Moon Today: The Evolution Of The Earth

Moon today. The Earth keeps the Moon in orbit by its gravitational pull it sets onto it. The Moon is constantly spinning farther away from the Earth at a rate of approximately 3.78 centimeters per year. When the moon was closer to the planet, days were only five hours long, now, since the moon is slowly spinning away, the days get longer, meaning that the days are now 24 hours and will continue to slow down. Without the Moon, the Earth’s rotation could slow down, causing the planet to wobble slightly and have a disturbing effect on our seasons. This occurrence would take billions of years and might not occur at all. (1 February 2011, BBC News, why the moon is getting further away from the Earth)
Over millions of years, the Earth slowly continued to change. The Sun had risen over the Earth, making the Earth spin faster until the days were only six hours long. Debris continued to crash down onto the developing Earth. Suddenly, 3.9 billion years
ago, a hail of debris crashed down onto the Earth, larger and quicker than before. These debris were unlike the other debris that used to crash down regularly. Each of these debris carried small particles which contained minute droplets of water. (Beauty of Geography, February 7 2014, National Geographic The Story of Earth)
These types of debris bombarded the Earth one after the other. Over the course of 20 million years, millions of thousands of these debris, which are also called meteors, continued to hit the planet. This meant that the Earth was continuously collecting droplets of water and slowly, the planet was evolving into a planet filled with water. Because of the small layer of water accumulating on the planet, the lava, which was covering the surface of the Earth, cooled down to roughly 70 to 80 degrees, creating a solid crust. (Beauty of Geography, February 7 2014, National Geographic The Story of Earth)
Meteors continued to crash down onto the planet. Instead of carrying small droplets of water, they carried stromatolites, which is a solid structure created by a single-celled microbe named cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). (Stromatolites of Shark Bay, www.sharkbay.org.au) The meteors would crash land in the water, dissolve and release carbon amino acid, which they were carrying. These would bond together to create a rock/plant-like structure and had settled on the sea bed. These mountains of living bacteria turned sunlight into food for them to feed on, being the first photosynthesizing single-celled organism. By photosynthesizing, the stromatolites released a gas that would change the world for the better; oxygen. (Leslie Mullen, October 4 2010, stepping stones through time, www.astrobio.net) Slowly, The oxygen filled up the atmosphere with oxygen, creating an area for life on Earth as well as under water. If these stromatolites would not have formed, the evolution of life would have never occurred, meaning that no animals, no living, breathing organisms would have ever lived on Earth.
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist who studied multiple plants and animals during a five-year voyage around the world.
Darwin believed that evolution was the development of living organisms by natural selection. On a trip to the Galapagos Islands, many naturalists believed that species were created over a long period of time. Charles Darwin had a different approach to this belief. He made the discovery that animals changed and evolved to adapt to their environments. (Adrian J Desmond, Charles Darwin, www.britanica.com) Charles Darwin shared his idea of evolution by publishing his first book named ‘’On the Origin of Species’’. His book was published in 1859 and had a great success. (Natural selection, www.bbc.co.uk) He believed that every living thing is related to one another. This was called Darwinism. Natural selection is the process in which many living organisms change their appearance, size and behavioral traits to better adapt to their environment. This theory that Charles Darwin created is also called
survival