Early Earth Timeline

By Evelyn.chin
  • 4600 BCE

    4.6 billion years ago

    A nearby star exploded and sent a shock wave and that made it so that there was a lot of dust around the sun. This is called the big bang.
  • 3990 BCE

    4.6-3.99 billion years ago

    The gravity from the sun pulls dust together to form rocks and the rocks collide into each other to form planets. The rocks keep accreting and keep getting bigger.
  • 3890 BCE

    3.99-3.89 billion years ago

    The bigger objects start bumping into each other such as planets colliding with Earth. Somewhere in this stage, our moon was formed because a planet the size of Mars collided into Earth and some debris was knocked off and the debris came together again and stayed within Earth's gravitational field and became our moon.
  • 3390 BCE

    3.89-3.39 billion years ago

    Objects are crashing into Earth and leaving metal on the surface of the Earth.
  • 3190 BCE

    3.39-3.19 billion years ago

    Meteors and other objects collided into the Earth and left water on our Earth. The stage is also called the heavy bombardment stage.
  • 3000 BCE

    3 billion years ago

    The Earth cools and creates a lot of cool features such as the tectonic plates. The heavier stuff sinks to the center and creates the core of our Earth and that core stays hot and moves around because of the radioactive material.