– January 1 at 00:00 (4.6 billion years ago)
The Solar System is formed.
– January 8 (4.5 billion years ago)
A protoplanet the size of Mars baptized with the name of Theia or Tea collides with the Earth and is about to destroy it. He only tore off a piece of it, from which the Moon was formed .
– January 16 (4.4 billion years ago)
The oldest mineral is formed, zirconium , of which we can find tiny crystals in the sand on our beaches. The day lasts only 6 hours .
– January 25 (4.28 billion years ago)
The terrestrial nucleus is formed and, therefore, the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth, fundamental for the evolution of life. In turn, another singular phenomenon, unique on our planet, begins to settle: plate tectonics.
– From February 9 to 25 (from 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago)
The Earth is subjected to a very intense shower of asteroids and comets, it is the Great Bombardment . About 20,000 craters larger than 20 km in diameter and nearly a hundred larger than 1,000 km in diameter must have formed.
– February 9 (4.1 billion years ago)
The temperature drops below 100 ºC and rain makes its appearance for the first time in history . And it did not stop raining for centuries! The clouds gave way to the oceans.
– March 13 (3.7 billion years)
First evidence that life already existed on our planet. They were found in Isua (Greenland), a place where the oldest known sedimentary rocks are also found. That fossil evidence consists of small 1- to 4-cm bumps that look a lot like modern-day stromatolites that we find in, say, Shark Bay in Western Australia.
– March 21 (3.6 billion years ago)
The first continent appears whose existence we have deduced from geochronological and paleomagnetic studies of the two oldest protocontinents on the planet: Kaapvaal and Pilbara. The average temperature is 90 ºC , the volcanoes spew a lot of gases and, at night, a huge Moon shines in the sky causing tides of 30 meters in a greenish sea due to the large amount of dissolved iron.
– March 29 (3.5 billion years ago)
Photosynthesis appears , the biological process by which sugars are synthesized from carbon dioxide -using sunlight as an energy source-, and releasing oxygen as a waste product. All thanks to cyanobacteria .
– June 16 (2.8 billion years ago)
The oxygen produced by the cyanobacteria reacts with the iron dissolved in the seas, forming iron oxide, which settles to the bottom and gives rise to banded iron formations : all the iron mines that exist on the planet come from this date. The oxygen, now free to escape into the atmosphere, causes the Great Pollution, causing the entire planet to freeze : it was the Huronian glaciation, which lasted 400 million years.
– June 24 (2.4 billion years ago)
99% of living beings have not been able to adapt to living in an environment with oxygen and have died or are confined in places where this lethal gas does not reach them. Others have learned to live with it because they have developed cellular respiration .
– July 18 (2.1 billion years ago)
The first multicellular organisms appear. They were found in 2010 in Gabon and are known as the Franceville or Gabonionta fossil group, although such a discovery is still under debate as there are scientists who think that they are not true multicellular organisms. If not, it would be Grypania spiralis the first of its kind, which appeared on August 5. But this fossil is not without controversy either. While this is happening, our planet continues to slow down its rotation and the day already lasts just over 12 hours.
– August 7 (2 billion years ago)
The eukaryotic cell appears, the first cell with a nucleus, and the first bacteriophage viruses, which are, today, the most abundant organism on the planet: it is estimated that there are more than 10 quintillion of them.
– August 19 (1.7 billion years ago)
sex appears.
During the month of September, life continued its anodyne existence, with the stromatolites on November 4 (720 million years ago)
The coldest day in the history of the Earth: 50º below zero in Ecuador. And it is that our planet is totally frozen.
– November 6, 6 pm (700 million years ago)
The first mushroom appears. Bad news for vegans: Mushrooms are closer relatives to animals than to plants. Sautéed with garlic, we are eating our cousins.
– November 11, 3 pm (630 million years ago)
The first complex multicellular organisms appear. Dubbed the ‘Ediacaran fauna’, they are soft-bodied, skeletonless beings that resemble pucks, mud-filled bags, or spongy mattresses.
– November 19 (540 million years ago)
This day is a holiday in the Calendar of Life.
1 am: the fauna of Edicara disappears and the most mysterious phenomenon in all of history occurs, an unprecedented explosion of life, the Cambrian explosion.
10 pm : life leaves the seas and goes to dry land. The proof? 25 rows of footprints left by lobster-sized, centipede-like animals found in 2017 in southeastern Canada.
– November 23
The Earth continues to slow down: the day has 21 hours.
the last 40 days
They are very intense, many things happen.
We have lived through five great extinctions, the most devastating of which was the Permian-Triassic extinction event (December 12, 252 million years ago), where life was on the verge of disappearing from the Earth. The last one was the Cretaceous-Tertiary (December 26, 65 million years ago) that ended with the dinosaurs.
The first vascular plants appeared on December 12 (250 million years ago), flowering plants on December 21, and grass did not make its debut until the morning of December 26. For its part, the first ants are from December 18 and the bees, from Christmas Eve. Let’s not forget that both are a specialized form of wasp.
Dinosaurs and mammals occupy the last 4 days of the year of life, a period in which the Himalayas and the Pyrenees rose (December 30) and the Mediterranean dried up (December 31 at 12 in the morning). At 5 pm on the last day of the year, three Australopithecus afarensis left footprints similar to ours on a layer of volcanic ash in Kenya: this is the first sign of bipedalism. And just 7 hours later, around the stroke of midnight on the last day of the Year of Life, a representative of the human species left its mark on the dusty surface of another body in the Solar System, the Moon.
Our species has come a long way in just seven hours.
References:
Dawkins, R. (2004) The Ancestor’s Tale, Antoni Bosch
Parker, S. (2014) Evolution. The Whole Story, Quintessence Editions
