NEWER VERSION: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgRHZ5jDPUUWatch 3.3 billion years of continental drift. Credits in the video.For this mapped onto a globe, vi...
I recently learned a really weird piece of evidence geologists apparently look at: heavy oxygen trapped in rocks. Turns out water with oxygen18 is slower to evaporate than water with the lighter oxygen16, which apparently means that rocks absorb oxygen18 water more readily than oxygen16 water, and therefore landmasses tend to accumulate oxygen18 leaving less in the seas… which means, when geologists find really old sea floor rocks full of oxygen18, it suggests that there was a lot more oxygen18 in the seas back then, which suggests that there was very little dry land to absorb oxygen18, meaning ancient earth might have been a water world, which is what we see in the start of the video.
I recently learned a really weird piece of evidence geologists apparently look at: heavy oxygen trapped in rocks. Turns out water with oxygen18 is slower to evaporate than water with the lighter oxygen16, which apparently means that rocks absorb oxygen18 water more readily than oxygen16 water, and therefore landmasses tend to accumulate oxygen18 leaving less in the seas… which means, when geologists find really old sea floor rocks full of oxygen18, it suggests that there was a lot more oxygen18 in the seas back then, which suggests that there was very little dry land to absorb oxygen18, meaning ancient earth might have been a water world, which is what we see in the start of the video.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/ancient-earth-may-have-been-a-water-world-with-no-dry-land/
*which also has obvious implications for the origins of life, as the article mentions—none of Darwin’s “warm little ponds”