Every carbon atom in your body has been around for billions of years, cycling endlessly between air, oceans, rock and living things. Understanding this carbon cycle is the key to understanding both why Earth has stayed livable for so long and why burning fossil fuels is such a profound disruption. We follow a carbon atom on its journey through the planet's great cycles — the fast biological loop and the slow geological one.

You'll come away understanding where carbon is stored and how it moves, why the ocean is doing us a quiet and costly favour, how the cycle self-regulated Earth's climate over deep time, and precisely what fossil fuels do to break the balance.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: NASA E ...