Around 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth was formed through high-speed collisions between dust and space rocks. Our planet, then, was only a molten sphere of magma thousands of miles deep. As it spun around and around, the Earth cooled, and after 1,000 to 1 million years, the first mineral crystals in its crust began to form.
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Meanwhile, Earth’s first water may have been carried here by ice-rich comets from outside our solar system, or it may have arrived in dust from the cloud of particles that birthed the sun and its orbiting planets, around the time of Earth’s formation.
When Earth was a hot magma ocean, water vapor and gasses escaped into the atmosphere. “It then rained out from the atmosphere as conditions got cool enough,” said lead study author Benjamin Johnson, an assistant professor in the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences at Iowa State University.
Over a billion years after the formation of the planet, around 3.2 billion years ago, the Earth became a vast ocean, with no continents. At least that’s what this new study suggests.
More details about this over at Space.com.
(Image Credit: PublicCo/ Pixabay)
Source: neatorama