Planet Oil: The Treasure That Conquered The World
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YEAR: 2015 | LENGTH: 3 parts (55 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBC
description:
Documentary series exploring how we’ve become so reliant on oil in little longer than a human lifetime.
episodes:
Episode 01
From the moment we first drilled for oil, we opened a Pandora’s box that changed the world forever. It transformed the way we lived our lives, spawned foreign wars and turned a simple natural resource into the most powerful political weapon the world has ever known. But when exactly did geology turn into such a high-stakes game? In this series, Professor Iain Stewart visits the places that gave birth to the earth’s oil riches, discovers the people who fought over its control and supply, and explores how our insatiable thirst for oil is changing the very planet on which we depend. It’s a journey that will help us answer a fundamental question – how did we become so addicted to oil in little more than one human lifetime?
Episode 02
By the early 1950s, a holy trinity of oil, plastics and fertilisers had transformed the planet. But as Professor Iain Stewart reveals, when the oil producing countries demanded a greater share in profits from the Western energy companies, the oil and gas fields of the Middle East became a focus for coup d’états and military conflict.
In the North Sea, Prof Stewart recalls the race against time to find alternative supplies in the shallow, but turbulent waters both here and in America’s Gulf coast.
The offshore discoveries in the 1970 proved to be a game changer. It marked an engineering revolution; the moment when ‘difficult’ oil and gas (previously unviable sources) could be commercially produced from the ocean depths. It was the moment when Western Europe and the US finally unshackled themselves from their 20th century energy security nightmare.
EPisode 03
As we entered the 21st century, the world was guzzling oil, coal and gas like never before. Despite fears of ‘peak oil’, Professor Iain Stewart discovers that while huge technological advances are helpingextend the life of existing oilfields, new unconventional oil and gas supplies like shale gas and tar sands are extending the hydrocarbon age well into the 21st century.
Given there’s plenty of fossil fuels still in the ground, the spectre of climate change has forced many to ask can we really afford to burn what’s left? In this concluding episode, Iain Stewart argues we face a stark choice.
Do we continue feed our addiction – suck Planet Oil dry – and risk catastrophic climate change, or do we go hell for leather for alternative energy sources, such as nuclear and renewables, to make the transition from our fossil fuel past to a low-carbon future. In which case, how do we make that shift?
SIMILAR TITLES:
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A Day in the Life of Earth
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YEAR: 2019 | LENGTH: 1 part (58 minutes) | SOURCE: BBCdescription:
If you think the Earth takes millions of years to change, it’s time to think again! Presented by Hannah Fry, this TV special reveals how much our planet can change in just 24 hours. A new era of science allows us to watch as the Earth moves, breathes, shrinks and grows right under our noses. The story is driven by scientists and explorers, and harnesses cutting-edge data, newly launched satellites and blue chip CGI to show us the true personality of the Earth… more dynamic than it’s ever been seen before. Every minute new land is born, every hour tonnes of rock arrive from space, before you go to sleep a cloud of dust from the Sahara will have fertilised the Amazon, and while all that was happening, the ground under your feet moved half a metre. As Hannah explains, Earth’s daily changes are all linked in surprising ways, and – more importantly – we would not be able to survive on the planet without them.
We start with the inner earth – the invisible but hugely dynamic system beneath our feet which constantly rebuilds the planet’s surface. On the island of Stromboli, we climb a volcano with geologist Professor Chris Jackson to see how much lava a single volcano can produce on a daily basis and how that lava builds new land. Chris also reveals what powers the inner earth – radioactive decay beneath of our feet, where heavy elements are constantly decaying into lighter ones – a process that produces the equivalent energy of 27,000 Hiroshima bombs every day. This energy is a crucial driver to plate tectonics and therefore volcanic activity. And the speed with which volcanic activity makes land is crucial – if it didn’t create land faster than erosion destroys it, we would have no land to live on and the world would be one giant ocean.
The story doesn’t stop with new land being made. It’s also constantly being moved. We reveal how the moon not only causes huge movements of water in the ocean – which we know as the tides – but also creates waves of solid rock on land, known as ‘solid earth tides’; a ceaseless shape change which we never notice. When amateur divers Ramon and Veronica Llaneza found red dust in an underwater cave in the Bahamas, little did they know how far it had travelled to get there. Scientist Charlie Bristow has tracked the source of the dust to the Sahara and worked out how huge quantities of solid mud get airborne and carried across the Atlantic – half a million tonnes of it per day! Much of it ends up in the Amazon, where it helps fertilise the rainforest – the lungs of the planet. Meanwhile, in the polar regions, mountains are also being moved – by glaciers, which grind down rock 24-7 and eventually deposit it in the ocean, where it helps trigger another daily change – this time to life.
In the ocean, we follow the daily growth of phytoplankton – microscopic plant life fuelled by the nutrients put into the ocean by erosion. Five billion tonnes of it grow every day and, like all plants, absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. In fact, there is so much phytoplankton in the ocean that they are responsible for every second breath we take. The explosive growth of phytoplankton triggers another global change and the biggest mass movement of animal life known to science – the daily migration of the zooplankton, which rise up from the depths every night to feed on the plants. In Florida, we get underwater with a group of intrepid divers, who plunge into the pitch-black ocean for a chance to see this global phenomenon up close. We also look at how science is now able to track the growth of plants on land using satellites. If you could put all the growth in all the world’s forests into one imaginary tree, you would get a single tree three km tall in just one day. But with all this growth, there is an inevitable flipside – fire. The film goes behind the scenes with the US Forest Service as they tackle the biggest wildfire in California’s history. Every day an area of forest twice the size of the Grand Canyon National Park is burnt down.
Finally, Hannah Fry gets us to look outwards. The Earth is not a bubble – it’s part of a bigger cosmic system that every day messes with the composition of our planet. We lose atmospheric gases like hydrogen and helium at the rate of 1kg per second to space. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. In fact, when you look at the Northern Lights, you’re actually looking at helium being lost. But Earth does get something back from space. We join a group of amateur astronomers to watch the Geminid meteor shower in the deserts of California. This heavenly light display is actually revealing a process that goes on all day, every day. The Earth is constantly picking up space dust – an estimated 60 tonnes of it every 24 hours. But perhaps the biggest change of all is the one that few of us are even aware of. Our whole galaxy is moving through the cosmos at two million km per hour.
It really is a different planet every day. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be on it!SIMILAR TITLES:
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BBC Four - A Day in the Life of Earth
Hannah Fry reveals how much the Earth can change in a single day.BBC
BBC Four - Colour: The Spectrum of Science
Helen Czerski goes in search of colour to reveal how it has written our planet's story.BBC
This entry was edited (4 years ago)
