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did earth have dirt when formed?
i mean if dirt is just an aftermath of rocks, species, etc, then it couldn't have been an original substance, right? so was early earth just one big mantle?
4 Answers
- SkyLv 72 years agoFavorite Answer
The earliest Earth was entirely molten during the period of heavy bombardment. During the next billion years or so it cooled and hardened as the bombardment greatly reduced, allowing the water in the atmosphere to condense and rain down, filling the oceans. During the next billion years or so as life began to form in the oceans, weathering and erosion from water and wind would have been degrading rocks down into small rocks and grains. Smaller and fewer impacts from meteorites would have also contributed to breaking up the solid crusty surface. I'm not sure what the poles looked like during that time, but if there were ice sheets, glaciers, and ice ages that came and went, that would have also helped to pulverize the surface crust into smaller grains (plus freeze/thaw cycles during the seasons). Once early algaes and other organisms were able to survive on land, taking a hold wherever they could and sucking nutrients from the minerals, they took probably another billion years to evolve into many different species of plants and mosses which further broke down the rocky surface, as well as depositing layers of decaying organic matter mixed with the granular rocky surface to form what we would now call dirt.
This is all greatly simplified from things I've read about it over the years, so if you want more details about it you'll have to do the research yourself.
- PavelLv 62 years ago
I think moss transforms rocks to soil.
Moss probably originated from something like algae from the sea.
- Anonymous2 years ago
No, it was almost all magma.