Robert Hazen Featured in NOVA's Life's Rocky Start

12 January 2016

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The program debuted 13 January, 2016 on PBS Television (US), and is available to some audiences online. Check your local television listings for rebroadcasts.

Program Description: Four and a half billion years ago, the young Earth was a hellish place—a seething chaos of meteorite impacts, volcanoes belching noxious gases, and lightning flashing through a thin, torrid atmosphere. Then, in a process that has puzzled scientists for decades, life emerged. But how? NOVA joins DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen as he journeys around the globe. From an ancient Moroccan market to the Australian Outback, he advances a startling and counterintuitive idea—that the rocks beneath our feet were not only essential to jump-starting life, but that microbial life helped give birth to hundreds of minerals we know and depend on today. It's a theory of the co-evolution of Earth and life that is reshaping the grand-narrative of our planet’s story.

  • Read Randy Showstack's article in Eos, including an interview with Robert Hazen, here. 
  • Read May Wei-Haas' interview with Robert Hazen on Smithsonian.com here.
  • Watch a panel featuring Hazen and the show's producers, recorded at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, USA on 6 January 2016, here.