An artistic illustration of Earth today and 4.5 billion years ago. (Image: Tobias Stierli / NCCR PlanetS)
An artistic illustration of Earth today and 4.5 billion years ago. (Image: Tobias Stierli / NCCR PlanetS) - A team of international scientists has gained new insights into Earth's atmosphere of 4.5 billion years ago. Their results have implications for the possible origins of life on Earth. Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Earth would have been hard to recognise. Instead of the forests, mountains and oceans that we know today, the surface of our planet was covered entirely by magma - the molten rocky material that emerges when volcanoes erupt. This much the scientific community agrees on. What is less clear is what the atmosphere at the time was like.
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