4 Earth’s Origins and the Precambrian

The most popular explanation for the origin of the Moon, the ‘Giant Impact Hypothesis’ or the ‘Moon-Forming Event’, is that it resulted
from debris after collision of Earth with a Mars-sized proto-planet, probably about 100 million years after the formation of the Solar System.
The Moon was very close to the Earth when it formed and has since travelled away from the Earth. Credit: Steve A. Munsinger/Science Source.

There is no accurate date for the formation of the Universe;
however, an approximation of over thirteen billion years
(13.8 Gyr) appears likely. From that time onwards, the Uni-
verse has continuously expanded, with the creation of galax-
ies and stars within them. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way,
was formed at around 10 Ga, and according to the nebular
hypothesis, our own star, the Sun, formed at the centre of a
proto-planetary disk at 4.57 Ga. Planetismals collided and
ultimately acquired sufficient mass to form Earth and the
other planets.
The Precambrian Earth. Until the twentieth century,
‘real’ fossils with hard parts had only been found in Cam-
brian and later rocks, and all rocks formed earlier than that
were thus termed ‘Precambrian’, a term still widely used
today. Before and during the nineteenth century there was
no good means of knowing the age of the Earth, and esti-
mates varied from the six thousand years calculated from the
addition of biblical dates by Bishop Ussher in the seven-
teenth century to the few hundred million years suggested by
Charles Lyell in the nineteenth century. However, it is now
known that the oldest rocks on Earth so far radiometrically
measured are about four billion years old, and the individual
minerals within some of them have been dated to be from as
far back as 4.4 Ga (Wilde et al., 2001). Thus there are
enormous geographical and chronological age ranges within
Precambrian rocks, whose description and discussion are
largely outside the scope of this book. The rocks older than
about 2.5 Ga are termed the Archean, and those dated
between the Archean and the base of the Cambrian at
543 Ma the Proterozoic, which is divided into the Paleopro-
terozoic, Mesoproterozoic, and Neoproterozoic successively
(see Endpaper). The age unrepresented by rocks between the
Earth’s origin and the Archean is termed the Hadean.
The Origin of the Earth and the Moon. Because of the
restless tectonic evolution of our planet, the rocks originally
formed near the times of the origin of the Earth have long
since been subducted and recycled within the mantle. How-
ever, from lunar and other planetary studies, scientists

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78 EARTH’S ORIGINS AND THE PRECAMBRIAN
assume that most, if not all, the heavenly bodies in the Solar
System were formed within a relatively short time of each
other. Therefore the age of the Sun, planets, and asteroids
should be close to the age of primitive meteorites, and from
that the age of the Earth’s formation is now agreed to have
probably been at 4.57 Ga (Connelly et al., 2012). The most
popular explanation for the origin of the Moon, which is
known as the ‘Giant Impact Hypothesis’ or the ‘Moon-
Forming Event’, is that it resulted from debris after collision
of Earth with a Mars-sized proto-planet, probably about
100 million years after the formation of the Solar System.
It is interesting to note that George Darwin (the second son
of the pioneer biologist and geologist Charles Darwin) had
suggested as early as 1898 that the Earth and Moon had been
one body in the deep past and that the Moon later travelled
away from the Earth.
Early Earth. We here refer to ‘Early Earth’ as roughly the
first 1.5 billion years of Earth’s evolution, before the onset of
plate tectonics, and it includes the Hadean and parts of the
Archean Eons. Nearly all the traces of Early Earth, including
a massive bombardment history, have been demolished by
younger plate tectonic processes, but clues recorded and
preserved in some of the oldest rocks, combined with numer-
ical modelling and the cratered surface of the Moon and
other terrestrial planets, yield important insights into the
Early Earth. How continental crust formed and evolved
through time is highly controversial, but during the Early
Earth new continental crust must have been dominantly
mafic, had a lower silica content, and was probably much
thinner (<20 km), and some argue that the net crustal growth
rate may have been fairly constant (Fig. 4.1).
Early Earth was certainly very different from the planet we
know today; the mantle was clearly hotter than the modern
mantle, mantle plumes of very hot magma were abundant,
and the lithosphere was thinner and more buoyant. This very
different and hot geodynamic regime, facilitated by high heat
production due to radioactive decay, core differentiation, and
the Moon-forming event, would have limited subduction of
tectonic slabs (e.g. O’Neill et al., 2007), or perhaps resulted
in flatter subduction. Vertical tectonic processes appear to
have been dominant over horizontal ones, and the mode of
mantle convection was probably one of stagnant lid convec-
tion, as proposed for other terrestrial planets in the Solar
System where there is no evidence for plate tectonics.
After the Moon-forming event, it is likely that a fast
spinning Earth (a day was only a few hours) retained enough
heat to melt large parts if not all of the mantle for tens of
millions of years, giving rise to what is generally termed a
magma ocean. The two large low shear-wave velocity prov-
inces (LLSVPs) in the lowermost mantle beneath Africa and
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the Pacific Ocean, named Tuzo and Jason (Fig. 2.13) have
been argued by some to have been stable for a very long time
(Torsvik et al., 2014), and peridotitic materials enriched in
iron and perovskite provide a suitable fit to their seismic
properties. Magmatic segregations of Fe-rich peridotitic or
komatiitic materials could have formed during early magma
ocean crystallisation or shortly afterwards, and thus an Early
Earth origin for these LLSVP deep mantle structures is
feasible but controversial.
Supercontinents. Pangea is the only Phanerozoic super-
continent, and is therefore known in considerable detail
(Fig. 4.2). Wegener (1912) first proposed that all the contin-
ents once formed a single supercontinent surrounded by a
vast marine area (the Panthalassa Ocean). His Pangea recon-
struction (originally named Urkontinent) was based on the
similarity between coastlines on opposite margins of the
Atlantic, the distribution of old glacial deposits, and identical
Permian and Carboniferous plant and animal fossils from a
number of continents now separated by oceans. There are
many similarities between Wegener’s and modern recon-
structions of Pangea, but the most important difference is
that we are now able to position Pangea in its ancient latitude
and longitude (Fig. 4.2).
The reconstruction of supercontinents relies on palaeo-
magnetism in concert with the alignment of orogenic fea-
tures, matching of conjugate margins, geochronology,
detrital zircon geochronology, large igneous provinces
(LIPs), mafic dyke swarms, and more. Even though Precam-
brian palaeomagnetic data are often sparse and geometric
relationships can be ambiguous, at least two Precambrian
supercontinents, Rodinia (Fig. 4.3) and Nuna (Columbia),
are now recognised by most workers, although variable
continental make-ups have been proposed for them. From
those three supercontinents one may argue for an assembly
periodicity of 750 Myr (Meert, 2012) based on formation
times at 1.9–1.8 Ga (for Nuna), 1.1–1.0 Ga (for Rodinia) and
0.32 Ga (for Pangea). Dispersals of Nuna, Rodinia (e.g. Li
et al., 2008), and Pangea (Buiter & Torsvik, 2014; Torsvik &
Cocks, 2013) all appear to have been contemporaneous with
massive LIP volcanism, which perhaps assisted their break-
ups, but LIPs are also found well away from supercontinent
dispersal time, and not all promoted plate boundary changes
and breakup.
Supercontinents have also been linked to sea-level
changes, but that can only be demonstrated for Pangea. If
mantle flow patterns have remained fairly stable, then pat-
terns of dynamic topography at the Earth’s surface should
also have remained stable. Tuzo (Fig. 2.2b) was located
beneath the heart of Pangea (Fig. 10.1) at around 250 Ma,
and the concentration of continents above this region of
 EARTH’S ORIGINS AND THE PRECAMBRIAN 79

Fig. 4.1. Supercontinent (supercraton/superterrane) time lines compared with the spectra (number) of U/Pb detrital zircon crystallisation
ages (Hawkesworth et al., 2010), estimated cumulative continental crust growth (blue thick line), and the thickness of the continental crust
(thick and stippled red lines) through time (Dhuime et al., 2012, 2015). The oldest detrital zircon found on Earth is 4.37 billion years
old (Wilde et al., 2001), whilst the oldest dated crust is about 4 billion years old (Bowring & Williams, 1999; Mojzsis et al., 2014). Eclogite
diamonds started to dominate from 3 Ga (Shirey & Richardson, 2011). The onset of steep subduction and plate tectonics probably occurred
at around 3 Ga but modern-day-style plate tectonics with deep cold subduction attendant on ultra-high-pressure (UHP) metamorphism
probably did not occur until the Neoproterozoic. G-UHT, granulite–ultra-high-temperature metamorphism; E-HPG, eclogite–high-pressure
granulite metamorphism.

stable high dynamic topography (upwelling) should have
contributed to low sea levels (Conrad et al., 2014). Indeed,
Phanerozoic sea level was at an all-time low near the
Permian–Triassic boundary (Fig. 16.2). Earth was in an ice-
free greenhouse condition at that time, and the subsequent
dispersal of Pangea with continents moving towards regions
of negative dynamic topography led to a global eustatic sea-
level rise of the order of 50–100 metres since the Early
Jurassic. That magnitude is comparable with that of other
important mechanisms for sea-level change, such as crust
production rates and glaciations.
Supercontinent Attractors. There are some striking simi-
larities between many Pangea (Fig. 4.2), Rodinia (Fig. 4.3),
and Nuna reconstructions; for example, the Baltica–Lauren-
tia–Siberia and East Gondwana elements (India–Australia–
East Antarctica–Madagascar) form groups that largely
resemble each other in all supercontinents (Fig. 4.4). The
term ‘strange attractor’ was introduced by Meert (2014) for

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80 EARTH’S ORIGINS AND THE PRECAMBRIAN

Fig. 4.2. (a) Wegener’s (1912) relative reconstruction of Pangea (Africa and Europe kept fixed), with ice caps (white areas), at around
310 Ma (Late Carboniferous), and (b, c) two modern reconstructions of Pangea at around 310 and 250 Ma (Permian–Carboniferous
boundary). (b) and (c) are reconstructed to Pangea’s latitude and longitude with palaeomagnetic data using the ‘zero longitude’
approximation for Africa (see Chapters 2, 9, and 10). Not all the continents and terranes were part of Pangea at any given time and those
shaded red were either separate from Pangea or only loosely connected with it in Late Carboniferous to Early Mesozoic times.

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 EARTH’S ORIGINS AND THE PRECAMBRIAN 81

Fig. 4.3. Examples of three different Neoproterozoic (~700–750 Ma) Rodinia reconstructions where the locations of the continents are
taken from (a) Dalziel (1997), (b) Torsvik (2003), and (c) Li et al. (2008). Laurentia (including North America, Greenland, Scotland, and
Rockall) forms the core continent in all varieties and is centred at the Equator. Continents or cratons shaded in red later amalgamated to form
Gondwana at around 550 Ma. Pangea dispersal was associated with many LIPs fed by plumes above the African (Tuzo) LLSVP in the
deepest mantle (Fig. 2.16). If Tuzo and its Pacific antipode (Jason) were stable as far back as Rodinian times we show the present size of
Jason (the plume generation zone, 1% slow contour in the SMEAN tomographic model).

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82 EARTH’S ORIGINS AND THE PRECAMBRIAN

Fig. 4.4. The Northern and East Gondwana attractors identified by Meert (2012). The examples show the relatively similar grouping of
North America–Baltica–Siberia within the Nuna (Zhao et al., 2004), Rodinia (Li et al., 2008), and Pangea (Fig. 4.2c) reconstructions. Note
that the India–East Antarctica–Australia connections are essentially similar for all the three supercontinents, and also for the Gondwana
Superterrane, which formed at around 550 Ma.

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landmasses that formed a coherent geometry in all three
supercontinents. An extreme form of vertical-dominated tec-
tonics or Wilson Cycle tectonics, with continents assembling
and dispersing in more or less the same position for billions
of years, is very unlikely, and a probable reason for the
‘strange attractor’ is that our visions of old supercontinents
are moulded by the known connections between the Gon-
dwana Superterrane and Laurussia, which amalgamated to
form the relatively recent supercontinent of Pangea in the
Late Carboniferous. A very different Rodinia map by Torsvik
(2003) is nearly free of the strange continental attractors
(Fig. 4.3b), with Baltica geographically inverted (though
next to Greenland), Siberia is shown to the east of Baltica
and India conjugate to West Australia (Torsvik et al., 2001),
rather than East Antarctica as in all other supercontinent
reconstructions from Nuna to Pangea.
Zircon Record and Supercontinents. Zircon forms the
archive of continental crust (Hawkesworth et al., 2010;
Roberts & Spencer, 2014) and many authors have noted that
crystallisation age peaks (Fig. 4.1) correspond with periods
when the Earth was in a supercontinent regime. Those peaks
are commonly interpreted as the result of enhanced preserva-
tion associated with supercontinent assembly or episodic
growth (O’Neil et al., 2007; Parman, 2015) of continental
crust (e.g. massive magmatism linked to deep-seated mantle
plumes). Crustal ‘preservation or growth’ peaks appear cor-
related with Nuna, Rodinia, and Pangea, but there is also a
notable peak at around 500 Ma, which has been linked to the
Gondwana Superterrane, which constituted about 64% of all
today’s land areas. Before the assembly of Nuna, a pro-
nounced zircon peak is also seen at around 2.7 Ga and that
could have been linked to various postulated supercraton
connections such as Vaalbara, Superia, and Sclavia (Evans,
2013).
Onset of Plate Tectonics. The bulk composition of con-
tinental crust is similar to that of rocks produced in subduc-
tion settings, and therefore the time of the onset of
convergent plate interaction, plate tectonics, and ultimately
supercontinents, are leading questions in Earth history. When
and how modern plate tectonics (with subduction) started is
debated: the Archean remains the most popular time frame
for the onset, but this question critically depends on how
plate tectonics is defined. The prevalence of eclogitic dia-
mond compositions at around 3 Ga (which are interpreted as
demonstrating the onset of formation of eclogite through
subduction and its capture via continental collision) suggests
a major change in the geodynamic regime at that time
(Shirey & Richardson, 2011) and perhaps the onset of plate
tectonics. Rb/Sr ratios in juvenile continental crust also
increased around that time (Dhuime et al., 2015), suggesting
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EARTH’S ORIGINS AND THE PRECAMBRIAN 83
that the newly formed crust became more silica-rich, and
therefore probably also thicker, reaching maximum thickness
(~40 km) at Rodinia assembly time (Fig. 4.1). A gradually
cooling mantle and the onset of cold, deep and steep subduc-
tion (blueschist and ultra-high-pressure metamorphic
conditions), comparable with the present day, first occurred
in Neoproterozoic times (e.g. Stern, 2008). Ultra-high-pres-
sure terranes represent subduction of continental crust to
depths of 100 km or more as a result of continent–continent
collision and later exhumation. Western Norway is a prime
example of a large ultra-high-pressure terrane shaped
through the Late Silurian collision of Baltica with Laurentia
(Greenland: Figs. 2.19, 7.5, and 7.6), and which was subse-
quently exhumed relatively rapidly over 20 million years,
during the Early Devonian (e.g. Andersen et al., 1991).
The Earth’s Early Atmosphere. A critical milestone
occurred at about 2.2 Ga, termed the Great Oxidation Event,
when the Earth’s atmosphere changed from a reducing one
(consisting largely of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water vapour,
and inert gases, with subsidiary amounts of hydrogen,
methane, and ammonia) to an oxidising atmosphere (the
ancestor of the air of today). That change was brought about
chiefly by the cumulatively increasing quantities and activ-
ities of a very varied and slowly evolving range of primitive
biota discussed below, much of it too simple to be allocated
to either the animal or the plant kingdoms, but chiefly cyano-
bacteria. Those organisms absorbed the carbon gases and
released free oxygen. Although the Great Oxidation Event
involved a sizeable increase of free oxygen in the atmosphere
and hydrosphere, the increase continued steadily after that,
and accelerated again in the Late Proterozoic, at about
600 Ma (Lyons et al., 2014; Andersen et al., 2015).
The Origin of Life. It is uncertain exactly when life
started, but it appears to have occurred only once, at approxi-
mately 3.7 Ga, when the oldest DNA molecules evolved
from a complex inorganic soup. Even Darwin suggested in
1859 that ‘probably all the organic beings which have ever
lived on this Earth have descended from some one primor-
dial form, into which life was first breathed’, and no reput-
able scientist has subsequently documented multiple
creations. DNA enables the unique mechanism through
which cells are repetitively reproduced through interlinked
spirals (thus defining what we call life) in all the many
organisms from that time to the present day. There is unre-
solved debate as to whether the first organisms were photo-
synthetic cyanobacteria, which lived near the sea surface,
chemosynthetic organisms (e.g. chemolithotrophs), which
lived around deep-sea vents, or anoxygenic photosynthesi-
sers, which could live closer to the surface: all three categor-
ies still live today (Taylor et al., 2009). Those most primitive
84 EARTH’S ORIGINS AND THE PRECAMBRIAN
creatures, which include bacteria, are classified within the
Prokaryotes, which differ from Eukaryotes in their lack of a
nucleus. Because the first organisms were largely soft-
bodied, their early record as actual fossils is tantalisingly
incomplete; however, the steady increases in the overall
proportions of carbon isotopes seen in rocks from about 3.5
Ga onwards appear to indicate that biological systems were
in place by that time, which was over a billion years before
the Great Oxidation Event.
Laminated structures known as stromatolites have been
described from Archean rocks as old as 3.4 Ga in Australia
and South Africa; however, the oldest stromatolites appear to
have been inorganic in origin. In contrast, most of the stro-
matolites deposited after about 3.0 Ga are certainly of
organic origin, and were the earliest known rock-builders to
have made a key contribution to the amount of free oxygen
in the atmosphere. Although the range and diversity of those
complex organisms peaked in the Middle Mesoproterozoic
and later Precambrian times, stromatolites are still to be
found living today at a variety of sites, most famously as
somewhat amorphous mounds in Shark Bay on the west
coast of Australia. The oldest Eukaryotes are dated at about
2.0 Ga, and the earliest metazoans at about 1.1 Ga.
Away from the seas, there is some evidence for the exist-
ence of terrestrial life from isotope compositions in rocks as
early as 2.7 Ga, also before the Great Oxidation Event, which
would probably have been in the form of microbial ecosys-
tems driven by oxygen-generating photosynthetic cyanobac-
teria, although there is no direct evidence of those organisms
from actual fossil remains until the Late Proterozoic at about
1.1 Ga (Wellman & Strother, 2015). As in arid regions today,
microbial mats and biological crusts consisting of commu-
nities of organisms were probably important in soil forma-
tion, and Proterozoic primitive soils (palaeosols) are known
(Taylor et al., 2009).
During the later Neoproterozoic, more distinctive and
larger animals are found as identifiable fossils. Chief of those
is the Ediacara Fauna, named after Ediacara in the Flinders
Range of South Australia where it was first noticed, and
representatives of the Ediacara Fauna have now been found
around the world in more than 20 areas; however, most of the
soft-bodied species in that fauna can only loosely be placed
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within the ‘modern’ phyla found from Cambrian times
onwards. Although variable numbers of different animals
are known from the different localities, no recognisable
faunal provinces of potential use in assessing global palaeo-
geography are apparent from analysis of the known distribu-
tion and generic composition of the Ediacara Fauna
(McCall, 2006).
Snowball Earth. An Earth covered by ice from pole to
pole has been suggested for parts of the Precambrian (e.g.
Kirschvink, 1992; Hoffman et al., 1998), perhaps lasting for
some millions of years and associated with chilling global
mean temperatures as low as 50 C. Two Snowball Earth
intervals have been postulated for the past billion years, one
at around 710 Ma (Sturtian glaciation) and the last ending at
about 635 Ma (Marinoan). Both the existence of and reasons
for Snowball Earth conditions are debated, but reduced
atmospheric greenhouse gases, essentially carbon dioxide
(CO2) and methane (CH4), to near present-day levels through
tectonically mediated rock weathering is one explanation.
Arguments for Snowball Earth conditions include their
global distribution, association of glacial deposits with car-
bonate successions, and a few palaeomagnetic studies (e.g.
from Australia) suggesting glacial deposition close to the
ancient Equator.
Our Unique Planet. Scientists and others have long
searched for planets similar to ours, but so far in vain.
The Earth is unique in many ways. The most obvious is
the presence of life here, and that is linked with the abnor-
mal abundance of free surface water. A magnetic field
protects us from cosmic radiation, and modulates atmospheric
escape, and the Earth’s magnetic field may have affected
climate as well as evolution. A magnetic field is not unique
to Earth, but plate tectonics have not been identified on any
other terrestrial planets. The distributions of natural resources
such as hydrocarbons, gas, coal, metal deposits, and indus-
trial minerals are directly linked to plate tectonics. Biodiver-
sity is well tied to the distribution of continents, and human
origins themselves may be linked to plate tectonics. Human
activity, with unrestrained burning of natural resources
(mainly coal, oil, and gas), which originated from plate
tectonic processes, may ultimately prove catastrophic for
our planet.