Kevin Costner, eat your heart out. New research shows that the early Earth, home to some of our planet’s first lifeforms, may have been a real-life “waterworld”—without a continent in sight.
Kevin Costner, eat your heart out. New research shows that the early Earth, home to some of our planet’s first lifeforms, may have been a real-life “waterworld”—without a continent in sight.
The study, which appears today in Nature Geoscience, takes advantage of a quirk of hydrothermal chemistry to suggest that the surface of Earth was likely covered by a global ocean 3.2 billion years ago. It may even have looked a bit like the post-apocalyptic, and land-free, future imagined in Costner’s infamous film Waterworld.
The group’s findings could help scientists to better understand how and where single-cell organisms first emerged on Earth, said Boswell Wing, a coauthor of the research.
“The history of life on Earth tracks available niches,” said Wing, an associate professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. “If you’ve got a waterworld, a world covered by ocean, then dry niches are just not going to be available.”
The study also feeds into an ongoing debate over what ancient Earth may have looked like: Was the planet much hotter than it is today?
Read more at University Of Colorado At Boulder
Image: A view of the trees and shrubby growth of the Panorama district. Credits: Jana Meixnerova; Benjamin Johnson
