Before the advent of man, the world was a completely different place. Our planet did not always look like it does now. It has undergone incredible changes over the past 4.5 billion years, and they are even more fantastic than you can imagine.
If you could go back in time and find yourself on Earth millions of years ago, you would see an alien planet taken straight from a science fiction book.
Giant mushrooms grew all over the planet
About 400 million years ago, trees only grew up to the waist of a person. Most of them were only a few tens of centimeters tall, and other plants were not much larger, with the exception of mushrooms. At one period in the history of the Earth, mushrooms called prototaxites were in every corner of the globe, and they towered above all other living organisms.
These living organisms were 8 meters high and 1 meter wide. This makes them smaller than many modern trees. But at that time they were the largest plants on the planet, towering as much as 6 meters above others.
They did not have the large caps that we associate with mushrooms today. On the contrary, they consisted almost entirely of the trunk, representing a mushroom pole sticking out of the ground. But they were all over the place. Fossil remains of these living organisms are found in all parts of the planet. Therefore, there would be few places on Earth without forests full of giant mushrooms.
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The sky was orange and the oceans were green
The sky was not always blue. It is believed that about 3.7 billion years ago, the oceans were green, the continents were black, and the sky overhead looked like orange fog.
At that time, the appearance of the Earth was very different from the present, and we have every reason to believe that this gives us a completely different color scheme. The oceans were green because iron compounds were dissolved in the seawater, adding green rust to it and giving it the appearance of a rusty copper coin. The continents were black because they were covered with cooling lava, on which no plants grew.
And then the sky could not have been blue. Its current blue color is due in part to the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, but it was not very much 3.7 billion years ago. On the contrary, the sky was mostly methane. When sunlight passed through the methane atmosphere, we saw an orange haze over our heads.
The planet stank of rotten eggs
We have theories for more than just what our planet looked like. Scientists are pretty sure they also know what it smelled like. And if someone could sniff the air 1.9 billion years ago, they would have noticed the pungent smell of rotten eggs.
This is because the oceans were full of gassing bacteria that fed on the salt in the sea water. These bacteria consumed the salt and released hydrogen sulfide, filling the air with a stench that scientists say could be compared to the smell of rotten eggs.
But these scientists are just being polite. Let's be honest - in our time there are creatures that produce gaseous emissions of hydrogen sulfide. If we forget about scientific terms for a second, scientists are really just saying that the world smelled like bunches (the loud release of gas from the intestines). That is exactly what those bacteria did - they often and unusually "farted".
The planet was purple
When the first plants appeared on Earth, they were not green. According to one theory, they were purple. And if you saw the Earth from space three or four billion years ago, it would be completely purple, not green as it is today.
It is believed that the first terrestrial life forms absorbed the light of the Sun in a slightly different way. Modern plants are green because they use chlorophyll to absorb sunlight, but it is believed that early plants used retinal for this, and this gave a bright shade of purple.
Perhaps lilac has long been the color of our planet. It is believed that some 1.6 billion years ago, after the plants on our planet turned green, some of our oceans took on a purple hue. There was a thick layer of lilac sulfur near the surface of the water, and that was enough to color all the oceans purple and make them extremely toxic.
The ground looked like a snowball
We all know that there were ice ages on Earth. But according to relatively recent data, 716 million years ago it was very cold on our planet. This period was called "Snowball Earth" because the globe may have been so covered in ice that it looked like a giant snowball floating in space.
The land was so cold that the glaciers were at the equator. Scientists have proven this by finding traces of ancient glaciers in Canada. Yes, exactly in Canada, because 700 million years ago Canada was at the equator.
As a result, the warmest parts of the Earth were as cold as the Arctic today. However, scientists no longer think that the planet looked like white snow, because there was another horror of life 716 million years ago. Volcanoes erupted constantly, filling the sky with ash and turning ice and snow into a dirty, smoky mess.
Acid rain has watered the Earth for 100,000 years
In the end, the Snowball Earth period ended in the worst possible way. It is believed that the planet has gone through a period called by scientists the period of "strong chemical effects of the atmosphere." Simply put, acid rain has been pouring down from the skies continuously for 100,000 years.
The acid rains were so intense that they melted the glaciers that covered the planet. Ultimately, it was the best thing that ever happened to Earth. This filled the oceans with nutrients, which made life underwater possible, and the atmosphere with oxygen, which made possible the rapid growth of living organisms in the Cambrian period.
For some time, however, it was a nightmare. The air was full of carbon dioxide, and acid rain even poisoned the oceans. This means that before the emergence of life on all Earth, it was a poisonous, inhospitable wasteland.
The Arctic was green and full of life
About 50 million years ago, the Arctic was a very different place. This was the early Eocene era, and the earth was much warmer. Palm trees grew in Alaska, and crocodiles swam off the coast of Greenland.
Even the northern tip of the planet was covered in greenery. It is believed that the Arctic Ocean was a giant freshwater pond and that it was teeming with life. The water was full of green algae, especially the green fern called Azolla, which bloomed throughout the Arctic.
It was not exactly a tropical climate. During this era, during the warmest months, the air temperature was only about 20 degrees Celsius. However, in the northern parts of our planet, there were many giant turtles, alligators and early hippos, adapting to survive in winter conditions of constant darkness.
Dust covered the sky
When an asteroid, which is blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs, fell on Earth 65 million years ago, this was not all. The planet had turned into a dark, scary place of horror, and it was even worse than you can imagine.
From the impact of the asteroid into the sky and even into space, dust, soil and stones rose. However, tons of these substances hovered in the atmosphere and enveloped the entire planet in a thick layer of dust. For the creatures that still remained on Earth, the sun itself disappeared from the sky.
However, this did not last long, at most several months. But even when the large cloud of dust dissipated, the sulfuric acid remained in the stratosphere and entered the clouds, which became so thick that they thinned out the sun's rays and caused terrible acid thunderstorms for 10 years.
Rains of hot magma
However, this asteroid was small compared to the asteroids that hit the planet four billion years ago. This asteroid rain has turned Earth into a hellish place from your worst nightmares.
The oceans got so hot they started to boil. The heat released by the falling asteroids ultimately vaporized Earth's first oceans, turning them into vapor, which simply rose up and disappeared. Huge portions of the Earth's surface have been melted. The giant rock masses that covered the planet turned into liquid that slowly flowed in rivers with incredibly high temperatures.
Worse, some of the rocks evaporated and became the Earth's atmosphere. Magnesium oxide rose into the atmosphere like evaporating water and condensed as droplets of liquid magma. As a result, liquid magma poured from the sky back then, at about the same frequency as rain today.
Giant insects were everywhere
About 300 million years ago, the planet was covered in large, low-lying swampy forests and there was a lot of oxygen in the air. It had about 50% more oxygen in it than it does today, and this led to an incredible surge of life. It also resulted in a large number of dire insects taken straight from the Godzilla movie.
For some creatures, all this oxygen in the atmosphere was too much. The little insects couldn't handle it, so they started getting bigger and bigger. In fact, some of them have become huge. Scientists have found the fossilized remains of dragonflies the size of modern gulls with wings over 0.6 meters.
Giant beetles have also moved across the Earth, as well as all kinds of other giant insects. But they weren't friendly. Scientists believe that these huge dragonflies were carnivorous predators.