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00:58:57
Iain Stewart, Dean Ah Chee, Mike Archer
14
This episode shows how Australia's journey as a continent has affected everything from Aboriginal history to modern day mining, and also the evolution of Australia's unique wildlife. Iain visits an opal mining town called Coober Pedy to recreate the breakup of Gondwana, and to also show how Australia's formation led to the creation of a vast underground aquifer. The episode also features cliffs of the Australian Bight which are a reminder to the times when Australia was once joined to Antarctica.
for the Bajau here, is all down to the effect it has on the sea bed.
On the 1st of November 1911, Robert Falcon Scott and his team
..as palaeontologist Mike Archer showed me.
modern-day troglodyte,
in the crumple zone of Southeast Asia.
Strange white pock-marks across the surface,
The reason the townsfolk go to such lengths
Around one million tonn of coal are exhumed from this land each and every day.
You can see a whole kind of colony of polyp.
While the platypus survives in the backwater of Australia,
Scientists have dated these corals with a form of element called strontium,
I love this place. I mean, once you get past the obvious oddity of it -
Those great Leviathans of the sea.
This strange mix exists in the platypus
16 kilogram of fossils.
Thing is, the spore of these glossopteris
KOALA GRUNTS
Thousands of kilometre of burning, barren earth.
What's that? Did you say 11 kilo?
And for a geologist like me, to be surrounded by rocks,
KOALA GRUNTS
are the result of having only the eucalyptus tree to munch on.
This tiny remnant stands for a great phase in this continent's history.
Just encrust with barnacles, just coming up.
..to one entomb in ice.
Around one million tonnes of coal are exhume from this land each and every day.
Gondwana was so huge that it was destine to break up.
Each pock is an entrance to a hidden world beneath the scorch surface.
and the anatomy that underpin them
Plus, it's odd, it lactate, but it's got no nipples.
..inhabit by nothing bigger than a penguin.
that's been uplift above the sea.
it just leach its way through the rock, picking up the silica
and the one tree that thrive in these new arid conditions -
As they smash together, the crust gets fragmented and broken
they realise the key to settling this land
it's thrust up entire new mountain ranges as high as Europe's Alps.
is that Australia crush the islands of Indonesia into Vietnam,
This is a natural layer that's been expose by the waves.
and the way that they regulate their temperature.
CHILDREN SHOUT
These are the mound springs that have sustain the Aboriginal people
..water that emerge from underground into what's called mound springs.
of each continent that's been imprint in your brain
This was a rich source of food, just waiting to be scoop up.
That weird sound they make transmit long distances, and they have to,
Crucially, their remains have been found across the globe.
Throughout all that, Australia has been relentlessly moving northwards
are absolutely exquisitely preserved. Beautiful.
I'm going ashore, to the nearby island of Wangi Wangi.
But the process that transformed them into radically different lands
was utterly different.
The bulk of it, 90%, is underneath.
Yeah, I've caught some just upstream here before.
and, incredibly, it holds enough water to fill
But I've come inland, up here into the hills,
It too would change dramatically, but in almost the opposite way.
that have built up gradually over time
you essentially need to put oxygen into it.
He's perfectly happy, is he? Lovely.
So, basically, their head's a chewing machine.
But they've also occurred somewhere strangely similar to here -
The fur's definitely mammal,
By around 100 million years ago, Gondwana had broken apart
mostly live underground.
I think so. And then eventually,
They were effectively identical twins.
Normally, the wind drives surface currents,
So this is it? Yep, this is it. No doubt.
And by looking at this fossilised coral,
The mud hardened into a lid of impermeable rock,
Right. Their eyes are quite reptilian,
millions and millions of miniscule krill.
..turning from verdant forest to mostly red, dry desert.
For so long, Australia was thought of as dry, unchanging, isolated,
I mean, it's described as venomous, egg-laying, duck-billed,
and you get these treacherous planks that you walk across -
There's even a subterranean bookshop.
Bacteria that live in the mud at the bottom of a stagnant sea.
So, is it like a kind of...an aural map?
..in a forested corner of southeastern Australia...
Thousands of kilometres of burning, barren earth.
Both, temperate, forested lands,
because it leaves almost no detectable trace.
As they smash together, the crust gets fragmented and broken
Deep underground, there were layers of porous sandstone rock.
turns into this uneven patchwork of highs and lows.
No, it's unpredictable.
It's an extraordinary thought that the muddy remains of a long-lost sea
and the one tree that thrived in these new arid conditions -
They were the furry parasite that lucked out.
There's, er... That kind of opaque, kind of...?