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Earth formed in this manner about 4.54 billion years ago (with an uncertainty of 1%) [25] [26] [4] and was largely completed within 10–20 million years. [27] In June 2023, scientists reported evidence that the planet Earth may have formed in just three million years, much faster than the 10−100 million years thought earlier.
The last estimate Kelvin gave, in 1897, was: "that it was more than 20 and less than 40 million year old, and probably much nearer 20 than 40". [27] In 1899 and 1900, John Joly calculated the rate at which the oceans should have accumulated salt from erosion processes and determined that the oceans were about 80 to 100 million years old.
A variation of this analogy instead compresses Earth's 4.6 billion year-old history into a single day: While the Earth still forms at midnight, and the present day is also represented by midnight, the first life on Earth would appear at 4:00 am, dinosaurs would appear at 10:00 pm, the first flowers 10:30 pm, the first primates 11:30 pm, and ...
A graphical view of the Cosmic Calendar, featuring the months of the year, days of December, the final minute, and the final second. The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of 13.8 billion years to a single year in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science education or popular science.
Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left over from the formation of the Sun, which also created the rest of the Solar System. Initially, Earth was molten due to extreme volcanism and frequent collisions with other bodies.
Late heavy bombardment of the Moon (and probably of the Earth as well) by bolides and asteroids, produced possibly by the planetary migration of Neptune into the Kuiper belt as a result of orbital resonances between Jupiter and Saturn. [5] "Remains of biotic life" were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia.
Paleontologists excavating in Russia’s Yakutia region uncovered the first known mummy of a saber-toothed cat. The cub was only about 3 weeks old when it died around 35,000 years ago.
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...