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  • 6 weeks ago
It all started with a simple question: Is it possible to travel to the oldest and newest places on Earth? YouTuber, author and filmmaker Joe Scott looked into it, and it turned into the trip of a lifetime. It's a journey across 4 billion years of geologic history that explores the past and present of our remarkable planet, the absurd immensity of deep time, and our tiny but important place in it.
Transcript
00:04We live on an ancient planet that's constantly remaking itself.
00:08What if instead of talking about it, I actually went to the places that best illustrated them?
00:13What if I traveled to the oldest and newest places on planet Earth?
00:19Woo!
00:23There's a trail that goes right through here, but it's a six-mile hike, and it's an unmarked trail.
00:28Oh, this whole thing is like a tube.
00:30From there, we'd have to go off-trail for at least a mile and a half or so.
00:34So, technically speaking, illegal.
00:42We're going to be guides through time.
00:44I'm kind of having trouble even processing that sometimes.
00:47These are the oldest rocks we know of on maybe our planet.
00:50It's a 4-billion-year-old rock, a 3.7-billion-year-old rock, a 3.9-billion-year-old
00:54rock.
00:55Maybe this is a proto-continent.
00:56Proto-continent.
00:58I have to sit with that one for a minute.
01:00That's wild.
01:02The landscape here is changing so quickly, so if I'm on a field shift, nobody will ever
01:07look at this exact same landscape and see it.
01:09Hawaii is ephemeral.
01:12What does 4 billion years actually mean?
01:14That's really hard to comprehend.
01:16You think more deeply about things other than rocks when you're sitting on these rocks.
01:21The oldest set of place names had to do with where the larger animals would dwell.
01:28You're talking about like mammoths and mastodons?
01:30Well, we just call them large animals.
01:48It's our planet.
01:51This is how everything starts.
01:58You're thinking about like Kindergarten.
01:58But it's Minnesota.
01:58Here we go.
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