Deep Time Walk: Earth History

Every metre you walk is one million years of Earth's history.

Deep Time Walk turns the planet's 4.6-billion-year history into a guided audio walk. Set off, and GPS paces the narration to your own steps - 4.6 kilometres, 4,600 million years, from the molten beginning to the web of life that surround you.

You walk it in company. The included "A Fool and a Scientist" narrative is a dramatised audio production. One character reaches for poetry, the other for evidence, and both circle the same question: how did a ball of hot rock become a living world?

This initial Deep Time Walk narrative is directed by Jeremy Mortimer (over 200 productions for BBC Radio) and designed by Jo Langton (a BBC Studio Manager), with voices provided by leading actors Paul Hilton (Garrow’s Law, The Bill, Silent Witness), Chipo Chung (Doctor Who, Sherlock, Into the Badlands) and Peter Marinker (Love Actually, Event Horizon, Judge Dredd). The script is written by Peter Oswald (ex-playwright in residence at Shakespeare Globe, London) and Dr Stephan Harding.

WHY WALK IT INSTEAD OF READING IT? Being told the Earth is 4.6 billion years old gives you a number. Walking it gives you something a number cannot - and embodied experience.

Life appears early and then stays single-celled for well over half the journey. The oxygen you are breathing began as a waste product that poisoned the world that made it. Flowers arrive with a few hundred metres to go. All of recorded human history is the last few millimetres. This closing stretch is why so many people walk this. Deep Time Walk helps you think about what it means to be human today - it embodies just how unusual, and how fragile, the conditions we have inherited actually are.

TWO WAYS TO WALK • Walking mode — GPS advances the story as you move, outdoors, at your own pace. • Listening mode — for those not able to walk 4.6km.

WHAT YOU GET • Stunning graphics accompanying different chapters in Earth's history from a range of artists • Learn about key concepts from Earth’s long evolution including how Earth formed, the evolution of life, plate tectonics, oxygenic photosynthesis, multicellular life, The Cambrian Explosion, vertebrates, plants, amphibians, mammals, dinosaurs and finally (in the last 20cm) humans. • Around 80 minutes of original audio with an ambient soundscape • An interactive glossary - tap any idea for a plain-English explanation • Complete offline downloads, so you need no signal on the walk itself • Join a Walk - discover small, in-person, facilitator-led group walks happening near you • Background playback, so the story continues with your screen locked

Step back in time and experience Earth history like never before. Deep Time Walk is a ground-breaking tool enabling anyone, anywhere to take a walking audio history of our planet.