Despite this enormous flood, the Mediterranean took more than a century to refill. But what is more amazing is that this process of drying and flooding has happened not just once, but possibly ten tim...
As the sun beat down, something like 4,000 cubic kilometers of water evaporated from the Mediterranean surface every year. And with no Atlantic water to replenish it, the Mediterranean dried out. In j...
...Africa. The African plate has been drifting north over millions of years. And when it pushes against the European plate, huge fold s of rock have been forced up and over one another into great moun...
...and marked the growing pains of a young ocean. 16 million years ago, North America and Greenland finally split apart from Europe. As the continental plates separated, the North Atlantic was born. I...
It's the fossilized resin of ancient pine trees. And trapped within it, are perfectly preserved souvenirs, each fragment helping to build a picture of an ancient world. This resin has also trapped som...
..As they died they slowly sank, settling in layers on the seafloor. Through time they formed these cliffs in an ocean that was up to 300 meters deeper than we see it today. Just imagine how London mi...
They make perfect roof tiles, but these tiles occasionally reveal something extraordinary. Perfect snapshot s from 115 million years ago, back then, Solnhofen was part of a very still and salty tropic...
And when this rock was quarried , it also revealed traces of real monsters, the bones of huge dinosaurs. 117 million years ago, Oxford was a real-life Jurassic Park. Dinosaur fossils have been found t...
Parts of Pangaea were periodically flooded by shallow seas. But time and again this water evaporated, leaving layer upon layer of salt. Today these massive deposits lie buried deep beneath the Netherl...
It took a ten-meter layer of fallen rain forest to make just a one-meter seam of coal. When you consider the depth of all the seams in all the coalfields worked in Europe, from Britain through to nort...
This was no ordinary forest. What looked like trees were in fact giant fern s, horsetails and club mosses , the fossils of which have been exquisitely preserved in this Scottish park. They offer a gli...
In the east, another ancient range, the Urals , separates Europe from Asia. Both these ranges are evidence of Europe's earliest formation, the results of processes that began half a billion years ago....
And at other times, they'd have looked more like Africa's Serengeti Plains. More than 15 millions years ago, what is now Vienna and Paris would have been submerged beneath rich tropical seas. And over...
Europe, an ancient continent. Within its borders lies unrivalled richness of both natural and human wonders. At its northern limits, Europe reaches into the icy wastes of the high Arctic. To the south...
