Did plants drive ancient ice ages? Rewinding the Earth's evolution with Professor Ben Mills (Part 2)

About this episode

The episode explores the role of plants in ancient ice ages and features a simulation of terraforming an exoplanet with Professor Ben Mills.

We start todays episode at the end of the world with Professor of Earth System Evolution, Ben Mills. Soon we're looking at his incredible grid cell model of the Earth and watching 537 million years of evolution play out in pixels: continents drifting, plants evolving, ice sheets growing, CO2 falling, climates flipping. Ben then really shows us something cool: a simulation wherein we build, or rather terraform, an exoplanet from scratch into a habitable planet. In realtime we seed a lifeless world with cyanobacteria... wait for oxygen... drop in algae, tinker with plants... And how did we go? Well, let's just say we're glad Gaia took care of this all on our planet, because left to us three, we're probably not making it out of the Snowball... If you haven't listened to part 1 yet, don't start this episode until you've done that!!! Watch here . Make sure you're following Wonder wherever you get your podcasts - and chuck that notifications bell on! We release a GeoCo News email newsletter. You wouldn't want to miss out... ⁠⁠⁠sign up here.⁠⁠⁠ Find us on Instagram & TikTok: @thegeoco Thanks to the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Geological Society of Australia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for making this episode of Wonder…

People in this episode

Guest: Professor Ben Mills

Topics covered

• Earth System Evolution
• plant evolution
• ice ages
• terraforming
• exoplanets
• climate change

Keywords

• plants
• ice ages
• terraforming
• exoplanets
• cyanobacteria
• climate
• evolution

Sponsors

Geological Society of Australia

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Adelaide Plains, South Australia, Gaia, Earth, Snowball

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