“I’m going to tell you about the most incredible place,”
says host Will Smith. “It might be the weirdest place in the whole
universe...and you know what? You’re walking on it.” So begins a riveting cinematic journey into the bedrock of human existence we all call home: Earth.
Like many documentaries before it, National Geographic’s One Strange Rock
explores the wonders of the blue planet and how it has sustained itself
and millions of species over billions of ears. But the 10-episode
series takes this journey a giant leap ahead – it explores the inner
workings of Earth from the perspective the few human beings who have
ventured outside of it, astronauts. From this vantage
point, the show, co-produced by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and media
executive Jane Root, spans 45 countries and six continents to highlight
lesser-known facts about the minute and interconnected phenomena that
have made life possible on our planet. The series, produced by Nutopia
and Protozoa Pictures for National Geographic, will be premiered on
Monday at 9pm.
The first episode, Gasp, hosted by Smith and
astronaut Chris Hadfield, takes off from the most basic, universal and
instinctive unit of existence – breathing. The presence
of oxygen is what makes Earth unique in its ability to host a wide
variety of life. To understand how this vast repository of sustenance
came into being, the episode takes viewers on a fascinating journey
spanning Dallol in Ethiopia, Danakil in East Africa, the Amazon rain
forest in Brazil and Svalbard in Norway, among other places. The camera
aids this thrilling ride as it hovers above Earth one moment and plunges
into the depths of the ocean the next. This expansive voyage reveals that we all owe our existence to a microscopic organism: a diatom.
These photosynthetic microalgae, present in almost all water bodies,
are key to keeping the oxygen in circulation on the planet. It is
because of these diatoms that a salt desert in Danakil has life-giving
dust that fertilises plants in the Amazon, which in turn convert carbon
dioxide to oxygen. The series has been presented by
Hadfield and features interviews with seven other astronauts: Jeff
Hoffman, Mae Jemison, Jerry Linenger, Mike Massimino, Leland Melvin,
Nicole Stott and Peggy Whitson. Some of the best moments
of the show come when these astronauts describe how life-giving
phenomena are observed from outer space. They describe seeing the storms
blowing dust from Africa to Brazil and the river of life flowing over
the Amazon. Most fascinating is the revelation that the impact of
diatoms, which cannot be seen by the naked eye, can be observed from
space, in the form of a patch in the ocean that is a starkly different
shade of blue-green. One Strange Rock is a
virtual as well as a cerebral delight. With the help of dexterous
camerawork, the show offers viewers both a bird’s eye view of the
workings of Earth and an intimate look of the granular details: we see
the planet from the International Space Station thousands of miles away
and zoom into microscopic phenomena, such as a flower blooming, a water
droplet forming on a leaf and a speck of dust landing on the ground. Through
mind-boggling scientific facts, the show drives home a message that is
decidedly spiritual: about the interconnectedness of every creature on
Earth, about humankind’s place in it as just one aspect of a staggering
chain, and about the perfect and delicate balance that makes our
existence possible. (Via Scroll) Actor Will Smith co-hosts One Strange Rock. Image credit: National Geographic.
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