You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

How can cold dead rocks reveal the dramatic life history of a landscape

stretching back billions of years?

Solving mysteries like this is what drives my

guest today. As well as being a scientist, he's a pioneering explorer investigating

the remotous locations, from the majestic mountains of Southern China to the red deserts of New Mexico.

Now his craving to find increasingly exotic terrains has taken his quest all the way to Mars. But geologist Sanjeev Gupta's big discovery

came much closer to home when he unearthed one of the most definitive events in British

history. How we separated from France nearly half a million years ago

and Britain became an island.

And all this from a boy who didn't like science at school and hardly went to any university lectures.

He now uses his talents as a long-term planner on NASA's Mars Curiosity Mission, deciding

where their roving science lab on wheels will investigate next.

...