Kate Humble joins a team of geologists on a journey right to the heart of one of the most active volcanoes in the world.
On the island of Tanna in the Vanuatu archipelago lies Yasur - a volcano that erupts constantly, firing out red-hot lava bombs and showering the island in thick black ash. To discover whether another devastating eruption might happen, the team needs to collect a lava bomb the minute it is hurled from the crater.
As they prepare for their death-defying mission, Kate explores the island and discovers how the volcano shapes the lives, traditions and beliefs of everyone who lives in its shadow.
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3, the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
Richard Hammond -Wild Weather - Ep2 - Water: The Shape Shifter - Worksheet to support the BBC Documentary
‘Richard Hammond investigates the crucial role water plays. Without water there would be almost no weather: no rain, no snow, no hail, no clouds. So Richard goes in pursuit of water in all its forms. He tries to weigh a cloud, finds out how rain could crush a car, and gets involved in starting an avalanche’
Andrew Marr - Mega Cities - Ep1 - Living in the Cities - Worksheet to support the BBC documentary
‘For the first time in history, more people live in cities than the countryside. Across the globe, we have 21 cities with more than 10 million people, and these numbers are set to increase - busy, noisy, crowded megacities are the future. In a fascinating three-part series, Andrew Marr finds out how these heaving mega-metropolises feed, protect and move their citizens.
In the first episode, Andrew looks at how people live in five of the world’s biggest megacities: London, one of the world’s oldest megacities; Dhaka, the world’s fastest-growing megacity; Tokyo, the largest megacity on Earth; Mexico City, one of the most dangerous cities in the world; and Shanghai, arguably the financial capital of the world.’
The worksheet is written to provide independent learning and enrichment opportunities through a variety data collection and analytical tasks.
The worksheet has been written in Publisher to an A3 format but can be amended and printed as a PDF to accomodate A4 printing. I have included an A4 Word document version to allow for use in Google Classroom
Iain Stewart travels across mountain ranges and glaciers to reveal ten remarkable stories about avalanches.
Over a million avalanches happen throughout the world each year, and yet we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the chaotic turbulence inside an avalanche. Scientists have had to put themselves right inside a raging avalanche to find out more.
Stewart shows how the deadliest avalanche in history killed 18,000 people in three minutes; how Hannibal’s army was devastated by avalanches as he crossed the Alps to fight Rome; why an avalanche was key to one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time; and how global warming may increase the rate of ice avalanches in the future.
Written in Publishers and formatted to A3 the worksheet can be edited and saved as a PDF for A4 printing
BBC - Extinction - David Attenborough - Worksheet to support the BBC Documentary
With a million species at risk of extinction, Sir David Attenborough explores how this crisis of biodiversity has consequences for us all, threatening food and water security, undermining our ability to control our climate and even putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases.
Extinction is now happening up to 100 times faster than the natural evolutionary rate, but the issue is about more than the loss of individual species. Everything in the natural world is connected in networks that support the whole of life on earth, including us, and we are losing many of the benefits that nature provides to us. The loss of insects is threatening the pollination of crops, while the loss of biodiversity in the soil also threatens plants growth. Plants underpin many of the things that we need, and yet one in four is now threatened with extinction.
Last year, a UN report identified the key drivers of biodiversity loss, including overfishing, climate change and pollution. But the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss is the destruction of natural habitats. Seventy-five per cent of Earth’s land surface (where not covered by ice) has been changed by humans, much of it for agriculture, and as consumers we may unwittingly be contributing towards the loss of species through what we buy in the supermarket.
Our destructive relationship with the natural world isn’t just putting the ecosystems that we rely on at risk. Human activities like the trade in animals and the destruction of habitats drive the emergence of diseases. Disease ecologists believe that if we continue on this pathway, this year’s pandemic will not be a one-off event.
Written in Publisher and formatted for A3 printing, the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
The worksheet is a 3 page resource
Professor Iain Stewart uncovers clues hidden within the New York skyline, the anatomy of American alligators and inside Bolivian silver mines, to reconstruct how North and South America were created. We call these two continents the New World, and in a geological sense they are indeed new worlds, torn from the heart of an ancient supercontinent - the Old World of Pangaea.
Iain starts in New York, where the layout of the city’s skyscrapers provide a link to a long-lost world. Deep within their foundations is evidence that 300 million years ago New York was at the heart of a huge mountain range - part of the vast supercontinent called Pangaea.
Trekking into the Grand Canyon, Iain uncovers a layer of sandstone from Pangaean times that shows there was a vast desert either side of the mountains. Footprints in the rocks of the Grand Canyon reveal that there was only one type of animal that could thrive here - a newly evolved group called the reptiles. Iain meets the closest living relative of those early reptiles - the alligator.
Two hundred million years ago, Pangea underwent a transformation. North and South America were carved from Pangaea, and pushed westwards as separate island continents. To see how this westward movement shaped South America’s often bloody human history, Iain travels to Potosi in Bolivia. Cerro Rico is one of the most dangerous mines in human history. Iain goes to the heart of this extinct volcano to reveal the process that has shaped South America - subduction.
Subduction has also created the longest continual mountain range in the world - the Andes. At its heart lies the stunning ethereal landscape of the Salar de Uyuni, a vast salt flat where a lake has been uplifted thousands of metres above sea level. The lithium found here may be a new source of mineral wealth for Bolivia, for use in mobile phones.
The last chapter in the story of the Americas is told through that most typically Andean animal, the llama. But like much of South America’s wildlife it originated in North America, and only came south when the two island continents of North and South America joined three million years ago.
Since that momentous joining the story of the Americas has been a shared one. Together they continue their westward drift away from the Old World. However, on a cultural and economic level you could argue that the opposite is the case. In our new global economy the Americas are at the very heart of our connected world.
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the worksheet can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
Two hundred million years ago the continent we know as Eurasia - the vast swathe of land that extends from Europe in the west to Asia in the east - didn’t exist.
To reveal Eurasia’s origins, Professor Iain Stewart climbs up to the ‘eternal flames’ of Mount Chimera in southern Turkey, blazing natural gas that seeps out of the rock. Formed on the seafloor, it shows that where the south of Eurasia is today, there was once a 90-million-square-kilometre ocean known as the Tethys. It is the destruction of the Tethys Ocean that holds the key to Eurasia’s formation.
In the backwaters of Kerala in southern India, he finds evidence of how that happened, in the most unlikely of places: the bones of the local fishermen’s catch. The freshwater fish called karimeen shares anatomical features with another group of fish that live in Madagascar, evidence that India and Madagascar were joined. India was once 4,000 kilometres south of its current position on the other side of the Tethys.
As it moved north, the ocean in front of it closed. And as it collided with the rest of Eurasia the impact built the Himalayas, the greatest mountain range on Earth. Professor Stewart reveals how the mountains aren’t simply pieces of the land pushed upwards. In fact the rock that forms them was once the floor of the Tethys Ocean.
As Eurasia assembled, Arabia, Greece and Italy too moved north, completing the continent we know today and creating a mountain chain that spans the continent. And it was in the shadow of these mountains that the continent’s first civilisations rose.
But the formation of Eurasia is just the beginning, because the process that formed it is still active today. On the island of Stromboli, Italy’s most continually active volcano, the spectacular eruptions show that the ocean floor is being pulled beneath Eurasia. It is this process that closed the Tethys, and today is closing the Mediterranean, revealing Eurasia’s future. 250 million years in the future all of the continents will collide together once more, forming a new Pangea, with Eurasia at its heart.
Written in Publisher andformatted to A3 the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
BBC - Kolkata with Sue Perkins - Worksheet to support the BBC Documentary
Sue Perkins immerses herself in the complex life of Kolkata. She sees first-hand how it has evolved from a place notorious for its fabled ‘Black Hole’ dungeon and the dreadful poverty of its street people to a place reinventing itself as a vibrant new megacity, with a booming property sector and a reputation for eccentricity, culture and tolerance.
In this intricate human habitat, Sue explores the lives of its people, from the 250,000 homeless street kids hustling for a living to the wealthy young entrepreneurs who race their Ferraris and Lamborghinis down the streets of the New Town.
She joins the rickshaw wallahs navigating the chaotic city streets and narrow lanes, thronged with people, and descends into Kolkata’s Victorian sewers as part of an epic clean-up. She limbers up with the ladies of the Laughing Club and makes an offering to the goddess in the sacred Kalighat Temple.
No other city tells the remarkable story of India more clearly than the beautiful, crazy, colourful city of Kolkata. Through encounters with people from every strata of society, from the richest to the poorest, Sue paints a picture of contemporary India emerging from a brutal colonial past to take its place among the most powerful nations on earth.
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Dan Snow travels back to a seething Manhattan in the throes of the industrial revolution. Millions fled persecution, poverty and famine in Europe in the 19th century in search of the Promised Land. When they arrived what they found was even worse than what they’d left behind.
New York was a city consumed by filth and corruption, its massive immigrant population crammed together in the slums of Lower Manhattan. Dan succumbs to some of the deadly disease-carrying parasites that thrived in the filthy, overcrowded tenement buildings. He has a go at cooking with some cutting edge 19th century ingredients - clothes dye and floor cleaner - added to disguise reeking fetid meat. And he marvels at some of the incredible feats of engineering that transformed not just the city, but the world.
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Professor Iain Stewart reveals how our iconic continents were created, and how their tumultuous past has shaped our life today.
EP1. Africa - A free resource
EP2. Australia
EP3. America
EP4. Eurasia
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Professor Iain Stewart uncovers the mysterious history of Australia, and shows how Australia’s journey as a continent has affected everything from Aboriginal history to modern-day mining, and even the evolution of Australia’s bizarre wildlife, like the koala.
Iain begins searching for the platypus - a strange creature that is half mammal and half reptile. 200 million years ago reptile-like mammals were found across much of the world because at this time Australia was just one part of a huge landmass called Gondwana, that dominated the southern hemisphere.
Piecing together evidence from fossils found in a sea cliff outside Sydney and rocks recovered from Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, Professor Stewart shows that Gondwana was covered by a forest of now extinct trees called glossopteris. This was the habitat of the ancestors of today’s platypus.
To discover the fate of Gondwana, Iain visits an unusual mining town called Coober Pedy where many of the buildings are underground in dug-out caves. The opals that are mined here enable him to recreate the breakup of Gondwana, and also show how Australia’s formation led to the creation of a vast underground aquifer. This source of hidden water sustained the Aboriginal people as they criss-crossed the otherwise arid Australian interior.
Iain travels to the cliffs of the Australian Bight to show how Australia was once joined to Antarctica, and how their split led to the evolution of the biggest group of mammals on Earth - the filter feeding whales.
Australia’s journey away from Antarctica has also left its mark on the koala. Its big, round face and fluffy ears are a result of adaptations to the climate change that Australia has undergone on its northwards journey.
Finally Iain travels to Indonesia to meet the Bajau people of the Banda Sea - sea gypsies who glean almost all they need to live from the waters around them. Contained within these waters is evidence that shows Australia’s eventual fate. Over the next 50 million years, Australia will collide with Asia, its isolation will be over, and it will become forested and lush once again.
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printng
In a Horizon special, naturalist Sir David Attenborough investigates whether the world is heading for a population crisis.
In his lengthy career, Sir David has watched the human population more than double from 2.5 billion in 1950 to nearly seven billion. He reflects on the profound effects of this rapid growth, both on humans and the environment.
While much of the projected growth in human population is likely to come from the developing world, it is the lifestyle enjoyed by many in the West that has the most impact on the planet. Some experts claim that in the UK consumers use as much as two and a half times their fair share of Earth’s resources.
Sir David examines whether it is the duty of individuals to commit not only to smaller families, but to change the way they live for the sake of humanity and planet Earth.
3 page resource
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
BBC - Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey Episode 2
Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth’s voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, this time travelling from January to the March equinox.
Right now you’re hurtling around the sun at 64,000 miles an hour (100,000 kms an hour). In the next year you’ll travel 584 million miles, to end up back where you started.
Presenters Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth’s voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, to witness the astonishing consequences this journey has for us all.
In this second episode we travel from January to the March equinox. Kate Humble gets closer to the Sun than she has ever been before, whilst Helen Czerski visits a place that gets some of the biggest and fastest snowstorms on Earth.
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
BBC - Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey Episode 1
Right now you’re hurtling around the sun at 64,000 miles an hour (100,000 kms an hour). In the next year you’ll travel 584 million miles, to end up back where you started.
Presenters Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth’s voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, to witness the astonishing consequences this journey has for us all.
In this first episode they travel from July to the December solstice, experiencing spectacular weather and the largest tides on Earth. To show how the Earth’s orbit affects our lives, Helen jumps out of an aeroplane and Kate briefly becomes the fastest driver on Earth.
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
Kate Humble and Dr. Helen Czerski go on a mission to chronicle the devastating effects of Earth’s movements. By following its voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, 584 million miles, Humble and Czerski discover why the planet tilts and how this results in such weather events as monsoons. They also find that some of the smallest changes in Earth’s movement caused ice ages and that another glacial period could happen in the future.
Ep1- Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth’s voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, travelling first from July to the December solstice and showing its effect.
Ep2- Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth’s voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, this time travelling from January to the March equinox.
Ep3-Kate Humble is in the Arctic, where spring arrives with a bang. Helen Czerski chases a tornado to show how the earth’s angle of tilt creates the most extreme weather on the planet. An already free resource on my Shop
All resources are written in Publisher and formatted to A3 but can be saved as PDF’s for A4 printing
Human Planet: Change and Sustainability - Worksheet to support the BBC Documentary
Linked to the KS3 curriculum, this programme looks at how humans have learnt to live with extremes and covers five themes: sustainable waters, pastures, cities, forests and arctic.
The worksheet contains a variety of dat collection activities, map and flag work along with opportunities for extended explanation and analysis
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 it can be edited and saved as a PDF for A4 printing
BBC - Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey Episode 3
Right now you’re hurtling around the sun at 64,000 miles an hour (100,000 kms an hour). In the next year you’ll travel 584 million miles, to end up back where you started.
Presenters Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth’s voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, to witness the astonishing consequences this journey has for us all.
In this final episode we complete our journey, travelling back from the March equinox to the end of June. Kate Humble is in the Arctic at a place where spring arrives with a bang, whilst Helen Czerski chases a tornado to show how the earth’s angle of tilt creates the most extreme weather on the planet.
written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
Andrew Marr - Mega Cities - Worksheets to support the BBC TV Documentary
Ep1 -Living the in the Cities
Ep2 -Cities on the Edge
Ep3 -Sustaining the Cities
The worksheets are written to provide independent learning and enrichment opportunities through a variety data collection and analytical tasks. They can be fully edited and amended for age and ability
The worksheets are written in Publisher to an A3 format but can be amended and printed as a PDF to accommodate A4 printing. I have included an A4 Word document version to allow for use in Google Classroom
Richard Hammond - Wild Weather - Worksheets to support the BBC TV Documentary Series
Episodes include
Ep1 - Wind
Ep2 - Water
Ep3 - Temperature
All worksheets are written in Publisher and formatted to A3 printing. They can howevevr, be edited and saved as PDF files for A4 printing. All have word versions for uploading to Google Classroom
Richard Hammond -Wild Weather - Ep1 - Wind: The Invisible Force - Worksheet to support the BBC Documentary
Richard Hammond investigates how wind actually starts. He visits one of the windiest places on the planet, walks into the centre of a man-made tornado and creates a 10-metre high whirlwind - made of fire!