The Great Oxygenation Event — The Deadliest Event in the History of Life on Earth

Two and a half billion years ago, a single species of bacteria accidentally triggered the greatest ecological catastrophe in the history of life on Earth. They poisoned the atmosphere with a toxic waste gas, turned the oceans to rust, and froze the entire planet from pole to equator. Nearly everything alive was destroyed. The catastrophe lasted three hundred million years. The gas they released is oxygen. And you are breathing it right now. In this documentary, we follow the full story of the Great Oxygenation Event — from the evolution of photosynthesis to the rust-red banded iron formations that record the poisoning of the ancient ocean, from the global Snowball Earth glaciation to the emergence of the first complex cells powered by the very gas that caused the catastrophe. This is the story of how life nearly destroyed itself — and in doing so, made us possible. Subscribe for new episodes every week.