John Valley on the Early Earth

09/20/20 • 26 min

The Earth was formed just over 4.5 billion years ago. What happened just after it formed and what were conditions like then? John Valley reveals what we have managed to discover about our planet’s very distant past, and how we did it.

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Sara Russell on What the Asteroids Can Tell Us About the Earth

The asteroid belt lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It formed out of the same protoplanetary disc as the Earth, but many asteroids have barely changed since then. Sara Russell explains what these time capsules can reveal about the Earth and how we will learn much more from the spacecraft currently fetching and returning asteroid samples to Earth.

Sara Russell is a professor of planetary sciences and leader of the Planetary Materials Group at the Natural History Museum in London. Her research seeks to unravel how the solar system formed and cast light on questions such as how the Earth got its water and organic materials. She even has an asteroid named after her.

Next Episode

Barbara Romanowicz on Seeing Deep into the Earth

Barbara Romanowicz uses the seismic waves triggered by earthquakes to probe the interior of the Earth. She has forged new techniques for analyzing these waves to give us a much sharper view of the deep structure of the Earth. She is a Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley, and Chair of Physics of the Earth’s Interior at the Collège de France in Paris.