And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Point of View:

First Person

Day:

Day 1

Earth Event 3

Sunlight Through Dark Clouds

Get Your Reminder of the Harmony from the Big Bible Store!

Just click on the image and you will be directed to the Big Bible Store for more information.

Scientific Description of the Event

At the end of Earth Event 2, we are left with some large bodies of water on the surface of the Earth with a dense atmosphere and cloud cover over the Earth. Very little sunlight would have been able to shine on the surface of the Earth.

During the following 400 million years of the Hadean Eon the Earth’s outer layer, called the crust, began to form. It was made mostly of dark, heavy volcanic rock called basalt. It was thin and unstable. Volcanoes were common, and large impacts from space could easily break or melt the surface again. Water vapor released from volcanoes condensed as the planet cooled, forming thick clouds and eventually heavy rainfall. Over long periods of time, oceans began to grow deeper in low areas of the crust. At this stage, even though some solid rock existed, there were probably no large continents rising high above the water. Most of the surface may have been covered by ocean, with only small, temporary pieces of land appearing and disappearing.

As time passed, the Earth continued to cool down even more. As more water collected on the surface, less water remained in the atmosphere as steam. This would cause the dark cloud covering to slowly began to thin out.

Since water reacts with carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid, then as rain fell carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere. When the slightly acidic rain fell onto the newly forming crust, it reacted with the rocks in a process called chemical weathering. This process caused carbon dioxide to become part of the minerals and sediments of the Earth.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which means it helps trap heat in the atmosphere. As carbon dioxide was removed, the atmosphere slowly changed even more. With slightly less heat being trapped, cooling continued. This helped reduce the amount of thick cloud cover even more. The change was slow and steady. The shifts in cloud cover and atmospheric content would have occurred over millions of years.

By around 4.0 billion years ago at the beginning of Archean Eon, the Earth still had many volcanoes and likely frequent storms. The sky was probably still very hazy and filled with gases that we would not want to breathe today. There was almost no oxygen in the atmosphere yet. But compared to the earliest times of the Hadean Eon, the planet would have been calmer. The oceans probably covered much of the surface. The thick steam clouds had mostly turned into rain and settled into oceans.

Even though it took hundreds of millions of years, the cooling of Earth and the gradual thinning of its dark cloud cover marked one of the most important transitions in our planet’s story. What began as a hot world wrapped in steam and ash slowly transformed into a planet with oceans, a solid crust, and skies that allowed some diffuse light to shine through. And the diffuse sunlight reaching the oceans would be helpful in creating the right conditions for the first simple forms of life to develop.

Although the development of the first life forms does not seem to be described in Genesis 1, the condition of having some sunlight on the surface of the Earth is described for this Earth Event. This condition was vital so that Earth could change into a watery planet with the potential to support life.

Scientific Evidence for this Event

Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada Yada