It's filled with this toxic gas, hydrogen sulfide.

Now, hydrogen sulfide is curiously present in us.

I told you hydrogen sulfide is in us.

Hydrogen sulfide is very fatal to we humans.

We can easily go back to the hydrogen sulfide world.

No, a mixture of iron sulfide plus two parts H2SO4.

We had these hydrogen sulfide oceans for a very great long period.

We know hydrogen sulfide is erupting presently a few places on the planet.

There are microbes which, through their metabolism, produce hydrogen sulfide, and they do so in large amounts.

Because there's no oxygen there, it's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on Earth. Shipwrecks are perfectly preserved.

Peter Ward Yeah, every single cell in us can produce minute quantities of hydrogen sulfide in great crises.

And I should say that the concentrations of hydrogen sulfide required to get this benefit are low, incredibly low.

Now, the same mouse is given 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide in this solid graph, and look what happens to its temperature.

We also found out that we could subject animals to otherwise lethal blood loss, and we could save them if we gave them hydrogen sulfide.

And what you're seeing here is a cloud of densely packed, hydrogen sulfide rich water coming out of a volcanic axis on the sea floor.

And the reason I could do that is because we mammals have gone through a series of these hydrogen sulfide events, and our bodies have adapted.

He puts in 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide the same stuff that survived these past mass extinctions and he turns a mammal into a reptile.

It can only occur if the surface of the ocean has no oxygen, and is totally saturated with hydrogen sulfide enough, for instance, to come out of solution.

One thing those people did out there was take this technology of hydrogen sulfide, which is this start up company that's burning venture capital very quickly, and they fused it with another company that sells another toxic gas that's more toxic than hydrogen sulfide, and they give it to newborn babies who would otherwise die from a failure to be able to oxygenate their tissues properly.

Five years from now, this is what I hope happens to me I'm taken back to the boat, I'm given a gas mask 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide.

You're in an accident. You've got two choices you're going to die, or you're going to take the hydrogen sulfide and, say, 75 percent of you is saved, mentally.

So, it was interesting for us when we applied hydrogen sulfide to a mouse when it was also cold because what happened is the core temperature of the mouse got cold.

And so, we wanted to find out might we be able to use hydrogen sulfide in the presence of cold, and we wanted to see whether we could reproduce this skier in a mammal.

So, these are the thought leaders in trauma medicine all over the world saying this is true, so it seems that exposure to hydrogen sulfide decreases damage that you receive from being exposed to otherwise lethal low oxygen.

Asteroid strikes get all the coverage, but Medea Hypothesis author Peter Ward argues that most of Earth's mass extinctions were caused by lowly bacteria. The culprit, a poison called hydrogen sulfide, may have an interesting application in medicine.

There is tremendous amounts of hydrogen sulfide coming into this cave from volcanic sources and from the breakdown of evaporite minerals below the carbonates in which this cave is formed and it is a completely hostile environment for us.

It turns purple from the presence of numerous microbes which have to have sunlight and have to have hydrogen sulfide, and we can detect their presence today we can see them but we can also detect their presence in the past.

Am I understanding you right, that what you're saying here is that we have in our own bodies a biochemical response to hydrogen sulfide that in your mind proves that there have been past mass extinctions due to climate change?

And so we thought, like in a game of musical chairs, might we be able to give a person some hydrogen sulfide, and might it be able to occupy that place like in a game of musical chairs where oxygen might bind?

In one model of heart attack, animals given hydrogen sulfide showed a 70 percent reduction in heart damage compared to those who got the standard of care that you and I would receive if we were to have a heart attack here today.

In fact, in chemical accidents, hydrogen sulfide is known to if you breathe too much of it, you collapse to the ground, you appear dead, but if you were brought out into room air, you can be reanimated without harm, if they do that quickly.

If you give mice hydrogen sulfide, you can lower their demand for oxygen, and you can put them into oxygen concentrations that are as low as 5,000 feet above the top of Mt. Everest, and they can sit there for hours, and there's no problem.

And in an enormous 40 page paper in German he says, at one point my wife is German and she translated it for me and at one point he says, ganz widerlich Geruch, an absolutely repulsive smell, which is good. Reminiscent of hydrogen sulfide.

And this company, the first thing it did was make a liquid formulation of hydrogen sulfide an injectable form that we could put in and send it out to physician scientists all over the world who work on models of critical care medicine, and the results are incredibly positive.

This led Lee Kump, and others from Penn State and my group, to propose what I call the Kump Hypothesis many of the mass extinctions were caused by lowering oxygen, by high CO2. And the worst effect of global warming, it turns out hydrogen sulfide being produced out of the oceans.

And I want to say that I think we're on the path of understanding metabolic flexibility in a fundamental way, and that in the not too distant future, an EMT might give an injection of hydrogen sulfide, or some related compound, to a person suffering severe injuries, and that person might de animate a bit, they might become a little more immortal.