The History of Earth

4.6 Ga – ongoing65 items

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Hutton’s Unconformity at Siccar Point, Berwickshire, 2011: tilted grey Silurian greywacke under red Devonian sandstone. Photo: Lysippos. CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Hutton’s Unconformity at Siccar Point, Berwickshire, 2011: tilted grey Silurian greywacke under red Devonian sandstone. Photo: Lysippos. CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

4.5 billion years of rock, water and air

The planet itself, from its first solids to the map we know: the impact that made the Moon, the first oceans and the first crust, an atmosphere that gained oxygen, ice that reached the equator, and seven supercontinents assembled and torn apart. Life appears only where it changed the rocks.

How to read it

  • The four eons — Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, Phanerozoic — and their ten eras run as bands, on the boundaries of the current ICS chart. Zoom out and the three eras with animals shrink to the last eighth.

  • Supercontinents — Vaalbara, Kenorland, Columbia, Rodinia, Pannotia, Gondwana and Pangaea — are periods too, with how sure geologists are in the notes.

  • Places are where the evidence crops out today: the Jack Hills, Acasta, Isua, the Pilbara, Vredefort, Sudbury, Siberia, the Deccan, Yucatán.

Threads to follow

  • continents — first crust to Pangaea and beyond

  • oceans — from the first water to a dried-up sea

  • oxygen — how the air changed, and the rust it left

  • ice — the oldest glaciation, two Snowball Earths

  • asteroids — the great craters, and a disputed barrage

  • volcanoes — the floods of lava that split Pangaea

For the living side of the story see The Evolution of Life and The Big Five Mass Extinctions; The Ice Ages takes over for the last three million years.

The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, — no prospect of an end. — James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth”, 1788

Dates are years before present, with the uncertainty their sources give. Eon and era boundaries follow the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, v2026/06.

Items

  1. Hadean

    ≈ 536 million years

  2. The Solar System’s first solids

  3. Earth forms

  4. The Moon-forming impact

  5. The oldest piece of Earth

    Jack Hills, Western Australia

  6. The first oceans

  7. Nuvvuagittuq: the oldest rock?

    Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, Nunavik, Quebec

  8. The Late Heavy Bombardment?

    ≈ 300 million years

  9. Archean

    ≈ 1.53 billion years

  10. Eoarchean

    ≈ 431 million years

  11. Acasta Gneiss

    Acasta River, Northwest Territories

  12. Isua: pillow lavas and banded iron

    Isua supracrustal belt, southwest Greenland

  13. Paleoarchean

    ≈ 400 million years

  14. The oldest reliable magnetic field

  15. Mesoarchean

    ≈ 400 million years

  16. When did plate tectonics begin?

  17. Vaalbara

    ≈ 400 million years

  18. Pongola glaciation, the oldest ice

  19. Neoarchean

    ≈ 300 million years

  20. Kenorland

    ≈ 270 million years

  21. Proterozoic

    ≈ 1.96 billion years

  22. Paleoproterozoic

    ≈ 900 million years

  23. Continents rise above the sea

  24. Banded iron of the Hamersley Basin

    Hamersley Range, Pilbara, Western Australia

  25. Huronian glaciation

    ≈ 230 million years

  26. Great Oxidation Event

    ≈ 210 million years

  27. The sulfur signal vanishes

  28. Vredefort impact

    Vredefort Dome, South Africa

  29. The “boring billion”

    ≈ 1 billion years

  30. Columbia (Nuna)

    ≈ 500 million years

  31. Sudbury impact

    Sudbury Basin, Ontario

  32. Mesoproterozoic

    ≈ 600 million years

  33. An 18-hour day

  34. Grenville orogeny

    ≈ 110 million years

  35. Neoproterozoic

    ≈ 461 million years

  36. Rodinia

    ≈ 150 million years

  37. Sturtian Snowball Earth

    ≈ 57 million years

  38. Marinoan Snowball Earth

    ≈ 12 million years

  39. Pannotia

    ≈ 50 million years

  40. Gaskiers glaciation

  41. The inner core begins to freeze?

  42. Gondwana

    ≈ 370 million years

  43. Phanerozoic

  44. Paleozoic

    ≈ 287 million years

  45. Iapetus closes: Scotland meets England

  46. Late Paleozoic Ice Age

    ≈ 100 million years

  47. Pangaea

    ≈ 135 million years

  48. Siberian Traps

    ≈ 900 thousand years · Putorana Plateau, Siberian Traps

  49. Mesozoic

    ≈ 186 million years

  50. Central Atlantic Magmatic Province

    ≈ 600 thousand years

  51. Gondwana begins to split

  52. The South Atlantic opens

  53. Cenozoic

  54. Deccan Traps

    ≈ 800 thousand years · Deccan Traps, western India

  55. Chicxulub crater

    Expedition 364 drill site M0077, off Progreso, Yucatán

  56. India hits Asia

  57. Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum

    ≈ 200 thousand years

  58. The Hawaiian–Emperor bend

  59. Antarctica freezes

  60. Messinian salinity crisis

    ≈ 637 thousand years

  61. The Zanclean flood

    Strait of Gibraltar

  62. The Isthmus of Panama closes

    Isthmus of Panama

  63. Hutton at Siccar Point

    Siccar Point, Berwickshire

  64. Wegener proposes continental drift

    Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt am Main

  65. Magnetic stripes on the sea floor