This story is highly simplified, and each stage in it is under detailed investigation by different

sets of specialists. But the outline, for our purposes, is sound.

Before Earth
Earth was not around at the beginningthe universe began without us some 10 billion years
earlier than Earth. The universe started out with only two elements, hydrogen and helium gas,
which formed stars that burned these elements in nuclear fusion reactions.
Long, long ago (some 5 billion years ago) in a perfectly ordinary place in the galaxy, a supernova
exploded, pushing a lot of its heavy-element wreckage into a nearby cloud of hydrogen gas and
interstellar dust. The mixture grew hot and compressed under its own gravity, and at its center a
new star began to form. Around it swirled a disk of the same material, which grew white-hot
from the great compressive forces. That new star became our Sun, and the glowing disk gave rise
to Earth and its sister planets. We can see just this sort of thing happening elsewhere in the
universe.
While the Sun grew in size and energy, beginning to ignite its nuclear fires, the hot disk slowly
cooled. This took millions of years. During that time, the components of the disk began to freeze
out into small dust-size grains.
Iron metal and compounds of silicon, magnesium, aluminum, and oxygen came out first in that
fiery setting. Bits of these are preserved in chondrite meteorites. Slowly these grains settled
together and collected into clumps, then chunks, then boulders and finally bodies large enough to
exert their own gravityplanetesimals. This whole process is rather well modeled by scientists
like those at the Planetary Research Institute.
As time went by, planetesimals grew by collision with other bodies, and as their mass grew
larger, the energies involved did too. By the time they reached a hundred kilometers or so in size,
planetesimal collisions produced a lot of outright melting and vaporization, and the materials
which we can confidently call rocks and iron metalbegan to sort themselves out. The dense
iron settled in the center and the lighter rock separated into a mantle around the iron, in a
miniature of Earth and the other inner planets today. Planetologists call this differentiation, and it
is documented not only for the planets, but also for most of the large moons and the largest
asteroids (from which come iron meteorites). The asteroids Ceres, Pallas and Vesta survive from
that time, miniature planets.
Earth Is Born

At some point during this time, the Sun ignited. Although the Sun was only about two-thirds as
bright as it is today, the process of ignition (the so-called T-Tauri phase) was energetic enough to
blow away most of the gaseous part of the protoplanetary disk. The chunks, boulders, and

planetesimals left behind continued to collect into a handful of large, stable bodies in well-spaced
orbits.
Earth was the third one of these, counting outward from the Sun. We know that the process of
accumulation was violent and spectacular, because the smaller pieces left huge craters on the
larger ones. Our studies of the other planets in the Space Age document these impacts
everywhere we've looked.
At one point early in this process a very large planetesimal struck Earth an off-center blow and
sprayed much of Earth's rocky mantle into space. The planet got most of it back after a period of
time, but some of it collected into a second planetesimal circling Earth. It's still thereit's the
Moon. Since this theory took center stage in the mid-1980s, it has become everyone's favorite.
And as geophysicist Don Anderson once explained, "The objection that such an event would be
extremely rare is actually a point in its favor, since the Moon is unique."
The oldest surviving rocks on Earth were formed some 500 million years after Earth first formed.
So all of the activity of Earth's birth was already ancient history (except for a possible "late
bombardment" of the last stray planetesimals around 4 billion years ago). The oldest rocks, dated
by the uranium-lead method as about 4.03 billion years old, show that there were volcanoes,
continents, oceans, crustal plates, and life on Earth in those days. While the eons that followed
were full of strange stories and far-reaching changes, the Earth had taken on its basic structure
long before.
PS: The evidence for this story is not the kind of things that geologists find visible in rocks. It's
the result of patient evidence-collecting from meteorites and the geology of the other planets,
analyses of very large bodies of geochemical data, and generations of serious argument among
many different sets of specialists. You can take it or leave it, since it doesn't affect the price of
beans, but if you want to learn science or have it taught in your schools, this is the story of Earth
this and no other.

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In the very beginning of earth's history, this planet was a giant, red hot, roiling, boiling sea of
molten rock - a magma ocean. The heat had been generated by the repeated high speed collisions
of much smaller bodies of space rocks that continually clumped together as they collided to form
this planet. As the collisions tapered off the earth began to cool, forming a thin crust on its
surface. As the cooling continued, water vapor began to escape and condense in the earth's early
atmosphere. Clouds formed and storms raged, raining more and more water down on the
primitive earth, cooling the surface further until it was flooded with water, forming the seas.
It is theorized that the true age of the earth is about 4.6 billion years old, formed at about the
same time as the rest of our solar system. The oldest rocks geologists have been able to find are

3.9 billion years old. Using radiometric dating methods to determine the age of rocks means
scientists have to rely on when the rock was initially formed (as in - when its internal minerals
first cooled). In the infancy of our home planet the entire earth was molten rock - a magma
ocean.
Since we can only measure as far back in time as we had solid rock on this planet, we are limited
in how we can measure the real age of the earth. Due to the forces of plate tectonics, our planet
is also a very dynamic one; new mountains forming, old ones wearing down, volcanoes melting
and reshaping new crust. The continual changing and reshaping of the earth's surface that
involves the melting down and reconstructing of old rock has pretty much eliminated most of the
original rocks that came with earth when it was newly formed. So the age is a theoretical age.
When Did Life on Earth Begin?
Scientists are still trying to unravel one of the greatest mysteries of earth: When did "life" first
appear and how did it happen? It is estimated that the first life forms on earth were primitive,
one-celled creatures that appeared about 3 billion years ago. That's pretty much all there was
for about the next two billion years. Then suddenly those single celled organisms began to
evolve into multicellular organisms. Then an unprecedented profusion of life in incredibly
complex forms began to fill the oceans. Some crawled from the seas and took residence on land,
perhaps to escape predators in the ocean. A cascading chain of new and increasingly
differentiated forms of life appeared all over the planet, only to be virtually annihilated by an
unexplained mass extinction. It
would be the first of several mass
extinctions in Earth's history.
Scientists have been looking
increasingly to space to explain
these mass extinctions that have
been happening almost like
clockwork since the beginning of
"living" time. Perhaps we've been
getting periodically belted by more
space rocks (ie. asteroids), or the
collision of neutron stars
happening too close for comfort?
Each time a mass extinction occurred, life found a way to come back from the brink. Life has
tenaciously clung to this small blue planet for the last three billion years. Scientists are finding
new cues as to how life first began on earth in some really interesting places - the deep ocean.
Checking the Fossil Record
Scientists have studied rocks using radiometric dating methods to determine the age of earth.
Another really cool thing they've found in rocks that tells us more about the story of earth's past
are the remains of living creatures that have been embedded in the rocks for all time. We call
these fossils. It has been the careful study of earth's fossil record that has revealed the exciting

picture about the kinds of creatures that once roamed this planet. Fossilized skeletons of
enormous creatures with huge claws and teeth, ancient ancestors of modern day species (such as
sharks) that have remained virtually unchanged for millions of years, and prehistoric jungles lush
with plant life, all point to a profusion of life and a variety of species that continues to populate
the earth, even in the face of periodic mass extinctions.
By studying the fossil record scientists have determined that the earth has experienced very
different climates in the past. In fact, general climactic conditions, as well as existing species,
are used to define distinct geologic time periods in earth's history. For example, periodic
warming of the earth - during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods - created a profusion of plant
and animal life that left behind generous organic materials from their decay. These layers of
organic material built up over millions of years undisturbed. They were eventually covered by
younger, overlying sediment and compressed, giving us fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum and
natural gas.
Alternately, the earth's climate has also experienced periods of extremely cold weather for such
prolonged periods that much of the surface was covered in thick sheets of ice. These periods of
geologic time are called ice ages and the earth has had several in its history. Entire species of
warmer-climate species died out during these time periods, giving rise to entirely new species of
living things which could tolerate and survive in the extremely cold climate. Believe it or not,
humans were around during the last ice age - the Holocene (about 11,500 years ago) - and we
managed to survive. Creatures like the Woolly Mammoth - a distant relative of modern-day
elephants - did not.
Read about a really exciting recent find of a perfectly-preserved, frozen Woolly Mammoth! This
was a particularly exciting find because it wasn't a fossil that scientists found, but actual tissue,
which still has its DNA record intact.
Also, read more about the Ice Man - another frozen tissue sample of a human being who was
frozen into the high mountains of France. He was just recently discovered as thousands of years
of ice pack have finally melted from around his body.