The History of Earth
4.54 billion years, scrolled into a single day. Scroll through deep time and feel how late and how briefly we appear.
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Earth forms
Earth coalesces from the young Sun's disk of dust, molten, with no solid surface and no air.
The Moon is born
A roughly Mars-sized body strikes Earth; debris flung into orbit coalesces into the Moon.
The first oceans
Earth cools enough for liquid water to persist; ancient zircon crystals record an early crust.
The first life
Microbial life appears in shallow seas; stromatolites, layered microbial mats, are its oldest robust traces.
Oxygenic photosynthesis
Cyanobacteria begin splitting water and releasing oxygen, long before it builds up in the air.
The Great Oxidation
Over millions of years oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere, the planet's first great chemical revolution.
The complex cell
A cell engulfs a bacterium; it becomes the mitochondria that power all complex life.
Snowball Earth
Glaciers reach the tropics; Earth nearly freezes over, likely with thin ice at the equator.
The first animals
Soft-bodied multicellular animals settle the seafloor, the enigmatic Ediacaran world.
Cambrian diversification
Over a few million years almost all major animal body plans unfold, including the first true eyes.
Plants take the land
First mosses, then tall forests green the continents and reshape climate and air.
The Great Dying
Vast volcanism triggers the largest known mass extinction; the vast majority of marine species vanish.
The age of dinosaurs
Dinosaurs rule the land for some 165 million years; one of their lineages becomes the birds.
The impact
An asteroid, together with volcanism and prior stress, ends the non-avian dinosaurs; mammals rise.
Homo sapiens
Our species appears, in the very last seconds of the day.
Farming and today
Farming, cities and the entire present crowd into the very last blink of the day.
If all of Earth's history were a single day, our species would appear only seconds before midnight. Everything humans have ever built, thought and told happened in the very last moment.
Data after the geologic time scale. Dates are best scientific estimates with uncertainties; the 24-hour clock is an illustrative device.