{"id":223392,"date":"2025-10-14T11:08:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T16:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/geologists-discover-the-first-evidence-of-4-5-billion-year-old-proto-earth"},"modified":"2025-10-14T11:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T16:08:08","slug":"geologists-discover-the-first-evidence-of-4-5-billion-year-old-proto-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/geologists-discover-the-first-evidence-of-4-5-billion-year-old-proto-earth","title":{"rendered":"Geologists discover the first evidence of 4.5-billion-year-old \u2018proto Earth\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/geologists-discover-the-first-evidence-of-4-5-billion-year-old-proto-earth2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered extremely rare remnants of \u201cproto Earth,\u201d which formed about 4.5 billion years ago, before a colossal collision irreversibly altered the primitive planet\u2019s composition and produced Earth as we know today. Their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41561-025-01811-3\" target=\"_blank\">findings<\/a>, reported today in the journal <i><i>Nature Geoscience<\/i>s<\/i>, will help scientists piece together the primordial starting ingredients that forged early Earth and the rest of the solar system.<\/p>\n<p>Billions of years ago, the early solar system was a swirling disk of gas and dust that eventually clumped and accumulated to form the earliest meteorites, which in turn merged to form proto Earth and its neighboring planets.<\/p>\n<p>In this earliest phase, Earth was likely rocky and bubbling with lava. Then, less than 100 million years later, a Mars-sized meteorite slammed into the infant planet in a singular \u201cgiant impact\u201d event that completely scrambled and melted the planet\u2019s interior, effectively resetting its chemistry. Whatever original material proto Earth was made from was thought to have been altogether transformed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered extremely rare remnants of \u201cproto Earth,\u201d which formed about 4.5 billion years ago, before a colossal collision irreversibly altered the primitive planet\u2019s composition and produced Earth as we know today. Their findings, reported today in the journal Nature Geosciences, will help scientists piece together the primordial starting ingredients [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,19,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroid-comet-impacts","category-chemistry","category-existential-risks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}