Name: Ancient Earth Was a Hellscape
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For millions of years, ancient Earth was a fiery hellscape of volcanic activity, totally inhospitable to life. See what our planet might have looked like before the atmosphere—a ball of rock and fire hurtling through space.

For millions of years, Earth was a fiery hellscape, inhospitable to life.

Ancient Earth Was a Hellscape

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For millions of years, ancient Earth was a fiery hellscape of volcanic activity, totally inhospitable to life. See what our planet might have looked like before the atmosphere—a ball of rock and fire hurtling through space.

For millions of years, Earth was a fiery hellscape, inhospitable to life.

Planet Earth

NarratorMillions of years after the birth of the planet, there's still no atmosphere as we know it.But that is going to change.Speaker 1Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth would have been a very violent place.Speaker 2Such that it's called the Hadean, which comes from the God Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, because it was imagined to be a hellish kind of place.NarratorAcross the globe molten magma surges up from within. Rivers of fire unleash a cocktail of gases. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane explode out of volcanoes in thick plumes. These are the building blocks of our early atmosphere.And we can see echoes of this young planet still on earth today.Speaker 3The volcanoes that we have here in Iceland look very similar to those that we had four and a half billion years ago. The early Earth was dominated by volcanic activity, and this lasted for millions of years. Those volcanoes acted as pathways for the gases that are trapped inside the magma to escape into our atmosphere.NarratorBut how do scientists know what the atmosphere was like in the past? Surprisingly, clues are hidden in some of the rocks we find today.Speaker 5Throughout Earth's history and evolution, there's been a dynamic interplay between the Earth's surface and the Earth's atmosphere. And because of this interplay, there are chemical fingerprints that are trapped in rocks.Speaker 1The rock I'm holding in my hand is 3.4 billion years old, and there are tiny bubbles trapped in this rock that are samples of Earth's ancient atmosphere. So we can measure the gases and piece together evidence of what the atmosphere was like in the past.

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