Early Earth is often described as 'Hadean' for good reason. Arising from the ashes of a collision that gave us our Moon, the primordial eon was characterized by hellish heat trapped beneath a thick blanket of carbon dioxide and water vapor.
Amid the scant bits of mineral evidence we do have from the Hadean are signs that it already harbored oceans after just a few hundred million years of cooling.By the eon's end around 4 billion years ago, the carbon cycle seems to have stabilized temperatures to the point life could exist rather happily.
A rapidly churning crust of wet, molten rock packed with pyroxene could account for a rapid loss of all that carbon dioxide in a stabilizing process that would take millions, rather than billions of years.And then, following a cooling that gave us a regenerating crust consisting of a handful of slowly moving plates, all of that magnesium-rich rock would be left far beneath our feet.
The scenario is an intriguing one, not least because such a phenomenon would have helped kick-start life in other ways.
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