Flysch, el susurro de las rocas
Director Alberto José Gorritiberea, Asier Hilario
Countries Spain
Duration 71 min
Synopsis
Geology is the science that studies planet Earth, and geologists are the detectives looking for leads that allow the reading and interpretation of the pages of its history. From its birth 4,600 millions of years ago, planet Earth has constantly been changing. Only 50 millions years ago an island called Iberia was drifting in the sea until it collided with the European continent. The marine sediments fossilised in the last 100 million years rose from the sea to form the Pyrenees, and the non-stopping sea erosion has given place to a book in the coast of the Bay of Biscay that is wide open. In the cliffs of Zumaia we find the pages of this great book spread along several kilometres of coast line. Every few inches, in every layer, we find the remains that were deposited over thousands of years. Traces that tell us about the biodiversity and the climate of other times. But there are layers, chapters of this great encyclopaedia, pointing at events that in the past abruptly changed the direction of life. A magnetic change that reversed the polarity of the Earth, a drop of a few dozen metres in sea level, one of the greatest warming up periods the planet has gone through, and a mass extinction that wiped out 70% of the species, with the dinosaurs amongst them, are registered in the pages that are deciphered in Zumaia. Four boundaries that make this outcrop a real place of pilgrimage for the scientists that study our planet. Several experts have visited the tidal platform in Zumaia to give us their opinions. Amongst them we have Bruce Runnegar, the former director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, Jan Smit, co-author of The Impact Theory of Mass Extinction that explains the extinction of dinosaurs, Anil Markandya, environmental economist and one of the most prestigious members of the IPCC, and Adolfo Eraso, a glaciologist that in his seventies still carries on with his studies in the Arctic and Antarctic poles, are only some of the guests that analyse the rocks in Zumaia to understand the past of the planet Earth as a whole. In our eagerness to compare data and starting from the outcrop in Zumaia, we venture ourselves in a trip looking for answers to the changes in sea levels in the Urbasa mountain range, volcanic emissions, glacier melting and continental drift in Iceland, the remains of a great change in species and climate in the North American state of Wyoming, and one of the definite proofs of the impact of the asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs in the Arroyo Mimbral outcrop in Mexico. As detectives comb the scene looking for clues leading to proof, this documentary tries to decode something that has already happened on the planet to come up with a new question: would the human species survive the changes that have already happened? It is difficult to ponder what the future will bring, but the past is written in the rocks. Maybe reading this great book, interpreting it, will help us to at least see our planet with a different pair of eyes.
Geology is the science that studies planet Earth, and geologists are the detectives looking for leads that allow the reading and interpretation of the pages of its history. From its birth 4,600 millions of years ago, planet Earth has constantly been changing. Only 50 millions years ago an island called Iberia was drifting in the sea until it collided with the European continent. The marine sediments fossilised in the last 100 million years rose from the sea to form the Pyrenees, and the non-stopping sea erosion has given place to a book in the coast of the Bay of Biscay that is wide open. In the cliffs of Zumaia we find the pages of this great book spread along several kilometres of coast line. Every few inches, in every layer, we find the remains that were deposited over thousands of years. Traces that tell us about the biodiversity and the climate of other times. But there are layers, chapters of this great encyclopaedia, pointing at events that in the past abruptly changed the direction of life. A magnetic change that reversed the polarity of the Earth, a drop of a few dozen metres in sea level, one of the greatest warming up periods the planet has gone through, and a mass extinction that wiped out 70% of the species, with the dinosaurs amongst them, are registered in the pages that are deciphered in Zumaia. Four boundaries that make this outcrop a real place of pilgrimage for the scientists that study our planet. Several experts have visited the tidal platform in Zumaia to give us their opinions. Amongst them we have Bruce Runnegar, the former director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, Jan Smit, co-author of The Impact Theory of Mass Extinction that explains the extinction of dinosaurs, Anil Markandya, environmental economist and one of the most prestigious members of the IPCC, and Adolfo Eraso, a glaciologist that in his seventies still carries on with his studies in the Arctic and Antarctic poles, are only some of the guests that analyse the rocks in Zumaia to understand the past of the planet Earth as a whole. In our eagerness to compare data and starting from the outcrop in Zumaia, we venture ourselves in a trip looking for answers to the changes in sea levels in the Urbasa mountain range, volcanic emissions, glacier melting and continental drift in Iceland, the remains of a great change in species and climate in the North American state of Wyoming, and one of the definite proofs of the impact of the asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs in the Arroyo Mimbral outcrop in Mexico. As detectives comb the scene looking for clues leading to proof, this documentary tries to decode something that has already happened on the planet to come up with a new question: would the human species survive the changes that have already happened? It is difficult to ponder what the future will bring, but the past is written in the rocks. Maybe reading this great book, interpreting it, will help us to at least see our planet with a different pair of eyes.