Somewhere in the universe
it is always the morning of creation.
All matter of earth- every particle of our bodies-
has existed before in other suns and times
distant beyond all our powers to imagine.
We were of the primordial matter
formed in the violent creation of the universe
nearly 20 billion years ago.
Our matter burned in the refineries of a great star
and was flung again into the void
in a supernova explosion.
From the debris of the supernova
gravity begins to shape a solar system.
Gas and dust coalesce.
Shadow planets form
sweeping up vast quantities of matter
as they carve orbits through the solar nebula.
Then, at the center
the mighty engines of the sun flare and ignite.
Through four and a half billion years.
An Earth evolved to which no human eyes were witness.
The molten earth crusted and cooled.
Volcanoes discharged the gases and waters
which would film the planet's surface.
Continents emerged from primeval seas.
Life evolved.
It was no static and finished Earth
which modern man surveyed.
We found echoes of chaos everywhere...
evidence of titanic forces and movements...
and we re-asked the ancient questions:
Why volcanoes?
Why earthquakes?
Why the torn and upheaved landscapes?
And we probed newer mysteries:
Why matching geological formations divided by oceans?
Why the fossils of identical life
on widely separated continents?
Why glacier tracks in the Sahara
oil in the Arctic, coal in Antarctica?
How had ancient seafloors become mountain peaks?
What processes of creation
could resist the unceasing work of glacier wind and water?
Given the age of Earth, these forces of erosion
should have leveled the continents a hundred times.
Our search for answers
opened eyes smaller and larger than our own.
We read the codes of fossils.
Images from space of the torn continents.
Heartbeats of earthquakes from the Earth's interior.
The molten flows of its volcanoes.
Slender cores drilled from its deepest seafloors.
From a dozen sciences came the fragments of answers
which were to revolutionize the study of Earth.
An astonishing theory took shape.
It is a theory called "Global Plate Tectonics"
but it is nothing less
than the rediscovery of the Earth-
an encompassing theory of Earth's crust
being continuously created and destroyed...
of a genesis which has never ended...
of extraordinary journeys of the continents.
The most recent journey began almost 200 million years ago
when dinosaurs were in their ascendancy.
All of the continents were then assembled
in a single land mass-
a super-continent, now called Pangaea.
180 million years ago, a great rift has begun to open
between what will become North America and Africa.
The Atlantic is born.
135 million years ago
the first true birds appear in the primeval skies.
South America fractures from Africa.
Great areas of the continents drown
and emerge with the drift of the continents.
Climates and weather change
constantly shaping the evolution of life.
India has broken free from Antarctica
and drifts north to collide with Asia 40 million years ago
creating the mighty Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau.
Dinosaurs have perished.
Mammals multiply.
The Atlantic widens as the Pacific dies.
The world we know took form.
We now know the crust of the Earth
to consist of a number of rigid plates.
Like great rafts of stone
bearing the continents on their backs
these plates sail sluggishly- inches in years-
over the hot, deeper mantle of the Earth.
The plates are in constant relative motion
building apart..
Colliding...
Sliding past one another...
overriding other plates...
plunging to destruction
within the interior from which they formed.
The movements of the plates are sustained
by the continuous creation of new earth's crust
The process- one of four major tectonic processes-
is called "seafloor spreading."
It occurs within the central rifts
of the great mid-ocean ridges
which wind for 40,000 miles across the ocean floors.
Beneath these rifts, Earth's crust is thinnest
and the pressures of the magma rising from the fiery interior
are relentless.
The magma forces its way upward
entering the rift between the plates
spreading the seafloor, breaking to its surface
in spectacular undersea lava forms.
Along this great system of mid-ocean ridges
suddenly volcanoes are born
and ashy islands, black and burning
are thrust up out of the sea.
We are witnessing the birth of the island of Surtsey
near Iceland.
For months, this tiny ashen island
waged a battle for survival against the sea.
Its survival depended
on the surfacing of lava from deep within the rift-
lava which would armor Surtsey
against the waves of the north Atlantic.
Surtsey had become the newest battleground
in Earth's oldest war-
In cessant forces of erosion, relentless powers of creation.
Surtsey survives.
Today, this small volcanic island
so recently created from the fire of Earth's interior
has earned a place on the maps of the Earth.
Like Surtsey, all of Iceland was created
in fiery volcanic emergence
for here, the colossal mid-Atlantic edge has surfaced
to form the greatest volcanic island on Earth.
Upon this extraordinary land of ice and fire
of glaciers stained with the ashes
of a thousand eruptions
we can view the exposed features of seafloor spreading...
the newest crust of Earth.
Oceans of congealed lava.
Towering shield volcanoes, such as Hekla
the greatest, most effusive of Iceland's volcanoes.
Lakagiar, a long alignment of more than 100 volcanic cones
marking a major fissure atop the mid-Atlantic ridge.
The island of Heimaey, where an eruption in 1973
Threatened to bury the town of Vestmannaeyjar.
And the stretch marks of creation-
great cracks in the Earth left by spreading plates.
Beneath us, the American plate and the Eurasian plate are born
and slowly grow apart
Iceland grows from the center outward
at the rate at which the Atlantic widens-
slower than a human fingernail grows.
Yet in 180 million years.
This slow spreading of the plates created the Atlantic
and in the last 13 million years
it built this great volcanic island
straddling this boundary of creation.
Far from Iceland and the mid-Atlantic ridge
the rifting process
which splits continents and creates oceans
has only begun.
Yet is has created a geologic feature so enormous
it can be seen from the moon- the Breat Rift Valley of Africa.
This great crack in the Earth's crust
extends for 4,000 miles, from Mozambique in the south
to Lebanon in the north.
Where the continent fractured some 20 million years ago
an escarpment plunges 2,000 feet to the sunken rift floor.
The remains of great volcanoes dominate the Rift Valley
eroding monuments to the continent-splitting forces
still at work beneath.
On the floor of the Rift Valley
roam remnants of the great animal herds of Africa.
They run where valley floor did not yet exist
ten million years ago...
where a sea may exist in ten million more...
or a great ocean In a hundred million.
And here, in the eroded gorges of the rift floor
in the exposed sediments of three million years
we have unearthed the clearest record
of the genesis of man.
For here, anthropologist have discovered
the oldest fossil remains spanning human evolution.
Life has been profoundly shaped
by the movement and separation of the continents.
Had not the continents been continuously raised and renewed
life would never have advanced from the sea.
Had not the continents separated
Life would not have been isolated in separate preserves
to proliferate in a thousand directions
which evolution explored.
Had not the climates and weather constantly changed
with the drift of the continents
newer, more adaptive life-forms would not have evolved
to displace older species.
Mamal might never have succeeded reptile.
Man might never have gained dominion
over all the fish and fowl
and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth.
Man has been uniquely favored
by the forces which move and alter the Earth's crust
yet through all his history
he has remained a hostage to their powers of destruction.
As new earth's crust is created
in the spreading rifts and ridges of the earth
older crust is destroyed
in a second great tectonic process called "subduction."
When an ocean floor plate
collides with a continental plate
the havier seafloor plate is subducted.
It fractures
and plunges beneath the thicker, more buoyant continental plate
creating an ocean tranch.
Ponderously
moving inches in years, the great slab descends
generating deep earthquakes when it moves.
The heat of friction and of the Earth's interior
slowly consumes the plate.
Its lighter elements rise as magma toward the surface
fracturing paths
through the continental plate
emerging in the violence of volcanic eruptions.
No one who has witnessed the vlolance of a volcano
can continue in the innocent belief
in a placid, unchanging earth
nor in the continuity of our history
nor in the inevitable progress of our civilizations
15 centuries before Christ
Europe's first great civilization flourished
in the eastern Mediterranean.
It was the Minoan civilization, and this-
the palace of King Minos at Knossos on Crete-
its greatest palace.
The Minoans dominated the Mediterranean in their time.
Then, almost overnight
the Minoan culture was lost in an eclipe of time.
What power could cripple a civilization in a stroke?
The new theory of plate tectonics
suggested a cataclysmic tectonic event
Evidence led scientists 70 mile north of Crete
to a small island in the Aegean Sea, Santorini-
ancient Thera.
Where once a lofty mountain stood is a huge abyss-
the collapsed caldera of a great volcano-
the shell of the greatest cataclysm in human history.
Sheer cliffs plunge a thousand feet to the sea
and more than a thousand feet into its depths.
The present villages of Thera
Cling defiantly to the edge of an unremembered catastrophe.
But recently, with new theories and new tools
scientists have reconstructed an awesome event
35 centuries ago
at the height of the Minoan civilization
Thera erupted with the energy of 50,000 atomic bombs.
Earth shocks toppled Knossos.
Immense waves 300 feet high
crushed the ports and palaces of the Minoans.
A great civilization had been struck a blow
from which it would never recover.
The course of western civilization
was forever changed.
On the remains of Thera
beneath massive layers of pumice and ash
scientists have penetrated an extraordinary time capsule-
a city buried by the cataclysm-
the home of the Minoans of Thera- Akrotiri.
In these ruins of this extraordinary civilization
many find the source of one of the world's great legends-
of a magnificent civilization which disappeared into the sea-
of a lost continent which Plato called Atlantis.
The tectonic process continues
and from the center of the caldera
the volcano rises again, building a new Thera to destroy.
This shattered island remain a mounment
not to the wrathful power of Minoan gods
but to the power of Earth's tectonic forces
over the course of human history.
A third tectonic process occurs
when continent collides with continent
Neither of these great plates is driven to destruction
in the heavier, underlying mantle.
Insteadm they override and compress with titanic force
pleating huge rock strata into accordion folds
heaving them up
driving enormous mountains into the sky.
The Alps are a young mountain range-
only about 20 million years old.
They were created when Italy, riding the African plate
collided with Europe
and punched these jagged peaks into a younger daylight
Eiger, Jungfrau, Matterhorn- magical names.
Like the immortal sea
the mountains speak to something deep in our human nature.
They suggest the grandeur and terror of human disorders...
of unimaginably vast processes...
of time scales where the individual life
seems hardly more than the span of a mayfly
and the life of a whole civilization
is less than a mountain moment, or heartbeat of common stones.
In the scale of the earth's plates, the movements
are imperceptible.
In the scale of man
they are the living nightmare
of an earthquake.
This is earthquake country.
A great fault tears 700 miles through the crust of California.
It is the San Andeas Fault
the classic example of the last major tectonic process.
Beneath us, two great plates of the Earth's crust
are moving and grinding laterally past one another
generating earthquakes
in the spasms of their slow movement
To the left, a huge slice of western California
rides the Pacific Plate as it drifts northward
past the American Plate on the right
The fitful movement averages but two inches a year
yet it has already carried more than 300 miles.
And, in 50 million years, this slice of California
including the present sites of Los Angles and San Diego
will be an Arctic island approaching the Aleutian Trench.
North on the fault line stands a great and beautiful city-
San Francisco.
In 1906, a powerful earthquake and resulting fire
leveled this city.
Since, the stresses have steadily accumulated
in the fault
Yet, when the San Andreas
launches another great earthquake
San Francisco need not die.
In our new awareness of Earth's forces
we have designed our buildings
to withstand the greatest of earthquakes.
Already, a new science has taken the first promising steps
in predicting and controlling earthquakes.
Our new theories of plate tectonics
have begun to yield a harvest of benefits.
They have focused our search for minerals and petroleum.
We have only begun to tap the immense sources of energy
that underlie the earth.
Today, Iceland heats its entire capital of Reykjavik
from thermal wells
tapping the fires of the mid-Atlantic Ridge.
In time, we may learn to harness the inexhaustible furnaces
of the interior of our planet
The processes of genesis continue.
The Atlantic widens.
Africa fractures.
The Alps grow.
A new Thera rises.
The voyages of the continents continue.
We have peered into the boundaries of creation
and read the fires and flow of genesis
and seen our own molten image.
And we perceive, as never before
the fiery, moving outlines
of the immense and awesome journey
of which we are a part
And for all the people back on Earth
the crew of Apollo 8 has a message
that we would like to send to you:
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void..."
Science has only deepened the wonder of genesis.
The more we Ieaen of Nature's processes
the more beautiful the faces of our Earth
and the more mysterious our own beings.
From the ashes of long-ago stars;
from the volcano's molten fire;
from the vanished life which rode the drifting continents
evolved the miracle of human thought
Within our minds, continents move.
The earth evolves.
The universe unfolds.
Within us burns a special fire.
On Earth, it is again the morning of creation.