Abstract
The origins of the Earth and moon and the evidence for the first ocean are discussed. We explore answers to the following questions: Were there any continents 4 billion years ago? What would the view from a beach look like 4 billion years ago? How large were the first tides? Was the first ocean salty? What color was the first sky? When did life first arise in the ocean? During its early history, the Earth became a snowball; was the entire ocean ever frozen solid? What is the “albedo effect”?
“Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea.”
Rachel Carson
The Sea Around Us, 1951.
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Notes
- 1.
Valley et al. (2014).
- 2.
Schmandt et al. (2014).
- 3.
It could not have been any closer to Earth than three times the Earth’s radius, which is known as the Roche limit, the minimum distance from the center of the planet that a satellite can orbit without being destroyed by the severity of the tidal forces.
- 4.
Williams (2000).
- 5.
Bills and Ray (1999).
- 6.
Lathe (2004).
- 7.
Varga et al. (2006).
- 8.
Blamey et al. (2016).
- 9.
Walker (1979).
- 10.
Olson et al. (2016).
- 11.
Som et al. (2016).
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Harris, P.T. (2020). The Ocean Begins. In: Mysterious Ocean. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15632-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15632-9_1
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