All of Earth's Extinctions (As We Understand It)

There are not five mass extinctions. There are around thirty-five — the famous list is the residue of a single study published in 1982, and everything below its threshold simply stopped being counted. This documentary walks the complete recognised record of extinction on Earth, from the oxygen catastrophe of two and a half billion years ago to the losses still being counted tonight. It measures each event not by how many species died, but by how long the world stayed empty afterwards — and under that measure the ranking changes completely. Roughly thirty-five events, over three hours, and no hurry about any of it. 0:00 — The Line on the Graph 7:25 — The Ocean That Rusted 16:27 — The Ice at the Equator 25:23 — The World That Was Eaten 35:55 — The Cities That Were Not Rebuilt 44:53 — Where the Ocean Went 53:38 — The Quiet Period 1:00:27 — What the Roots Did 1:09:20 — Everything Became Small 1:18:55 — The Forest Comes Apart 1:27:32 — Two Rehearsals 1:35:12 — Sixty Thousand Years 1:46:28 — The Handover 1:55:10 — The Long Suffocations 2:04:01 — An Hour in the Record 2:14:16 — Into the Cold 2:24:37 — What Comes Back Selected sources: • Raup, D.M. & Sepkoski, J.J. (1982). "Mass Extinctions in the Marine Fossil Record." Science 215:1501–1503. • Marshall, C.R. (2023). "Forty years later: The status of the 'Big Five' mass extinctions." Cambridge Prisms: Extinction 1:e5. • Bond, D.P.G. & Grasby, S.E. (2017). "On the causes of mass extinctions." Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 478:3–29. • Sallan, L. & Galimberti, A.K. (2015). "Body-size reduction in vertebrates following the end-Devonian mass extinction." Science 350:812–815. • Burgess, S.D., Bowring, S.A. & Shen, S.-Z. (2014). "High-precision timeline for Earth's most severe extinction." PNAS 111:3316–3321. • Hull, P.M. et al. (2020). "On impact and volcanism across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary." Science 367:266–272. Current scientific understanding, based on peer-reviewed research. Our understanding continues to evolve.