When Earth Was Hell | Full Documentary

For most of its history, Earth was actively hostile to anything trying to live on it. Its first eon is named after the Greek underworld: the Hadean. There were oceans of magma, no oxygen to breathe, no ozone layer to stop incoming ultraviolet radiation, acid rain falling into acidic seas, and days that ended in less than ten hours. Then the sky began raining fire. Between roughly 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, during the Late Heavy Bombardment, shifting orbits in the outer solar system flung debris toward the inner planets. Impacts large enough to vaporize entire oceans struck again and again, sterilizing the surface and melting the crust back into liquid rock. The cratered face of the Moon is still a record of it. This full documentary travels through every one of Earth's deadliest chapters. Archean volcanism that filled the air with sulfur and turned rain to acid. Snowball Earth, when ice may have reached the equator between 720 and 635 million years ago and sealed the oceans beneath it. The Great Oxygen Catastrophe of 2.4 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria flooded the atmosphere with a gas that was lethal poison to almost everything then alive, causing what may have been the first mass extinction, driven by life itself. And then the Great Dying. Around 252 million years ago the Siberian Traps erupted for hundreds of thousands of years, acidifying the oceans and stripping them of oxygen until 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land vertebrates were gone. Ecosystems took millions of years to rebuild. Twice more, 444 and 66 million years ago, Earth came close to erasing complex life all over again. Life never stopped. Microbes endured the bombardments, survived the deep freeze, adapted to the poison, and rebuilt after every reset. Every one of these catastrophes also cleared the way for what came next, opening ecological space and pushing evolution down paths it had never taken. The planet that repeatedly came close to ending life is the same one now covered in forests, reefs, and cities. And the danger has not gone anywhere. Asteroids still cross Earth's orbit, supervolcanoes still sit beneath the crust, and atmospheric carbon has been driven up in a few centuries rather than a few million years. So when was the most dangerous time to be alive on Earth? And how did anything at all survive a world that turned lethal over and over again? Watch the full documentary now, and subscribe for more full-length documentaries on the forces that shaped our planet. #EarthHistory #Documentary #MassExtinction