Alan Davies

The geological thriller four and a half billion years in the making.

If 100 million years is a minute, minute zero is just a hot, loud, molten mess.

It takes two minutes of vivid lava flows and rain so heavy it can fill an entire ocean before the Earth cools enough to grow a crust.

Jump ahead 14 minutes and that crust cracks like an eggshell.

Earth starts playing a massive jigsaw puzzle, probably looking over at Mars and thinking, you just couldn't pull this off.

For the next 30 minutes or so, supercontinents assemble and split.

Oceans open and vanish, constantly reshaping the stage for life to flourish.

That flourishing required a solid foundation and for billions of years that anchor was Laurentia, the ancient stable core of what we now know as North America.

Welcome to Life Without, where I pull a single thread from our magnificent world.

Something we take for granted, just gone with my powers.

Poof.

No warning, no clever workarounds, just the unravelling.

How far will it run?

Can we stitch a patch and survive the wear and tear?

For BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without with me, Alan Davis.

And together, we'll find out if a life without North America ends up unpicking reality as we know it.

Embarking with me on this journey, earth scientist, presenter and author of The Whispers of Rock, Dr. Anjana Kandwar.

An environmental campaigner and author of It's Not Just You, How to Navigate Eco-Anxiety in the Climate Crisis, Tori Chow.

North America is the third largest continent, a colossal backbone of rock and life that bridges two oceans and two worlds.

So in a bold move, I'm pulling the landmass of North America right off the board to see how the rest of the pieces flux and reshuffle to fill the void and keep life going forever.