DO WE NEED TO REWRITE EARTH’S HISTORY?

The era of Earth’s formation, alongside the other planets in orbit around the young Sun, has long been seen as a time of dramatic collisions and cataclysmic encounters between newborn planets, but new discoveries have suggested that conditions could have been even more violent than previously suspected. And according to one theory, the most devastating event in our planet’s entire history was triggered not by a chance encounter with a random rogue planet, but by a ticking timebomb beneath Earth’s own surface.

Astronomers have pinned down the age of the Earth with surprising precision to 4.54 billion years, give or take a few tens of millions of years. Our planet’s active geology makes it