The Planet Earth Zone is based on the series of three lectures given by The Royal Institution at Christmas. Watching the lectures will give you a good overview of the topics the scientists in this Zone deal with, and provide good talking points for students in the zone’s Ask and Chat sections.
Here’s a guide to all of the topics discussed in the 2020 Ri CHRISTMAS LECTURES series, with timings for each section.
Lecture 1. Engine Earth
Watch lecture 1 on the BBC iPlayer ❯
00:00 Introduction to the lecture series’ subject and format
01:59 Prof Chris Jackson introduces the topic of this lecture – How the Earth’s climate has changed over billions of years.
02:17 ‘Let’s go back to the beginning’ – a history of Earth and its climate from 4.5 Billion years ago to now.
05:05 The Anthropocene – the global impact of humanity’s global presence
05:43 What is the difference between the climate and the weather?
07:50 How do we know what the climate was like in the past? – Reading fossil records.
12:31 Graphing the climate record
14:03 ‘What drives these changes in the climate?’
14:47 Dr Tamsin Edwards, climate scientist, computer modelling climate change – Understanding the Atmosphere. An experiment to show how different gases hold different levels of infra red radiation and heat. An introduction to what greenhouse gases do
20:27 Back to Chris – which gas is most responsible for climate change? Introduces some greenhouse gases that might be responsible. How CO2 levels are closely linked to global temperatures.
24:43 How does Carbon move around? – The transfer of carbon between air, earth and sea.
26:25 The role volcanoes play in releasing greenhouse gases from the deep earth.
31:34 Dr Peta Hayes, Senior Curator of Paleobotany – How do we use plant records to know about events in deep history, and historical global warming?
33:37 Back to Chris – Earth starts to cool – ‘global cooling’ – The role rain plays in this.
36:03 How the seas and sea creatures act as a carbon sink
38:04 What happens if too much CO2 is removed from the atmosphere?
39:25 What’s the geological evidence for periods of global cooling? – Evidence left in the landscape by glaciers and icebergs.
42:19 What does this all mean? Life on earth!
Fossil records of life and the impacts climate changes have on life.
43:32 Miranda Lowe, Principal Curator Natural History Museum explains why some animals might not be preserved as fossils.
45:30 Dr Chris Dean, Palaeontologist – How we look for fossils and work out what they tell us about the ‘big picture’, and what problems we might come across in creating that picture.
49:45 Back to Chris – The 5 mass extinctions in history, and how they were linked to climate changes.
51:46 What about the climate, and life, in our present and our future as well? The climate change caused by our greenhouse gas emissions, and the effects that’s causing
57:50 ‘What does this mean for us?’ – Introducing the topics of the next two lectures.
Lecture 2. Water World
Watch lecture 2 on the BBC iPlayer ❯
00:00 Dr Helen Czerski – Introduction
‘In this lecture we’re going to be looking at the ocean engine and its impact on our lives and our climate’
02:39 ‘What we’ll learn is that the ocean is at the heart of the Earth’s life support system’
03:19 ‘First of all we want to know something about where we’re going’ – the history of ocean exploration and the birth of oceanography. How we mapped the oceans and how our knowledge of the oceans has grown. How we study the oceans today.
06:28 Mapping the temperatures of our oceans.
08:44 Diving into the ocean. What life is like 2km down, at the sea floor. 400 year old sharks!
09:41 ‘What’s an arctic shark doing in the tropics?’ The role of salt in the oceans
10:45 Prof Chris Jackson shows how salty the oceans are, and how salt gets into the oceans from rocks.
12:13 Back to Helen – the largest waterfall in the world. The mountains and valleys of the sea floor. How differences in water temperature make a massive 3.5km underwater waterfall.
16:35 This is why the deepest parts of the ocean around the world are very cold
17:08 We have two major layers in the oceans – warm and cold.
17:29 The oceans are always moving.
17:52 Dr Eleanor Frajke-Williams, oceanographer and climate scientist, tells us about ‘Ocean Weather’ and ocean circulation, how it creates swirls and eddies. How massive ocean currents and their eddies carry heat and energy around the globe.
20:49 Back to Helen – Why do these patterns and movements in the ocean matter? Using a cannonball to show the ‘heat capacity’ of water, and how the ocean stores vast amounts of energy.
23:11 ‘Let’s have a look at Mars’ – temperature varies massively on Mars because it has no water. Temperatures on Earth are so stable because the oceans store energy and spread it out.
25:13 ‘Our ocean is full of life’
26:37 Professor Bridget Wade, Micropalaeontologist, tells us about phytoplankton – microscopic sea life, which feeds from sunlight and creates abut 50% of the oxygen we breathe, and how important they are to all sea life.
31:04 Back to Helen -‘The biggest migration on earth’ – Introducing the zooplankton, who feed on the phytoplankton, and are more varied in size (including jellyfish), and who hide in the depths of the oceans and hunt at night.
33:25 Visualising the different layers of the ocean, how life interacts between those layers, and how nutrients get transported around the ocean.
36:30 The importance of whales and whale poo. How whale poo acts as ‘ocean fertiliser’.
38:02 How the earth’s rotation and ocean currents also help to bring nutrients back to the surface, and how this creates regions of abundant life. The oceans are a massive recycling system.
40:30 Humans and our relationship with the oceans.
40:42 Nainoa Thompson, Polynesian ocean navigator, tells us of the perspective of ocean-living islanders and their voyages between the Pacific islands, and their science of navigation, and how vital our children are to making positive choices for our human future.
43:45 Back to Helen – ‘Let’s have a look at what humans are doing to the oceans and how that affects our climate’. How greenhouse gases increase the amount of energy building up in the oceans and making them warmer. How melting ice caps, sea level rise, flooding, and storms result.
48:29 The role of the ocean in carrying things that aren’t water – how is carbon absorbed transported by the ocean? How waves and bubbles absorb CO2 into the ocean.
52:11 How increasing carbon in the water is making the oceans more acidic, and what impact that has on life, eg corals and shellfish. How serious this can be for ocean ecosystems.
54:17 Dr Stephanie Henson, Oceanographer, explains how the poo and other ocean nutrients travel around the ocean, how important that is for ocean life, and how we measure nutrient levels in different parts of the ocean. How this matters for climate change.
57:37 Back to Helen – Summary: how the ocean’s systems are vital to the earth, and how human activity in the oceans is impacting them and the climate. Introduction to the next lecture’s topic: How we can live sustainably on planet earth.
Lecture 3. Up in the Air
Watch lecture 3 on the BBC iPlayer ❯
00:00 Dr Tara Shine – Introduction – ’Today we’re going to look at our own atmosphere, how it works, the effect we’re having on it, and what we can do to protect it.’
01:23 Divers, and the air we breathe. What gases make up air and the atmosphere, and in what percentages? How we breathe out carbon dioxide.
05:13 ‘How could something as natural, that we breathe, like carbon dioxide, be bad for us?’ How the release of fossil carbon is different to our normal breathing, and that changes the atmosphere.
07:49 Looking at how carbon dioxide travels around our planet. How the levels of CO2 have changed in the past century. How much we’ve already warmed the planet.
08:36 How much one degree of warming can matter.
09:58 How temperature change varies around the globe.
10:44 Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Chadian environmental activist and geographer, on how quickly the climate is already changing in Chad, where it’s already increased by 1.5 C and lakes are drying up. The effects this is having on human society., and how people are responding positively. How many people have a tiny climate footprint, but are being the most seriously impacted by climate change.
13:33 Back to Tara – Climate Injustice. Comparing the carbon footprint of people from various countries around the world. How the people suffering the most from climate change are the people who are least responsible.
16:12 Understanding the impact global warming will have on our ability to feed the global population with the ‘Queen of Weather’ game. How a 3 degree increase makes growing conditions much harder to deal with, exposing hundreds of millions to food insecurity.
21:37 Why we need to keep warming to 1.5 degrees.
22:25 What can we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stop our planet from warming any more? How we need to reduce our emissions. How the energy sector can make big changes.
24:31 Experiment: How can we store renewable energy? Converting electricity into hydrogen and oxygen for storage.
26:37 Dr Enass Abou Hamed, CEO and Co-Founder of H2GO Power, How we can use solid hydrogen storage as a safe and pollution-free way to store energy. Demonstration of the reactor that does this, powering home electrical devices. How hydrogen could be used for travel.
30:43 Back to Tara – Hydrogen can even be used to power planes.
31:14 The carbon footprint of what we eat. GBBO contestant Lottie Bedlow joins Tara to show the carbon footprint caused by baking a single loaf of bread, from growing and milling the ingredients used, to the oven and toaster. The carbon footprint of our food waste.
38:47 Back to Tara – What can we do about food waste? Footage of how we recycle and process food waste at an industrial scale. How we harness the heat created by compost to heat water and create electricity. How the waste is used to fertilise crops.
41:24 Becky Greaves, Head of Research at Biogen, tells us about anaerobic digestion of food waste. How we can harness methane instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, and use it to make electricity. The advantages of using biofertiliser, rather than synthetic fertilisers.
43:48 Back to Tara – ‘Just reducing emissions isn’t going to be enough’ How can we remove CO2 from the atmosphere? How nature is out best ally.
45:10 Prof Andy Baird, physical geographer, on how peatland absorbs and stores massive amounts of carbon. How peat can contain twice as much carbon as rainforests. How important it is to protect our peatlands.
50:00 Back to Tara – how we can restore and rehabilitate our peatlands to remove and store carbon.
50:58 Even with reduced emissions and more carbon storage, we will still need to adapt to a warmer climate. Understanding how social and economic conditions can make the impacts of climate change worse for some people. How can we ensure the less privileged aren’t impacted so seriously by climate change?
56:37 Summary. ‘We know what to do! We just need to do a lot more of it and to do it with greater urgency.’
57:22 Wrapping up the Christmas Lecture series. ‘We are all looking at the same thing, we’re just looking at it differently.’ ‘Change starts here.’