Deep Time

The ancient Earth was profoundly alien. How do we distinguish between the living and non-living in the fossil record?

Sophia Roosth

4 minutes

4 minutes

8 minutes

7 minutes

45 minutes

Adrian Currie & Derek Turner

Humans have been altering Earth for millennia, but only now are we wise to what we’re doing. How will we use that wisdom?

David Grinspoon

Did Neanderthals speak? Did dinosaurs roar? And when did birds begin to sing? The soundscape of deep time is coming back

Alex Riley

Does history unfold randomly and by chance, or are there underlying patterns and deep connections between its parts?

Walter Alvarez

Rachael Roettenbacher

3 minutes

3 minutes

From past to present, into the future: the flow of time is central to human experience. Why isn’t it central to physics?

Gene Tracy

Intelligence could have been moving back and forth between biological beings and machine receptacles for aeons

Caleb Scharf

Dinosaur collecting isn't just for museums any more – film stars and sheikhs do it too. What drives a man to covet big bones?

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

7 minutes

Light travels at around 300,000 km per second. Why not faster? Why not slower? A new theory inches us closer to an answer

Sidney Perkowitz

Paleogenetics is helping to solve the great mystery of prehistory: how did humans spread out over the earth?

Jacob Mikanowski

Was human evolution inevitable, or do we owe our existence to a once-in-a-universe stroke of luck?

Dan Falk

Cosmology has been on a long, hot streak, racking up one imaginative and scientific triumph after another. Is it over?

Ross Andersen

In the race for geology’s highest accolade – a ‘golden spike’ – do advocates of the Anthropocene sell their ideas short?

James Westcott

It is only a matter of time before our Universe goes black, cold and dies. Must this be the end of the road for life?

Michael Hanlon

4 minutes

We may think we are the first organisms to remake the planet, but life has been transforming the earth for aeons

Robert Hazen

Earth’s oceans are beginning to warm and turn acidic, endangering plankton and the entire marine food chain

Peter Brannen