Twenty million years ago a meteorite weighing 10 billion tons and moving at least 50,000 mph smashed into the Earth just below the North Pole. It vapourized on impact, releasing energy equivalent to 100,000 megatons of TNT, killing every living organism within thousands of miles. Before this the Arctic was covered with birch forest browsed by now extinct forms of rhinoceros and deer. Robert Schoch, geologist and palaeontologist, tells a new story of the Earth written in the ancient rocks of this planet. He finds that, far from being a place of slowly shifting changes over centuries, evolution has been propelled by a series of natural disasters which have caused catastrophic shifts in continents and climates.