Interactive: What Earth’s 4.54 billion-year history would look like in a single year

By Francisco Jose Testa, Lecturer in Earth Sciences (Mineralogy, Petrology & Geochemistry), University of Tasmania

As a kid, it was tough for me to grasp the massive time scale of Earth’s history. Now, with nearly two decades of experience as a geologist, I think one of the best ways to understand our planet’s history and evolution is by condensing the entire timeline into a single calendar year.

It’s not a new concept, but it’s a powerful one.

So, how do we go about this? If we consider Earth’s age as 4.54 billion years and divide it by 365 days, each day of the Gregorian…

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