Earth’s earliest landscapes

Abstract

It has long been suspected that during the earliest phases of Earth’s geological history its surface environment was very different to that which we enjoy now. Surprisingly, Precambrian paleosols now known are similar in many ways to deeply weathered soils at the land surface today. Nothing in the Precambrian rock record has yet been found that is comparable to the soils rich in glass and agglutinates on the Moon or the glazed and metamorphosed soils thought to be forming on Venus. Known Precambrian paleosols are neither as oxidized and sulfate-rich as the soils of Mars, nor as carbonaceous and sulfate-rich as carbonaceous chondrites. By this standard, Precambrian paleosols are not as different from modern soils as they could be.