Basic Formation of the earth!
Created | Updated Mar 18, 2009
Introduction:
Today the Earth is one of eight planets, and its surface is a relatively peaceful place. But underneath the surface, the Earth is still a raging inferno, a reminder of the powerful forces which created the Earth in the first place. So how did the Earth form and what were the steps in its formation?
The beginning:
Our solar system began as a huge dust cloud which was the shape of a disc, slowly the centre of the disc started to collapse in on itself.
As more and more particles were dragged into the gravitational pull, the mass got bigger, hotter and eventually ignited into what we know today as our Sun. Even though the creation of the sun took most of the mass in our solar system there was still enough left for the creation of the planets.
Birth of the planets:
Before the planets had formed the left over mass was still in the shape of a disc, which the solar wind effected greatly, the solar wind was strong enough to force all the gas in the disc to the far reaches of our solar system but not strong enough to move the rock and metal particles.
This in turn resulted in the rocky inner planets and the gas giants in the outer solar system.
How the Moon was formed:
To begin with the inner solar system had twice as many planets as it does today and they were all in a very tightly packed orbit. As so many planets occupied the same area of space there was only a certain amount of time before they would start to collide.
We gained our natural satellite through this process; a newly formed planet and our earth were on a collision course.
The planet that we collided was called Theia and was just a bit smaller than Mars but as it drew close it would have completely filled the whole sky.
The energy of the impact was immense, luckily as earth was the bigger planet it managed to survive but Theia was completely destroyed.
Theia hit the earth on a steep angle and that initiated the earths rotation, at the time though the earth was spinning a lot faster as the days were only a couple of hours long.
The only thing left from the death of the Theia was a dust and small rocks and this was captured by the Earth s gravitational field and eventually gathered together to form the moon our "celestial cousin".
Meteors and asteroids:
After the moon had been formed the earth still didn t get a break, as if the cataclysmic collision wasn t enough, the earth got continuously bombarded by left over fragments of the creation of the solar system.
This bombardment was very severe as there were countless amounts of asteroids and comets (mainly from the kuiper belt and the oort cloud).
As these celestial bodies hit at intervals the earth didn t have a chance to cool down and continued to be a huge mass of molten rock and metal.
This brutal attack on Earth was thought to have been the working of the biggest planet in the solar system....Jupiter.
As Jupiter has a huge mass it has a huge gravitational pull on all objects around it, its said that Jupiter at some point had pulled a vast amount of asteroids out of their normal orbit and directly into the path of the inner solar system eventually reaching Earth.
During this assault our planet was lucky enough to have gained many minerals and even water (water is found in almost every asteroid but frozen). As the Earth eventually cooled and slowly solidified (the crust) the water that was put into the thin atmosphere by the collisions
Also cooled and began to rain down on the young planet.
Origins of the ocean:
At first it was thought that our planets water took billions of years to form the oceans , but scientist are now looking back into it and have found that it only took hundreds of millions of years.
There are rocks in Greenland dating back to 3,500 million years old that have been worn to a round shape similar to rocks you find on any beach, which has proven the theory.
At the time that the oceans first formed there was no land in sight; the Earth was covered in a shallow light green ocean that was packed with iron. This changed rapidly as the tectonic plates were on the move; volcanoes were constantly erupting and creating new land, by this time only islands were present.
These islands were almost exclusively volcanoes and forming more and more igneous rock in turn forming bigger and bigger archipelagos.
This period also seen the moon about 5-10 times closer than we view it today, which caused huge mile high tides that swept all around the globe.
These tides are the engine that produced the primordial soup, the primordial soup would have come about from the high level of minerals in the ocean and the huge tides mixing then together.
There are huge forces involved in moving that amount of water and that energy was used to force chemical bonds between minerals and then rip then apart again and as there were only small islands dotted around the planet every time a tide come around, the islands were completely submerged underwater and the minerals would be deposited.
The moon was/is continuously moving away from us at roughly the same rate as your finger nails grow, that s not that much considering the vastness of space but its been going on for about 5 billion years.
This consequently means that the tides have lost a lot of there energy
and are slowly getting weaker.
During this time the visible land rich with mineral deposits had a chance to stabilize as they weren t being ravaged by the wild ocean.
Gradually those small islands got bigger as the tectonic plates were pushing land into the air in some places (mountains) and dragging into the earth in others (subduction), which creates a natural balance.
Over the countless millions of years the land mass grew and grew and eventually it grew to what we no today.
Tectonic plates:
There are dozens of plates on the earth but only about seven stick out which are:
Eurasian
Antarctic
African
Indo-Australian
Pacific (ring of fire)
North America
South America
As the Earth slowly cooled a small layer of land began to form on the surface(crust) and almost immediatly these plate began to fracture as the centre of the earth needed to ventilate waste heat. These fractures what we now know as rifts are constantly making new land and recyclying old land. These plates sit on top of the mantle which is basically magma and slowly drift around bumping into each other and sliding over and under each other which cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Today the Earth is one of eight planets, and its surface is a relatively peaceful place. But underneath the surface, the Earth is still a raging inferno, a reminder of the powerful forces which created the Earth in the first place. So how did the Earth form and what were the steps in its formation?
The beginning:
Our solar system began as a huge dust cloud which was the shape of a disc, slowly the centre of the disc started to collapse in on itself.
As more and more particles were dragged into the gravitational pull, the mass got bigger, hotter and eventually ignited into what we know today as our Sun. Even though the creation of the sun took most of the mass in our solar system there was still enough left for the creation of the planets.
Birth of the planets:
Before the planets had formed the left over mass was still in the shape of a disc, which the solar wind effected greatly, the solar wind was strong enough to force all the gas in the disc to the far reaches of our solar system but not strong enough to move the rock and metal particles.
This in turn resulted in the rocky inner planets and the gas giants in the outer solar system.
How the Moon was formed:
To begin with the inner solar system had twice as many planets as it does today and they were all in a very tightly packed orbit. As so many planets occupied the same area of space there was only a certain amount of time before they would start to collide.
We gained our natural satellite through this process; a newly formed planet and our earth were on a collision course.
The planet that we collided was called Theia and was just a bit smaller than Mars but as it drew close it would have completely filled the whole sky.
The energy of the impact was immense, luckily as earth was the bigger planet it managed to survive but Theia was completely destroyed.
Theia hit the earth on a steep angle and that initiated the earths rotation, at the time though the earth was spinning a lot faster as the days were only a couple of hours long.
The only thing left from the death of the Theia was a dust and small rocks and this was captured by the Earth s gravitational field and eventually gathered together to form the moon our "celestial cousin".
Meteors and asteroids:
After the moon had been formed the earth still didn t get a break, as if the cataclysmic collision wasn t enough, the earth got continuously bombarded by left over fragments of the creation of the solar system.
This bombardment was very severe as there were countless amounts of asteroids and comets (mainly from the kuiper belt and the oort cloud).
As these celestial bodies hit at intervals the earth didn t have a chance to cool down and continued to be a huge mass of molten rock and metal.
This brutal attack on Earth was thought to have been the working of the biggest planet in the solar system....Jupiter.
As Jupiter has a huge mass it has a huge gravitational pull on all objects around it, its said that Jupiter at some point had pulled a vast amount of asteroids out of their normal orbit and directly into the path of the inner solar system eventually reaching Earth.
During this assault our planet was lucky enough to have gained many minerals and even water (water is found in almost every asteroid but frozen). As the Earth eventually cooled and slowly solidified (the crust) the water that was put into the thin atmosphere by the collisions
Also cooled and began to rain down on the young planet.
Origins of the ocean:
At first it was thought that our planets water took billions of years to form the oceans , but scientist are now looking back into it and have found that it only took hundreds of millions of years.
There are rocks in Greenland dating back to 3,500 million years old that have been worn to a round shape similar to rocks you find on any beach, which has proven the theory.
At the time that the oceans first formed there was no land in sight; the Earth was covered in a shallow light green ocean that was packed with iron. This changed rapidly as the tectonic plates were on the move; volcanoes were constantly erupting and creating new land, by this time only islands were present.
These islands were almost exclusively volcanoes and forming more and more igneous rock in turn forming bigger and bigger archipelagos.
This period also seen the moon about 5-10 times closer than we view it today, which caused huge mile high tides that swept all around the globe.
These tides are the engine that produced the primordial soup, the primordial soup would have come about from the high level of minerals in the ocean and the huge tides mixing then together.
There are huge forces involved in moving that amount of water and that energy was used to force chemical bonds between minerals and then rip then apart again and as there were only small islands dotted around the planet every time a tide come around, the islands were completely submerged underwater and the minerals would be deposited.
The moon was/is continuously moving away from us at roughly the same rate as your finger nails grow, that s not that much considering the vastness of space but its been going on for about 5 billion years.
This consequently means that the tides have lost a lot of there energy
and are slowly getting weaker.
During this time the visible land rich with mineral deposits had a chance to stabilize as they weren t being ravaged by the wild ocean.
Gradually those small islands got bigger as the tectonic plates were pushing land into the air in some places (mountains) and dragging into the earth in others (subduction), which creates a natural balance.
Over the countless millions of years the land mass grew and grew and eventually it grew to what we no today.
Tectonic plates:
There are dozens of plates on the earth but only about seven stick out which are:
Eurasian
Antarctic
African
Indo-Australian
Pacific (ring of fire)
North America
South America
As the Earth slowly cooled a small layer of land began to form on the surface(crust) and almost immediatly these plate began to fracture as the centre of the earth needed to ventilate waste heat. These fractures what we now know as rifts are constantly making new land and recyclying old land. These plates sit on top of the mantle which is basically magma and slowly drift around bumping into each other and sliding over and under each other which cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
