How the Solar System Was Made
From a collapsing cloud to a young Sun and a disk of forming planets, with meteorites preserving the chronology of the Solar System’s birth.
Full chapter 2 · 2 hr 4 min
How Earth Was Made
The complete second chapter follows the formation of the Solar System, the Moon-forming impact, the early Earth, and plate tectonics.
Watch this film on YouTube ↗Sources by episode
This full-chapter edition brings together the films below. Open an episode for its research references, visual sources, and music credits.
30 min
How the Moon Was Made
What lunar samples and the Earth–Moon system reveal about the giant impact that most likely formed the Moon—and which details remain unsettled.
The Early Earth
How the early Earth cooled, developed a crust and oceans, and left fragments of its first 500 million years in ancient zircon crystals.
Plate Tectonics
How seafloor spreading, magnetic stripes, earthquakes, and subduction revealed a planet whose surface is continually rebuilt.
Compilation credits
Editorial assembly, explanatory animations, chapter titles, and transitions: From Cosmos to Civilization.
The opening mixes original reconstructions with excerpts from the component episodes. Identified opening sources include the HL Tauri zoom, the Wegener and Villumsen photograph, and aurora footage below; complete component-episode sources are linked above. Original source music from the HL Tauri video is not used.
Zooming in on the location of HL Tauri (eso1436b)
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA, ESA, N. Risinger; distributed by ESO
Alfred Wegener and Rasmus Villumsen - Expedition 1930 - 015
Loewe, Fritz; Georgi, Johannes; Sorge, Ernst; Wegener, Alfred Lothar
View original source ↗Source licence: Public domainIncorporated into an explanatory animation; presentation may include cropping, labels and overlays.
Aurora-Iceland Northern Lights timelapse 2026-02-06.hd
G. Edward Johnson
View original source ↗Source licence: CC BY 4.0
Music: Meditation From The Star Orion by OctahedronMusic, sourced through Envato Elements.
Footage and image usage
Credits and usage times retained from the published edition or its production credit record. Where present, times identify visual appearances, not documentary chapters. Source and licence corrections are listed in the visual credits above.
- ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA, ESA, N. Risinger; distributed by ESO
- Almaobservatory
- Archive of Alfred Wegener Institute
- Art Bromage
- Berann, Heinrich C., Heezen, Bruce C., Tharp, Marie.
- Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur : object 20550839 – image file fm426293a.jpg
- Caltech
- CAS
- Credit Line: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Gift of Bill Woodward, USNS Kane Collection
- Dr. Peter Sloss, NGDC
- ESO
- G. Edward Johnson
- GA
- Georoamer
- Gregory H. Revera
- GSFC
- Heinrich Berann, Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp
- James St. John
- JSC
- MIT
- NASA
- NASA/Goddard/MIT/Brown
- NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
- NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko.
- Nature
- NOAA
- Custom animations and figures: From Cosmos to Civilization. Third-party material incorporated into animations is credited on the linked sources page.
- Robert E. Wallace
- Smithsonian Institution
- Springer Nature
- Steve Jurvetson
- UNB
- USRA
- Weebly
- Wikimedia Commons
- Zhang et al.; Chinese Academy of Sciences and Curtin collaborators
How this film was made
Created and editorially directed by Anders Lunde using a custom production system developed over six months. AI assists research, drafting, programming, and visual production; I review and edit the material and make the final editorial decisions. Narration uses text-to-speech. Visuals combine custom-built scientific animations, AI-generated reconstructions, and credited scientific imagery.
Generated reconstructions illustrate scientific interpretations. They are distinct from photographs, specimens, and measured data.
More about the creator and production →