Darek Zabrocki, 'Early Earth.' Framestore/National Geographic. [o]
Four and a half billion years ago, or thereabouts, there was nothing but a hot, rocky, lifeless mass bathed in water
Darek Zabrocki, 'Early Earth.' Framestore/National Geographic. [o]
Four and a half billion years ago, or thereabouts, there was nothing but a hot, rocky, lifeless mass bathed in water vapor, ammonia, hydrogen and methane. After seven-hundred million years, the Earth had cooled sufficiently for the water vapor to condense and become an ocean. And still there was no plastic.
A little over half-a-billion years ago, layers of dead phytoplankton, algae and primitive marine organisms that had begun living in the ocean drifted to its floor and were trapped in mud and sand. Over geologic ages, through heat and pressure, these layers of decayed organic material became oil and liquid gas trapped beneath the earth’s surface of rock and clay. And still there was no plastic.
But its feedstock was now commingled within the seams, pools, shale beds, and seeps of fossil biomass — the hydrocarbons that had trapped the solar energy of an ancient world. The simplest of all the hydrocarbons was methane, encapsulated as a liquid gas from vapors released by the rotting carcasses of tiny sea creatures and, ov