From the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands; from state-of-the-art Californian laboratories to a dangerous volcanic complex hidden beneath western Naples, come on an adventure to places where the Earth's life-story is written into the landscape. Helen Gordon presents the extraordinary scientists who are piecing together this geological drama; explains plate tectonics, a breakthrough younger than quantum mechanics with many secrets still to reveal; and looks to the future of our world, with or without us.