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Robert Hazen

Professor Hazen journeyed around the globe in a new NOVA documentary

Aired January 13, 2016 on PBS, “Life’s Rocky Start” featuring Professor Hazen investigates the secret link between rocks and minerals, and every living thing on Earth.

Read the program description below and watch it here:

“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 mineralogist 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. “