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Earth may have been a 'water world' 3B years ago, scientists find
- corentin88 7y agoI learned only a few months ago that you can find in Australia some rocks that are 3bn years ago. It’s a unique situation I’ve learned and very "useful" to scientists! I went to Australia a few years ago and didn’t knew about that. Just want to go back there to see that! The site is very difficult to access though.
- samatman 7y agoA note to anyone who wants to follow up on this lead: these are called stromatolites.
- amelius 7y agoSo, were they completely immersed in water?
- andrewflnr 7y agoStromatolites are specifically fossilized bacterial colonies. Nothing GP said was about stromatolites, just "rocks". People should definitely go look up stromatolites, though. They're cool.
- WalterBright 7y ago> Just want to go back there to see that! Just don't climb Hanging Rock.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI hope that in a billion years we will have time lapse videos of how Earth changes :-).
- izzydata 7y agoStart taking 1 photo from space every 10 or 100 years.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoMay have to procure a little cubesat. Now I just have to eat healthy to stay around for the final video :)
- dredmorbius 7y agoAt 30 frames/second, shooting at one frame every 100,000 years, a film of the whole 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution would run 25 minutes. If you wanted more detail, you could shoot every 10,000 years, running a bit over 4 hours. Humans would appear in this long version of the film, in the final 0.667 seconds, or the final 20 frames. The 2,000 years since Christ's death would be a blur on the final frame. All of human history for the past 10,000 years would almost fill out that frame. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would appear 3 minutes 33 seconds before the end. The Cambrian Explosion, about 27 minutes from the end. That's the history of all multicellular life. At one frame every 100 years, the film would run 17 days 8 hours and change. And at a frame every decade, 300 years a seconds: 5 months 3 weeks. YouTube sees 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. If that were to corrspond with our movie of Earth's history, you'd need 150,000 years to upload all of it. Space is big, as you may have heard. Time is long.
- stewbrew 7y agoErm, is this actually news? I remember a small book from my childhood where the early earth was described as covered with water. My memories are vague though because I was more interested in the dinosaurs and sable tigers.
- rjkennedy98 7y agoI remember a big book from my childhood where the early earth was described as covered with water. I remember being more interested in the animals on the ark going in 2 by 2.
- gmt2027 7y agoSounds like My Book of Bible Stories. https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/bible-stories/ https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/bible-stories/
- gwd 7y agoBut even before that: > In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. ...And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. ... And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. So: First, Earth covered with water, clouds right up against the water, no sun Then, Earth covered with water, a clear visible area between the clouds and the water. Then Continents appear.
- ThefinalResult 7y agoAnd it will be again! ;)
- williesleg 7y agoI wonder how the ice age of the 1970's got cancelled? Scared the shit out of me when I was young. Now I know, that was part of the control.
- ngneer 7y agoCostner would be pleased...
- RickJWagner 7y agoBut the viewers (and movie financiers) would not.
- vixen99 7y agoFor the viewers, 'mixed reception' is more appropriate. Some of us will agree with reviewer Roger Ebert "The cost controversy aside, Waterworld is a decent futuristic action picture with some great sets, some intriguing ideas, and a few images that will stay with me".
- justlexi93 7y agoWas all the land flat or where did the water go? Melt all the ice and empty all the clouds, rivers and lakes - you still won't have enough water to cover the continents.
- bpodgursky 7y agoIf the earth's landmass was flat, you don't need as much water to cover the continents. If the earth had just "recently" cooled from being a ball of magma, it makes sense that there weren't major upheavals yet. It was only after significant tectonic motion, subduction, etc, that you got the variety of geographic terrain and continents we have now.
- Tade0 7y agoI wonder how our planet would be characterised in the context of the whole galaxy. We have no reference point(as in, other civilisations), so the fact that we're e.g. tilted somewhat, rotate at a decent speed or are in 70% covered by water might well be the weirdest thing in the universe.
- jon_richards 7y agoThe weirdest thing about us is most likely the fact that our moon is almost exactly the same size as our sun (relative to distance).
- fyrefoxboy12 7y agothat's very likely. I mean, Water World is pretty much a future-set-in-the-past story isn't it?