Welcome to Earth.com, your online information portal dedicated to our wonderful Planet Earth. Our goal is to help people learn how to create a sustainable environment for future generations and ensure a better world for all of the Earth’s inhabitants tomorrow.

Thanks to continuing research, study, and experimentation, we now know more than ever before about our Planet Earth. As technology advances, we continue to learn more about our planet and what’s going on around us and much of what we are learning points out that our Planet Earth is unique in this solar system.

Earth is the only planet in the solar system with a crust of tectonic plates floating on top of a magma interior. Over time, the plate tectonics pull carbon and other remnants of life back into the interior of the Earth where they are recycled. Without the plate tectonics there would be no way to recycle the carbon, and the Earth would overheat and our planet would end up hot and barren like Venus.

Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface may be covered in water, but the rest of the planet is composed mainly of iron, oxygen and silicon. The molten core of the Earth is 88% iron, creating a giant magnetic effect with opposite poles at the top and bottom. The magnetosphere field extends thousands of miles out from the surface where it channels the solar winds and protects us from harmful radiation.

The Earth’s atmosphere also extends out thousands of miles, although 75% of the atmosphere is contained within the first ten miles above the planet’s surface. At higher altitudes the atmosphere is extremely thin and there is less protection, free-moving particles can escape the pull of the earth’s gravity and get blown into space by solar winds.

We’ve discovered evidence of water on Mars, and the building blocks of life’s proteins on Saturn’s moons. Scientists have also seen amino acids in nebulae in deep space, but for now, Earth is the only planet known to have life and we are very lucky to be on it. Help keep the Earth healthy and we will all have a brighter tomorrow.

How Did the Earth Get Here?

Of all of the questions that face man, the question of how the earth was formed is one of the most challenging, and the different theories that man has formed over the years on the creation of the planet have often generated a great deal of controversy.

While today’s scientists believe that they have finally found the answer to this most basic question, it is important to remember that previous generations, societies and cultures assumed that their answers to this question were correct in their day too. Here is some basic information on the most popular theory of how the earth was formed.

The development of our planet began some 4.6 billion years ago, and the Earth has gone through staggering geological changes since that time. The Earth has been existence in some form for roughly a third of the history of the universe itself. The formation of our home planet began with the dawn of the Hadean era, in which various solar debris accumulated into an increasingly dense globe.

Very little of this matter exists in its former form today, but scientists have concluded that the primary ingredients were basic rocks and crystals. At some point during this era, the young earth formed its first mantle shortly before it collided with another large protoplanet, and much of the matter on our planet was formed by this event. In the chaos that followed, the Earth was a violent setting that was constantly bombarded by meteorites and rocked by terrific and constant volcanoes.

As the planet cooled off and things began to settle down, the Earth entered the Archaean era. It was during this period that our atmosphere was created, but the total absence of an ozone layer and the scarcity of oxygen meant that this would have been a difficult place to survive. However, the very first fossils began to appear during this time, and with it the story of life on Earth began. By this time, the Earth was large enough to attract the building blocks of life into its gravitational field, and the accumulation of water began to create our great oceans and seas.

In these waters, life slowly evolved, and it is likely that the early days of evolution included a world of lifeforms that is even more diverse than the world of today. Some of these lifeforms found a way to build and store energy through the use of the sunlight and the abundant carbon dioxide, and the oxygen that was created by this basic form of photosynthesis allowed for evolution to continue down its curious path.