The Hard Stuff

1. What was Earth like in its infancy? How does it compare with the Earth today? 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, it 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. Today the earth is full of life and water and rain there is no longer molten rocks flowing and there is no dangerous vapor in the clouds, today earth is life friendly.
2. How did Earth form? The Earth is thought to have been formed about 4.6 billion years ago by collisions in the giant disc-shaped cloud of material that also formed the Sun. Gravity slowly gathered this gas and dust together into clumps that became asteroids and small early planets called planetesimals.
3. Why is the liquid iron core important to the Earth? It produces the magnetic field that protects us from solar and cosmic radiation
4. Where did the Moon come from? The debris from this collision collected in an orbit around Earth to form the Moon. Capture theory - The Moon was a wandering body that formed elsewhere in the solar system, captured by Earth's gravity as it passed close by.
5. What function does the Moon have for Earth? The moon keeps the tide equalized and it helped the tilt of the earth without the moon we would have wild climate changes and a wobbly world. It slowed the rotation of earth as the moon drifted away.
6. Why is liquid water important to the history of the Earth? Just shy of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the