Earth! As far as we know it’s the only home to the life in the universe. Why? What is it that makes our planet so special? The answers are hidden deep within Earth’s past. To find them we must travel back in time until we reach the birth of the Earth. Then we can piece together our planet’s incredible story and discover why all of this, all of us, are here! (Please fasten your seatbelt we’re going on a very long journey!)
Our journey starts almost 5 billion years ago… But wait, this timeline can’t be right, there’s no sign of our beautiful blue planet. Just a newborn star, our Sun surrounded by all this dust. We’ve arrived too early before the Earth has even formed. Speed up the time and we can see gravity pull the dust into tiny rocks. It hardly seems possible, but something as complex as a planet is made from nothing more than dust and rocks. Over the millions of years gravity pulls these rocks together to form the Earth, one of at least a hundred planets circling the Sun.
But about 4.54 billion years ago our planet looks more like hell than home. Up close the temperature is over 1200 degree Celsius. There’s no air just carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor. It’s so hot and so toxic that if we got any closer we’d be incinerated and suffocated in seconds. The newborn planet is boiling ball of liquid rock. There are virtually no solid surfaces just an endless ocean of lava.
About 4.5 billion years ago a young planet called Theia is heading on collision course to Earth, it’s the size of Mars and it’s traveling at 15 kilometers a second (20 times faster than a bullet). The intruder’s gravity is distorting the Earth’s surface. Boom… The blast wave races out around the planet, it’s as though both young planets turn into liquid. Trillions of tons of debris blast out into space. But over the course of just a thousand years gravity works its magic and turns the rubble into a ring of red-hot dust and rocks that circles the Earth, and now from this ring a ball forms over 3000 kilometers wide. We’re witnessing the birth of our Moon now. It’s much closer than the Moon we recognize. Just 22,000 kilometers away instead of 384,400 kilometers away.
The sun rises over a cooling Earth and sets just three hours after it rises. The impact has set the Earth spinning so fast that entire day lasts just six hours. The days may pass quickly but the Earth changes slowly. To understand the making of our planet we need to fast forward through millions of years.
Around 3.9 billion years ago, a hail of meteors… We’re under attack from debris left over from solar system’s formation.They’re full of strange crystals inside which look like grains of salt, the same salt you put on your french fries and inside these crystals there are minute droplets of water. It seems these deadly missiles could contain the vital ingredient for life on Earth. There’s only a small amount of water inside each meteorite but as they bombard the Earth for over 20 million years pools of water grow. The water collects on solid ground, the Earth’s core remains molten. But Earth’s surface is cool around 70-80°C. Just enough to form a crust. In future we could swallow this water we take for a drink… every sip, every puddle, every drop of water in every ocean is billions of years old. And it may have travelled millions of kilometers to reach us carried inside a meteor.
The Earth looks more familiar but this is still a dangerous place. The wind is as fast or perhaps faster than most destructive hurricane that we ever witnessed. It’s a mega storm ripped up by planet’s rapid rotation. The Moon is so close to Earth, that the overwhelming gravity it creates huge tides that race across the planet’s surface. But over time the Moon moves away the waves calm and the planet starts to spinning slower and slower.
Over 3.8 billion years ago, after almost 700 million years after the planets birth, life
giving water covers its surface but not just water there’s something else down there…tiny islands they seem to have appeared from nowhere until molten rock bursts through the Earth’s crust and rises up through the ocean. Over time the lava cools and form volcanic islands. This is how land was formed, in the future they will join together to form the first continents.
The infant Earth has water and land it’s beginning to look like the planet we call home but the atmosphere is toxic and the temperature is scorching, nothing could live here. Meteors, they’ve been raining down since the planet’s formation but now 3.8 billion years ago the assault has entered a violent new phase, something has disturbed the orbits of these meteorites. They already brought water to the planet but they’re carrying something else too.
As the meteorites dissolve into water they release their minerals and transport carbon and primitive proteins, amino acids from outer space to the bottom of the ocean. It’s not smoke, it’s some kind of liquid. Sea water has seeped down into Earth through cracks in the crust getting hotter collecting minerals and gases on the way. It’s this potent mixture that’s vomiting back out into the ocean add to this all those minerals and chemicals from the meteorites and the water has become a chemical soup.
It’s impossible to know how or when but somehow these chemicals come together to create life. The water is now full of microscopic organisms these single celled bacteria are the earliest forms of life on earth. This is a defining moment in the making of the planet. Microscopic life is underway.
Image Source: Internet
– Pankaj R. Gode.
Illuminating The Dark Fields 