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Saturday, March 7, 2020

New research shows that the early Earth, home to some of our planet’s first lifeforms, may have been a real-life “waterworld”– without a continent in sight

Title:
Early Earth may have been a sunken 'waterworld'

Published:
HeritageDaily, 2 March 2020

From the article:
"New research shows that the early Earth, home to some of our planet’s first lifeforms, may have been a real-life “waterworld”– without a continent in sight.

The study, which appears March 2 in Nature Geoscience, takes advantage of a quirk of hydrothermal chemistry to suggest that the surface of Earth was likely covered by a global ocean 3.2 billion years ago. It may even have looked a bit like the post-apocalyptic, and land-free, future imagined in Costner’s infamous film Waterworld."

To read this article:
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2020/03/early-earth-may-have-been-a-sunken-waterworld/126009

To read the scholarly article:
Johnson, B.W., Wing, B.A. (2020). Limited Archaean continental emergence reflected in an early Archaean 18O-enriched ocean. Nature Geoscience, 13, 243–248. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-0538-9