers formed in the Alps.

As the glaciers grew and advanced and retreated, they scoured out these valleys we see today.

Essentially, the glaciers scraped away the rock overlay, revealing the surface containing

these reptile footprints.

Once exposed to the elements, this layer will quickly erode, and the prints will be destroyed,

but 20 years from now, other footprints may be uncovered.

About 50 million years ago, the Tethys reaches southern Germany, and Bavaria becomes an archipelago

of islands surrounded by a shallow sea.

The climate was hot and dry at that time, and the waters of the ancient ocean evaporated

quickly, leaving layers of sediment.

The marine species that came this far suffocated in the stagnant water.

The Sohnhoffen region was soon transformed into a marine graveyard.

For millions of years, the Sohnhoffen ocean floor turned into limestone.

Nineteenth-century laborers who used the limestone as building material discovered fossils that

astonished and disconcerted scientists.

Martina Kobel Ebert studies the period when Germany was a marine environment.

The limestone in this quarry was precipitated in one of the basins.

If we had a bird's eye view, we would see higher ground all around here, mounds of mud

or reefs, or even coral islands sticking out of the sea.

Here in these deeper basins, we find fossil fish.

But what makes this quarry so special is that many of the species we're finding are unknown

to science.

They've never been seen before, and they are beautifully preserved, the most gorgeous fossils

I've ever seen.

Today, Bavaria hardly resembles an ocean.

But the Jura Museum at Eichstadt has fossils that take us back 150 million years into a

tropical world inhabited by strange creatures.

This is one of the fish from our excavation site.

But of course, they don't come out of the quarry like this.

This needed several hundred hours of preparation work.

But once it's finished, you can see it is in a near-perfect state of preservation.

If you look closely, you can see that all the scales are in place.

You can make out the color pattern on the scales.

And these dark shadows are the remnants of the internal organs.

So a biologist could tell quite a lot about the physiology of the fish.

This fossil shark is an extraordinary specimen.

It has soft body preservation with all the fins in place, as you can see here.

Not just the skeleton has been preserved, even that would be remarkable, because sharks

don't have actual bone, their skeletons are made of cartilage.

Usually when people talk about fossil sharks, they're referring to a few isolated teeth.

The marine fossils of Solnhoffen have surprised researchers.

But not as much as the discovery of an archaeopteryx, a close cousin of the dinosaurs and the first

bird known to have lived on Earth.

When you look at the skeleton, you can see that it's part dinosaur and part bird.

The spinal column extends into a long tail, the teeth in the mouth.

It also has claws on the limbs.

So it is like a dinosaur skeleton.

It also has imprints of feathers.

It has wings, just like a bird.

The Solnhoffen archaeopteryx probably flew over the ever advancing waters of the Tethys

Ocean.

In the same period, 200 million years ago, a major event occurs that affects the whole

planet.

Tectonic forces begin to tear the single continent of Bangea apart.

The land masses of the Earth will never again be fully joined.

An ocean opened up, separating North America and Europe.

While to the south, the future Alps were covered by a shallow sea.

On Mount Cheneyé, in the Quera Massif on the French-Italian border, geologists are

searching for signs of the era when the Alps were underwater.

Jean-Marc Lardo and Raymond Ciriot study rocks that contain traces of life.

It's absolutely superb.

These rocks are fantastic because they clearly demonstrate oceanic affinity.

It's amazing.

The sedimentary rocks at this location have a very particular chemical composition.

They are rich in silica and full of nanofossils.

Sediments like these form only in the ocean and in specific areas of the deepest ocean,

in the ocean and nowhere else.

So we know precisely the type of environment where these sediments were deposited.

They are red, they are full of nanofossils that we call radiolaria.

What's amazing about radiolaria is that they are timepieces.

What I mean is that by studying their morphology in detail under the microscope, we can date

them.

We've done that here.

These fossils were deposited on the sea floor at a depth of 2,000 to 3,000 meters 160 million

years ago.

That was in the Jurassic.

So we are standing here on the muddy bottom of the Tethys Sea.

The presence of tiny animals who can live only at great depths is proof that these rocks,

now over 3,000 meters high, used to be 2,000 meters below sea level.

Back when this undersea world was still young and unstable, volcanic eruptions broke through

the ocean floor of the future Alps.

These gushes of lava are found on the flanks of today's Mount Chonaille.

Here we are.

This is a spectacular formation.

These are lava tubes.

These rocks are basalt, the rock that forms the sea floor.

We normally find basalt in the form of lava flow, but this basalt could not spread out

because the lava was immediately cooled by the seawater.

When it erupts underwater, it's unable to spread.

It's confined within the tubes.

It'll crack the tube open and slop out, but it immediately congeals.

And here we find all the characteristics of oceanic lava, called pillow lava.

At the birth of the Alps, lava which had been solidified in seawater was lifted high above

the ocean.

One way to look at it is that the Alps, like all other mountain chains on Earth, contain

the memory of vanished oceans.

When the highest mountains in Europe were still only a distant dream, the continents, after

being joined for hundreds of millions of years, started to break free of each other.

The enormous breach between North America, Europe and Africa creates the Atlantic Ocean.

The cold seawater of the Atlantic aids the growth of new microscopic organisms.

These living beings are so numerous they transform the geography of England and France.

In the Nor-Padecalei region, in the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Lille,

sedimentologist and geochemist Nicola Tribovia specializes in the oceans of the past and

the living organisms that colonize them.

Hello Nicola, come in.

How's it going?

Fine.

So, what have we got?

Nicola is studying microscopic algae which protect themselves with limestone armor called

cockaliths.

A cockalith is this tiny object.

This line indicates the scale of the image and it's two microns long.

In other words, it's minute.

This cockalith is what makes chalk, a rock typical of the Cretaceous.

In fact, Cretaceous means chalky.

So, what is a cockalith?

It's a tiny part of a cockosphere, which is the arrangement of these discs or plates

into a sphere.

So chalk is nothing more than the accumulation of these little round skeletons, these unicellular

algae that colonized every ocean and continue to do so.

Descending the steps of the Laezen quarry, Nicola is diving 30 million years into the

past.

Down here he can see the remains of the first algae to colonize the Atlantic.

Cockalith skeletons weigh only a few micrograms each, but there are billions and billions

of them covering the bottom of the sea.

On the coast of the English Channel, this limestone graveyard is almost 700 meters thick.

In the era when these chalk masses were forming, the sea level was much higher.

Why did sea level rise?

Because Pangea, the supercontinent, was breaking up and the pieces were sliding away from

each other.

The breakup of Pangea and the associated tectonic movement began the creation of the sea floor.

Material wells up from the mantle and forms mid-ocean ridges, which expand from all the

hot material flowing in.

They take up a lot of space.

When I get into my bathtub, the water level rises.

So in the same way, when the underwater mountain chain expands in what is, no matter how large

the scale, a confined space, sea level has to rise, probably up to 200 or 250 meters above

present-day sea level.

When the sea level eventually went down, the famous white cliffs of Dover, made of cockaliths,

were left 80 meters above sea level.

These cliffs are so fragile that erosion wears them down about 30 centimeters a year.

100 million years ago, a small piece of Africa breaks off.

This land mass is pushed northward towards Europe.

It will later become Croatia and Italy.

This collision between Africa and Europe changed over 300,000 square kilometers of the continent,

an area as large as the United Kingdom.

It lifted up the Alps, folded the ocean floors, and twisted the continent into surprising

shapes.

The tectonic power that created these mountains was immeasurable.

Eventually, they became Europe's largest mountain range, with peaks up to 4,800 meters.

First Michel Martellet is heading for Zermatt in the Swiss Alps.

He's on his way to an exceptional site with a sweeping view of the collisions that created

the Alps.

This is a remarkable spot, because here we're standing on sea floor, which was 3,000 meters

underwater during the Mesozoic, long, long ago, and it's now high in the mountains.

This is the perfect place to explain how the Alps were formed.

All around us are the remains of an ocean, but there's a paradox, because this magnificent

massif, the Monte Rosa, is made up of granite and nice, much older continental rock, around

400 million years old.

It's more than twice as old as this crust.

And there's a third partner in this dance as well.

There, with its peak hidden in the clouds, is another chunk of continental crust sitting

on top of this bit of ocean floor.

That's the Matterhorn.

Yet, and other mountains we've been in the distance started out in Africa.

So people can come to this one small location and visit Europe, the sea right here, and

over there, Africa.

The Matterhorn is not the highest peak of the Alps, but its distinctive shape makes

it one of the easiest to recognize.

And a magnet for mountaineers from around the world, 500 of whom have lost their lives,

attempting to reach its summit.

From the birth of the Scandinavian shield to the raising of the Alps, Europe has never

stopped changing.

It's become bigger and higher.

Tectonic changes in Europe have helped create life, and they've also been responsible for

the extinction of species.

Today Europe's 733 million people live in 51 countries.

Tectonic forces have never stopped changing and reinventing Europe, and researchers are

still trying to understand the recent past, the present, and most importantly, the future

of the European continent.

As Africa continues to push into Europe, Europe continues to change.

Tectonic forces will keep altering the continent, slowly erasing the Mediterranean Sea, forming

majestic underground galleries, causing volcanoes, and earthquakes.

And these are only some of what will come from the continual battle of Tectonic forces

in Europe.

Tectonic forces will keep altering the continent, and will continue to change.

Tectonic forces will continue to change.