One Strange Rock – A Planetary Perspective

I saw the first episode last night with astronaut Chris Hadfield and director Darren Aronofsky at Yuri Milner’s theater (photos below).

Wow – One Strange Rock is visually breathtaking and intellectually provocative, celebrating the strange planetary-scale phenomena of Earth. The opening framework comes from the astronauts; all of them discover a profound appreciation for Earth and its interdependencies and fragility (witnessing, for example, the vanishingly thin blue line of our atmosphere).

For example, the astronauts can see huge ocean blooms of diatoms near calving glaciers and other nutrient flows. It is a colorful perspective appreciated from 1m ft. up. They can see dust from Africa blowing across the Atlantic and falling in the Amazon rainforest, a wonderful fertilizer for the region – 28 million tons of diatom fossils blow from Africa to the Amazon per year! The Amazon generates 20x as much oxygen as humanity consumes each year, but we do not breath the air generated in the Amazon as it consumed by the local animal life. We breath because of the indirect effect of the Amazon on the ocean diatoms.

The river runoff from the Amazon feeds a florid bloom of diatoms in the sea, which can double in population every day. They generate about half of the oxygen we breathe. And the global systems are barely understood, with buffers and feedback loops maintaining a steady 20.95% oxygen level over long periods. Less oxygen and we die; too much and we burn up. The diatoms die and sink carbon to the sea floor, a half-mile thick.

When I was in high school, I used to scrawl on the blackboards “Diatoms Unite!” sacrificing millions of their compressed fossils, commonly known as chalk.

Catch the premiere on March 26.