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Contents
Title Page Introduction Production Credits Episode Synopses Ratings What the Papers Say Awards
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4 x 50 or 8 x 50 minutes
An e p ic j o u rne y o f sc i e nti f i c d i scove ry and a spectacular histor y of our turbulent, life-giving planet
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Introduction
The Earth is a peculiar planet. Imagine aliens returning to the Solar System after a few million years voyaging through space. All the planets orbiting the Sun would seem much the same as before except ours. The surface of the globe would look completely different: continents would have moved,new oceans would have appeared, entire mountain ranges would have vanished. The Earth is completely different. It is alive, and not just biologically. It moves, deep inside and on the surface. The scientists exploring the unique nature of our world have scaled volcanoes, dived to the abyssal depths, braved earthquakes and hurricanes, even ventured into space. At last, they believe that they can explain how and why the Earth is different. They now realise that the origin of life itself depended on the active geology of the planet,and that evolution has been propelled on its course by the ever-changing environment of our world. The Earth is more than simply our birthplace, it is quite literally the thing that gave us birth. Earth Stor y is about this amazing discovery. It is the story of our Earth,the creator of Life. Earth Stor y is one of the BBCs most ambitious documentary series ever. It took three years to make, cost 3 million and was filmed on Super-16 all over the world.In locations as diverse as the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,the polar ice cap, the crater of an active volcano in Hawaii and the peaks of the Himalayas, Earth Story follows the scientists as they piece together the clues that reveal the secrets of the planet and the life it sustains.The four-part version is presenter-less; the eight-part version is presented by Aubrey Manning, retired Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, sets off on a voyage of discovery around the world. As well as breathtaking images of the natural wonders of our world, state-of-the-art graphics are used to travel back and forward through time, to reveal how events over four billion years ago forged a living planet, unique in the solar system, and how even mankind is a product of the Earths dramatic and turbulent history. "Today we are in the midst of a scientific revolution in our understanding of the Earth," says Aubrey Manning. "Ive spent my career as a biologist. But I now know that those of us who study the creatures of the Earth have a lot to learn from those who study the Earth itself.Recently, scientists have begun to think of the Earth in a new way almost as though it, too, were a living organism." Earth Story takes viewers to places they have always dreamed of visiting, as well as places they never dreamed existed, to reveal the hidden history of this planet: from the origin of its oceans to the creation of dry land; from the life and death of super-continents to the raising of vast mountain ranges; and from the onset of Ice Ages to the evolution of life itself. A book, Earth Story: The Shaping of our World , written by series producer David Sington with Simon Lamb, was published by BBC Books to accompany the TV series and was in The Sunday Times bestseller lists for 12 weeks in the United Kingdom. It was published in the USA by Princeton University Press.
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Production Credits
Presenter (8 x 50 only) Series Producer Aubrey Manning (see page 12) David Sington (see page 21)
A BBC/The Learning Channel co-production
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Episode Synopses
1. The TimeTravellers This film sets out to answer a simple, but profound, question: how old is the planet and what was it like when it first formed? Geologists have been striving to find the answer to this question for the last 200 years before that,people had thought that the Earth could be dated by adding together the ages of Adam and all his descendants listed in the Bible and working towards the present. The search begins in the Barbeton Mountain Land,a remote corner of South Africa,down one of the worlds deepest mineshafts.Other locations visited include the fossil-laden beaches of Lyme Regis; and the oldest place on Earth:Isua at the edge of the great Greenland Ice Cap. With the aid of computer graphics, the programme travels back near ly four billion years, to re-create the landscape of that distant time, when the planet was covered with a single vast but shallow ocean, dotted with thousands of volcanic islands, and bombarded by meteorites.Astonishingly, life was already flourishing.The oldest-known object in existence may look like any old lump of rock but it is 4,566 million years old and may provide a vital clue to the age of the Earth.
2. The Deep Earth Stor y journeys to a world where the sun never rises and where the ambient air pressure is equivalent to two elephants sitting on a persons lap the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This other world, where the temperature hovers just above zero but is occasionally pierced by jets of water boiling at 300C , has revolutionised the way scientists think about this planet and filled in many of the missing elements in the unfolding detective story of the Earths history. At the heart of the tale is the mid-Atlantic ridge a vast chain of submarine volcanoes stretching the length of the Atlantic Ocean and then on through the rest of the worlds oceans a continuous mountain chain running for 60,000 kilometres. The cameras join British geologist Susan Humphries as she embarks on a journey in the research submarine, Alvin, to the crest of the ridge 1,700m below the waves. This strange volcanic realm holds the key to how the surface of the Earth is created and continuously renewed.
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Episode Synopses
3. Ring Of Fire This film is about plate tectonics earthquakes, volcanoes and the formation of the continents. The great Alaskan earthquake of 1964 (the most powerful ever recorded) provided the first clue in a scientific detective story that led to a new understanding of the planets surface. In the aftermath of the quake, American geologist George Plafker noticed something odd a line of dying barnacles several feet above the high-water line. Visiting the site, George tells how this observation led to the theory of plate tectonics.Scientists now realise that the entire surface of the world is in constant motion, and that all around the Pacific, the ocean floor is sliding back into the planets interior beneath the neighbouring continents a fact which explains the earthquakes that plague the nations of the Pacific Rim, from South America to Japan and New Zealand. But how do the volcanoes also found all round the Pacific fit into this theory? In search of an answer, Earth Story climbs 6,000m up one of the worlds highest active volcanoes in the Bolivian Andes.The water collected from the summit turns out to be Pacific sea-water, which has completed an extraordinary 100,000,000-year journey through the Earth. It is this seawater, dragged down into the Earths interior by the sinking ocean floor, which is the ultimate cause of the volcanoes.It acts like anti-freeze on the hot rocks of the Earths mantle, causing them to melt and erupt in the arc of volcanoes known as the Ring of Fire. As this molten magma rises through the crust, it adds material to the Earths continents. Evidence in Britains Lake District reveals this is how all continents form as the sea floor is destroyed, so the dry land is born.
4. Journey To The Centre Of The Earth What keeps the surface of the Earth in perpetual motion? The movement of the Earths plates provides scientists with a really challenging question what is the driving force? In search of the answer, this programme visits the worlds most active volcano Mount Kilauea in Hawaii;Iceland,the largest volcanic island on the planet, which seems to be splitting in two; Sweden, to see the work of scientists who are probing the secrets at the Earths very core; and to the Kanheri Caves in Western India, which provide striking evidence of violent events deep inside the planet. Hidden beneath peoples feet is a surprisingly complex and changeable world, where matter exists in forms never seen at the surface, and huge plumes of hot rock periodically rise through the Earth to erupt at the surface with devastating effects. Beneath our feet is the vast, churning heat engine of the Earths interior, which drives the dance of plate tectonics, reshaping the surface of our world and changing the course of evolution..
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Episode Synopses
5. The Roof Of The World To explore how mountains are made, in this programme Earth Stor y climbs to the roof of the world (the Tibetan Plateau in the High Himalayas) and delves to the lowest point on the Earths crust, Death Valley in California. Struggling with the altitude and the weather on an expedition to the 8,000m peaks around Mount Everest, British geologist Mike Searle collects rock samples to date the formation of the Himalayas. His work seems to suggest that the vast mountain range is still growing at the rate of one centimetre a year. It also confirms the theory that the Himalayas were created when India started to collide with Asia about 60 million years ago. But Oxford geologist Philip England thinks theres a lot more to it than that.His revolutionary idea is that the size and shape of Tibet can only be explained by thinking of Asia as a blob of treacle . In Greece, this explanation is being put to the test.Using the latest satellite technology, geologists calculate that Greece is on the move sinking down at the rate of four centimetres a year just like syrup on a plate. Tibet,which at five kilometres is the highest extensive real estate on Earth,now also seems to be collapsing under its own weight. Professor Bob Spicer, from Britains Open University, says that the future of Tibet can be seen in Death Valley in California,the lowest place on Earth.His study of fossil plants suggests that the Valley was once a high plateau like Tibet, but in the last 16 million years has collapsed nearly one and a half kilometres. Far from being ancient and fixed,mountains are ephemeral features of the Earths surface, constantly flowing up and down to the rhythm of plate tectonics. 6. The Big Freeze Travelling around the Alps, in Switzerland, the Karoo of Southern Africa and the lush island of Barbados, this programme discovers that, throughout its long histor y, the Earths climate has been in constant turmoil. After flying for four hours over a featureless white plateau,Danish geologist Niels Gundestrup arrives at his campsite on the Greenland ice sheet, a relic of the last Ice Age .The base is temporary home to 30 scientists who spend their days drilling down into the ice. They aim to bring up a continuous core of ice, three kilometres long, because every centimetre is a Rosetta Stone of climate history. The ice core stretches back 250,000 years but, to really understand all the climate changes throughout the entire history of Earth,it is necessary to examine the rock record,which dates back billions of years. In the crackling heat of South Africa,local geologist Maarten de Wit finds evidence that all the continents in the Southern Hemisphere including India and Australia were once in the grip of an Ice Age 300 million years ago. Scientists are finally beginning to realize that climate change is simply an inevitable consequence of the way the Earth works. But Greenlands ice cap reveals that the last 10,000 years have been a remarkably stable time for climate allowing agriculture and civilisations to develop.The programme asks whether, despite human intervention,the present balmy conditions could be just a temporary lull before an inevitable return to more frigid times?
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Episode Synopses
7. The Living Earth What are the turning points in the evolution of life? The disappearance of the dinosaurs was just the latest in a series of mass extinctions caused by catastrophic events. And the Earth itself has been the major force shaping the course of evolution. In the Barberton Mountains of South Africa,among the remains of ancient mud pools,the first fossilised bacteria have been found.And the remote outback of Western Australia,says local geologist Maarten de Wit,is home to billions of flies and the rare living fossil, stromatolites. The Burgess Shale, high in the Canadian Rockies, is a paradise for palaeontologists. The area is famous for its 550-million-year-old fossils, which seem to suggest that life exploded after the first great ice age into all the familiar groups still around today plus some very strange-looking creatures that didnt quite make it. Back in Africa,Rick Potts, from the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, is finding evidence to suggest that rapid fluctuations in climate stimulated the evolution of a group of upright apes with small brains into large-brained homo sapiens.
8. Other Worlds Why is the Earth is so different from its neighbours? In search of the answer, this programme goes back to the formation of the Solar System and the birth of the planets. Mars is now cold and dead, Venus is a scorching pressure cooker, yet robot probes have sent back evidence which suggests that ear ly on, both these planets were not unlike Earth, with oceans and volcanoes just like ours. So what happened? The answers throw light on the systems that have kept our planet hospitable to life for near ly four billion years. The key is an astonishing interplay between plate tectonics and life itself. The Earths biological activity seems to depend on its geological activity, and vice versa. The links between the Earth and Life are far more profound than people imagine. Our planet is not just a rock spinning in space, but an intricate system, where changes to one part affect all the others. As living things, humans are part of that system, our own fate inextricably bound up with that of the Earth, our beautiful,extraordinary, living home.
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Ratings
Episode 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 UK Txn Date Channel 01.11.98 08.11.98 15.11.98 22.11.98 06.12.98 13.12.98 20.12.98 27.12.98 BBC2 BBC2 BBC2 BBC2 BBC2 BBC2 BBC2 BBC2 Time On 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 20.00 19.50 Viewers 3.1 million 2.7 million 3.2 million 3.1 million 2.5 million 2.9 million 2.3 million 2.3 million Audience Share 11% 10% 12% 11% 9% 11% 8% 9%
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What the Papers Say

Whoever thought rocks could be so fascinating? Or that scientists quest to discover the age of earth could be so suspenseful? This ambitious series manages just that, with the help of Professor Aubrey Manning and other experts whose enthusiasm is infectious. Guardian Guide Alongside programmes like The Natural World, it is the justification for the existence of the BBC . No other television company produces anything of the same quality. Mail on Sunday We are used to television cameras taking us to the ends of the earth, but even by today's blas standards, to be shown what may be the genesis of life itself must count as something special. The Times This landmark series direct descent from Lord Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man The programme's main assets were human. We met a succession of enthusiasts: a fossil collector with an encyclopaedic knowledge of ammonites,the keeper of the world's oldest pebble, and a geologist in South Africa who read the land like an ancient seer. Manning combined all this into a coherent account of the discovery of geological time, and I for one ended up more interested in rocks than I was before. Independent on Sunday And besides all this charm and clever storytelling, Earth Stor y has found its own powerful visual vocabular y. It has restored dignity to shop-soiled images of earthquakes and lava flows and mountain ranges More important, Earth Stor y has realised how well-suited its subject is to computer graphics,and seems to have taken that art to a new level. Observer To combat the things the Earth throws at us, we have to understand why they happen.And thats what this series does. The Sunday Times Borders on the magnifcient unmissable. Daily Telegraph
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What the Papers Say

Scotland On Sunday
Rock revival unearths gem in academic TV presenter Hes doing for rocks what David Attenborough did for wildlife and David Bellamy for the humble peat bog.
Aubrey Manning,a retired professor from Edinburgh,is fuelling the biggest boom in interest in the science of geology since the Victorians discovered fossils.Manning is fronting Earth Story, a new BBC documentary series that is attracting around three million viewers even though it is pitted against ratings giants Heartbeat and Ballykissangel on Sunday nights. Manning's success is reflected in a new-found passion for geology that has spread throughout the country.The Natural History Museum's new 'earth' galleries in London now rival the dinosaurs as a visitor attraction, while publisher Dorling Kindersley's book Rocks and Minerals has become the best seller in its long-running Eyewitness series. Edinburgh will also soon be jumping on the geology bandwagon with its Dynamic Earth exhibition close to the site of the Scottish parliament, and expected to attract 500,000 visitors a year. Manning, himself, is not alone. BBC2 is broadcasting The Essential Guide to Rocks in which presenter Ray Mears' tours Britain talking about the geology and plant life in settings such as Beachy Head in Sussex. Manning, however, has become geology's most evangelical promoter. He believes his infectious enthusiasm is derived from the fact he is not a geologist and much of the information he is discovering for the first time. "I had been involved in presenting one of the BBC's Seven Wonders of the World programmes, which proved to be quite popular," he explained. "When the BBC decided to make Earth Story, they came to me and I said:You've made a mistake, the geology department is next door.' But they explained that what they wanted was an intelligent layman to act as an honest broker and make the subject more accessible." The decision paid off as Manning was an instant hit. "One of the really exciting things about this programme is that all the big discoveries about the earth's history are so recent," he said. "Thirty or 40 years ago, we didn't have any idea about how the earth was formed. It was like the study of biology before the theory of evolution.As a result,most of the people who made those discoveries are still alive.You can be interviewing scientists as important in their field as Charles Darwin was in his." Manning believes that,when explained clearly, geology is as gripping a subject as any Taggart drama. "It is just amazing to think that almost as soon as the earth was formed,and its surface had cooled, it was capable of sustaining life and that life, in its turn, has affected the make-up of the earth. "Although we cannot look at courtship displays like wildlife programmes, I think, when people's eyes are opened to it, they realise what a beautiful and romantic story it is."
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Scotland On Sunday continued/2 The documentary's producer David Sington says geology is more popular today than it has been at any other time for more than 100 years. "In the middle of the 19th Century, geology was cutting edge because fossils showed life forms at various stages of development and backed up the theory of evolution. "Today, there has been a resurgence of interest because people are realising that the way the earth works is being affected by environmental trends such as global warming which in turn are leading to dramatic events such as floods and hurricanes." The Natural History Museum was one of the first institutions to pick up on the potential marketability of rocks. Following market research which showed its geology exhibitions were the least-visited in the museum, they applied for lottery money to create four new 'earth' galleries, the last of which opened in July. Now visitors to the Rio Tinto Atrium move up an escalator which moves through a giant revolving globe. An array of glittering gemstones, sapphires, rubies and emeralds, adorns the earth's treasury, while, in the earth lab, amateur scientists meet the experts and compare their own fossils,minerals and rocks with the museum's own specimens. The result is that the museum's visitor figures have topped 1.8 million this year, the highest ever, and it has carried off London Tourist Board's large visitor attraction of the year award. "I believe we have played our part in promoting geology as a sexy subject," a Natural History Museum spokeswoman said."We have shown it doesn't have to be presented in a dry fashion and so have set the trend." Now English Heritage and Scottish Natural Heritage are following up their sites of scientific interest with sites of geological interest and fossil shops for collectors are springing up all over the country. Dr Stuart Munro, scientific director of the Dynamic Earth exhibition,which opens in May, said he believed geology was so popular with youngsters because it required no special skills or equipment. "In a sense, the earth is your laboratory," he said,"particularly in Scotland,which has some of the earth's oldest rocks in Lewis and Har ris, as well as some of its youngest, forming on the raised beaches of the Firth of Forth."
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What the Papers Say

The Observer
Earthly Delights
It seems daring to put geology and geologists in the same television programme.There is a risk of extreme contrast: on the one hand, there will be mountain peaks seen from speeding helicopters, there will be glowing lumps of lava shooting into the night sky, and fissures opening in the ground, and talk of shifting continents and dizzying, unfathomable time scales. On the other, there will be men in the rain wearing jackets with far too many pockets, tapping at the ground with little hammers:tap, tap, tap. But in Earth Stor y there has been barely a jolt as we have switched from one to another from the cosmos to the rock collector and this is a mark of the visual confidence and easy intelligence of the series, and is perhaps also connected to its rather extravagant soundtrack, on which one tends to hear a fanfare or drumroll when someone scratches his beard in the Lake District.And it is a tribute to the perfect casting of presenter Aubrey Manning, who over the past six weeks has reminded us that there is yet life in the grand, sweeping scientific documentary series. Manning is not a geologist. He is a retired professor of natural history, a biologist taking an interest in geological matters.This is doubtless galling to all the clever, young,TV-hungry geologists in British universities.But while there will be those who resent this relative lack of expertise, and who perhaps detect a biological bias in Mannings discourse a slight sense of geological history serving to prepare the Earth to receive life, and to receive human life in particular everyone else will have to acknowledge him as the perfect bringer of geological news. He is clearly transported by the subject, but he has none of the nurtured tics by which the professional TV enthusiast usually declares his or her authenticity he does not travel everywhere by tandem bicycle, or wear amusing glasses. He is a tall,thin man with a yellow jumper, and over-stuffed pockets,an OBE,and what novelists call a kind,open face. His speaking voice is serious without sounding portentous; and when interviewing the experts, he knows when to more along swiftly and when to repeat a piece of information that he rightly suspects will have immediately fallen out of our heads like a lump of coal. He is a very good teacher. And he and his TV colleagues know how to tell a story. The great success of the series so far has been the way it has placed geological processes in two time farms at once: the vast and the local. Each episode has coupled a story of unimaginable time spans and pressures and temperatures mountain-building,the mid-Atlantic ridge with a contemporary drama of scientific discovery, featuring people we can see and hear, and whose stories are only 30 years old, or less. We have seen these people numbering grains of sand;or describing in a strong accent how a large earthquak e makes the earth ring like a bell;or last week digging deep into Greenland,counting through the layers of ice like tree rings.
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The Observer continued/2 If we believe Manning and who could not? we are currently in the middle of a scientific revolution in our understanding of the earths composition and its internal movements;and on television this contemporary revolution serves as a kind of refuge a place of detail and narrative and human engagement in which viewers can catch their breath before returning to giddying thoughts of mantle plumes and meteorites. So, a few weeks ago, in the best programme of the series so far, Earth Stor y paid particular attention to the work of the American geologist George Plafker, who visited Alsaska after the 1964 earthquake, and noticed lines of dead barnacles now stranded way above the high tide mark on beaches.Here, the land had shifted upwards; elsewhere in Alsaska it had sunk. Plafker spend a summer measuring barnacle heights,and in time made the intellectual leap from dead barnacles to plate tectonics: and we made the leap with him. He ar rived at the extraordinary conclusion that the Pacific sea floor was slipping under Alaska, and being welcomed back into the Earths interior. This thought was, Plafker told us,absolutely new and different. The excitement of that moment, and others like it, have been perfectly delivered to us throughout the series: the interviewees have been engaged; and Mannings look of smiling enchantment is irresistible. He seems quite overwhelmed. Sometimes this is a response to the physical world as when, in the first programme, he was invited to hold a little piece of black rock,the single oldest object on earth that can be held in a human hand.But he is equally moved by ingenious experiments and brilliant deductions.Last Sunday, he was shown a graph that described how an early hypothesis about fluctuations in the earths temperature had been vindicated by later experiments.The graph was spread out on a car bonnet.He looked at it and said,Thats very beautiful which sounds unforgivable, but was in fact charming. And besides all this charm and clever storytelling, Earth Stor y has found its own powerful visual vocabulary. It has restored dignity to shop-soiled images of earthquakes and lava flows and mountain ranges images that have been worn to death in cheap little documentaries about Our Crazy World. More important, Earth Stor y has realised how well-suited its subject is to computer graphics,and seems to have taken that art to a new level.Before our eyes,Alaska has spookily risen and fallen. We have seen lines of islands formed, squeezed out of the inside of the Earth.Ice ages have crept across Europe, then crept away again and the continents have drifted away from one another. And we have seen Indian float across the ocean and hit Asia,and throw up the Himalayas with a terrible rumbling crash.They have already shown this more than once, but they could not show it too often.
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Sunday Times
Making the Big Bang sexy A professor is putting life into the oldest story of all
Let's see:a square, low-ceilinged box,5.5m by 5.5m,in a strip of university outbuildings serenaded by the distant clank of pneumatic drills and wind rattling the drains. A high-saddled Raleigh Sprite leans amid the office clutter, so this person obviously likes to get out and see the world. Standing next to a sink is a two-litre bottle of Fresh'n'Low filled with nasty-coloured liquid; perhaps this person likes to dabble in experiments.And piled up on the shelves are back copies of The Worm Runner's Digest an obvious interest in all creatures great and small is indicated. What kind of academic would inhabit an office like the one belonging to Professor Aubrey Manning? The short answer is, a British one. Were this America, Manning's long career in zoology would have earned him a sleek acre of ergonomic office space gazing down on a thrumming campus,not to mention a house in the Hamptons and generous sabbaticals to travel the world and be an eminent,greying, jet-set boffin in its more exotic outposts. As it is, we sit on floor-scraping easy chairs amid decaying PhDs [doctorates] and piles of periodicals, among the dust and detritus of academic bureaucracy, visually mugged by institutional green and beige. "We call this part of the university the Eventide Rest Home," says Manning, as we search for a bathroom in the building next door. "It's filled with retired professors like me." We hear much of how the sciences have supplanted the humanities in the public's affection, that scientists are the new avatars of understanding and consciousness. Nobody, however, appears to have told the good people who kit out Edinburgh University, who seem to be acclimatising to such new conditions at a geologic rate. Still,at least Manning has been getting out and about,courtesy of the BBC. He fronts Earth Story, a high-budget,capital letter, you-join-me-on-the-banks-of-the-Limpopo account of how the planet was formed and how it sustains life. "Front" is the operative word here; Manning has spent his professional life concerned with fiddly, squishy topics such as invertebrate reproduction, not with the big, clanking business of plate tectonics and crust growth. He is a newcomer to the subject; his "voyage of discovery" through the unfamiliar discipline is designed to prefigure the viewer's own, as Manning's avuncular enthusiasm heats up and melts down something that for most is a deeply technical field of interest or disinterest. "In this series it's my job," he says "to be a kind of honest broker between geology and the viewer." Let's face it, though, a lion pulling down a wildebeest, as popularised in the animal snuff movies of Sir David Attenborough, is sexy: the search for human inheritance in genes is sexy. Meanwhile, rock formation has all the sex appeal of a dead pope. Granted, there was a Big Bang, but nobody was around to watch it and it was followed by several billion years of hesitant foreplay leading to nothing but the eventual cooling of the universe.
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Sunday Times continued/2 "But that's the beauty of the subject," says Manning."Once you start dealing with rocks, you're dealing in such immense spans of time. In geological terms, humanity has been on earth for barely the blinking of an eye, yet its achievements are immense; it's quite stunning to appreciate how adaptable a species man really is." Paradoxically, the discipline also appeals to Manning for its newness. "Forty years ago, the general theory of geology was like biology before Darwin. I'm old enough to remember a time when continental drift was just a theory.Yet in the time since I joined this university in the early 1960s, the most incredible discoveries have been made. Most importantly, there's the mid-Atlantic ridge, a vast chain of submarine volcanoes that stretch the length of the Atlantic and on through the world's other oceans.We've discovered through subduction how water is pulled into the Earth's core, which then leads to the formation of continents. "And most of the people who made these discoveries are still alive.Talking to them is like meeting Darwin. In terms of importance, their work is on a par with Galileo seeing the moons of Jupiter. And nobody knows who they are, they've never been interviewed. It's incredible to think." Through assembling Earth Story, Manning has developed his own general theory, which the eight episodes of the series work to unravel. Rewind to the moon mission of 1969 and the first shots ever captured of planet Earth.This was a seismic moment in human consciousness;not only did it catalyse the ecology lobby but psychologists tell us the images put a severe dent in mankind's confidence:a new nihilism was born of the notion of mankind as a race of ants clinging to a rocky promontory in the inky void. This vision of life as a lucky accident,of mankind as mere tenants waiting fearfully for the meteors is one Manning argues against powerfully. The Earth, he believes, operates in harmony with the creatures that live on it: geological development and human evolution are inseparable. "Life forms put free oxygen into the oceans, and that process eventually makes rocks.Life forms lock up carbon dioxide, which builds vast deposits of chalk;the white cliffs of Dover in fact stretch all the way to the Urals and comprise the shells of minute organisms. So life does affect the structure of the Earth. Similarly, if the Earth had been a more stable physical entity, mankind wouldn't have developed the way it did. Man is a creature of environmental adversity; climatic changes were the first principle in the growth of the human brain. So it's all a two-way street." This all sounds suspiciously like James Lovelock's Gaia theory, an orthodoxy that considers the whole Earth a living organism to be protected at any cost. Manning admits he is a Lovelock supporter, but argues his followers go to extremes. "We shouldn't knock the environmentalists," he says "although they have created a number of false alarms over the years."
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Sunday Times continued/3 Manning himself is renowned for strong views on population control.The problem, he says, is not, as usually argued, the profligacy of the developing world but of the first world."Twenty per cent of the world's population uses 80% of the resources.The rich north is grossly overpopulated. "Take Britain it's ridiculous that we go on about birth rates being down, 58m Britons are more than enough. I'm not suggesting a cull, but we should allow our population to decline. In the next 25 years,unemployment will become our biggest social problem; there simply isn't anything for mankind to make any more. So to talk about getting the birth rate up, without considering what kind of world people are being born into, is completely irresponsible . Sorry, this is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine." Will Earth Story takes its place alongside the other behemoths of natural history television? Can Manning do for magma flows what Attenborough did for marmosets? The public will decide.The trouble is,the public has an atavistic appetite for the red-in-tooth-and-claw stuff, as do television companies, who can sell, market and syndicate animals more effectively across frontiers than talking, culturally specific human beings. Another difficulty is the public mood. From Disney onwards, natural history has always emphasised the interplay between life and nature, a harmonious interdependence in which all the elements pull together. The rise of gene science, however, has proposed a darker, more Machiavellian model of existence, one in which human behaviour is a mere by-product of the selfish gene's quest for immortality. A pioneer in this field is Richard Dawkins, and Manning agrees with Dawkins's contention, in his book, The Blind Watchmaker, that nothing as complex as the universe could have been "created" we live, Manning believes, in a godless void. Meanwhile, our visions of ourselves grow more specific and surgical: Dawkins's idea of man as a "gene transmission device" becomes increasingly accepted.In such a climate , does Manning believe the public can be made to care about the bigger picture? Can they succumb, as Louis MacNiece wrote, to "the drunkenness of things being various"? "I think the series is very timeous, yes.There are considerations of general knowledge people don't know this stuff and they should.And there's the beauty of the footage, except, of course, the bits I appear in. "But most importantly, I think the series shows we can't just rely on our genetic make-up to get us through the troubles that lie ahead.Life exists on this planet under severe constraints, the demise of the dinosaurs shows us that. To combat the things the Earth throws at us, we have to understand why they happen in the first place. And that's what this series does."
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The Herald
Journey to the centre of the earth Doreen Taylor-Wilkie speaks to Professor Aubrey Manning about what prompted his travels around the world for a new television series
Aubrey Manning retired from a professorship at Edinburgh University in the summer of 1997 but not to a life of leisure. He had barely had time to say goodbye to his colleagues before he set off on a round-the-world shoot for a television series by the BBC science department. From July 2, I only had six consecutive days at home until Christmas, he said.The tour took Aubrey Manning and the crew to Switzerland,Kenya,South Africa,Bali,and Lombok in the Malaysian archipelago,Western Australia, Canada,the US and the place that impressed him most For me, Iceland was awe-inspiring. The surprise for anyone who knows him is the subject matter which Aubrey Manning presents the earth's story away back millions of years, geological plates, plume mantles, volcanoes, glaciers et at.Yet he is not a geologist. He is a biologist and was professor of natural history at Edinburgh.I have certainly had my eyes opened about the earth sciences, he said.And also found it astonishing that so many geologists look at the natural world much like biologists getting out, discovering specimens, and enjoying it. For the viewer this gives the advantage that a scientist in one discipline can ask questions in another which draw out answers that can be understood by non-scientists.Yet geology seems far from his own specialities, largely concentrated on ethology, animal behaviour in insects such as bees. It is also in character that he should enjoy exploring a new subject.All his life, he has been wide open to new ideas, from the days when, as a 10-year-old, hemoved with his family from Chiswick in London to the village of Inglefield Green, near Egham, and close to both Windsor Great Park and Runymede. At that time , when the oral background was not the constant low growl of not-very-distant traffic, it was wonderful prospecting ground for a young boy. He became a fanatical bird-watcher, walking countless miles and,after he joined the local scout group, his first badge was the naturalist badge. Chemistry was also an interest until he blew himself up making fireworks. At secondary school,Strode School,Aubrey Manning's final years brought a new headmaster. "He gave me what was effectively private tutorship I can see his study now see that man formidable!" he said."And he was one of the people I was most proud of writing to when I got the Chair." His next step was University College London, where he read zoology, and then went on to Oxford for post-graduate research inethology with Nike Tinbergen,the famous Dutch ethologist.Manning was then faced with National Service and went into the Army "I was terrified that would spoil my academic career but, after an interview on my last leave, I was lucky enough to get a job at Edinburgh University."
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The Herald continued/2 Manning has been much involved in Scotland's environmental movement since, in 1966, he joined the Conservation Society the first with an interest in population. He founded a Scottish branch and "stomped" the country giving lectures. He has ranged over the gamut of environmental societies from Friends of the Earth to the World Wildlife Fund and more, but many agree that his strongest contribution came as chairman of the Scottish WildlifeTrust.Here his positive attitude of enthusiasm and encouragement came into its own and, as a result,led to many new ideas and projects. He has become more and more admiring of Scotland's past and present contribution to science and,on the subject of this present television series, he praises Charles Lyell, who wrote the first geology text book, Principles of Geology , in the ear ly 19th Centur y. Professor Manning had already been involved in one or two television programmes before Earth Stor y, and confesses that the latter has stimulated his interest in television and its potential for science, as well as geology. Could this be an indication of his next interesting route?
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Awards
American Geophysical Union News
David Sington wins Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism
David Sington, writer and producer of the eight-part television series, Earth Stor y, has been selected for the 1999 Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism.Sington is the first broadcaster and first non-American to win the award in its 11-year history. The Sullivan Award is presented annually by the American Geophysical Union for reporting that makes geophysical science accessible and interesting to the general public. It is named for its first winner, the late Walter Sullivan of The New York Times. Earth Stor y, a co-production of the BBC and The Learning Channel, was aired in late 1998 on BBC2 in the United Kingdom and on TLC in the United States. It is scheduled for 1999 release in Europe, South Africa,and Australia. The series was filmed around the world over a 30 month period.Its main thrust is an exploration of the fundamental processes that shape the Earth and how they interact. An introductory program discusses the concept of geologic time and how geologists read rocks to uncover the past.Four programs then explore the Earths rocky material:plate tectonics, mantle convection, and the behavior of the crust.Three final episodes examine the relationship between these processes and climate and evolution, including a comparison of Earth with Venus and Mars. Only the first four programs were entered in the Sullivan Award competition.A follow-up series is currently in development for the BBC, according to Sington. Sington has been making science programs, first for radio and later TV, since 1983. He studied natural science at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1981.Among his previous films are Traces of Guilt, about science in the fight against crime; Horizon:The Man Who Made Up his Mind, on Gerald Edelmans theory of the brain; and Horizon:The Man Who Moved the Mountains, about a New Zealand geologist who revolutionized our understanding of earthquakes.
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British Broadcasting Corporation BBC Worldwide Woodlands 80 Wood Lane London W12 0TT

A BBC/The Learning Channel co-production

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