Dead or Alive

Description

Like Earth, most of the worlds that orbit the Sun are made of rock, but, geologically speaking, any kinship among the interplanetary legion largely ends there. Some of our neighbors are alive, as it were, while others are frozen artifacts of a long-vanished era. This program visits subjects in the solar kingdom that still show a pulse and examines the factors that have kept them active. Creating a frame of reference with a discussion of planetary size and a visit to Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, the film takes viewers to a much larger mountain, the extinct Olympus Mons on Mars, then travels to a remote fragment of rock that should, by all rights, be cold and dead. Io, a moon of Jupiter, is home to extraordinary lava lakes and volcanic plumes.

Runtime

50 min

Series

Geography

Genre

Date of Publication

[2011], c2010

Database

Films on Demand

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