Furthermore, this shows that the formation of Earth’s oceans required much lower insolation than today, which was made possible by the faint young Sun. This also implies the existence of another stability state for present-day Earth: the ‘steam Earth’, with all the water from the oceans evaporated into the atmosphere.
A press release from the University of Switzerland at Bern explains that even less insolation at the birth of our home could have led to a steam-house Earth. The real bad news, however, is the realization that models are unreliable. Previous models gave the complete opposite prediction. Co-author Emeline Bolmont remarks,
“this is a complete reversal in the way we look at what has
long been called the ‘Faint Young Sun paradox’. It has always been considered as a major obstacle to the appearance of life on Earth! ” The argument was that if the Sun’s radiation was much weaker than today, it would have turned the Earth into a ball of ice hostile to life. “But it turns out that for the young, very hot Earth, this weak Sun may have in fact been an unhoped-for opportunity,” continues the researcher.
Q: So was the ice-ball Earth a scientific truth before this model was published?
Q: Or is this new model now the truth? How could one ever be sure without a time machine to go back and see what the young Earth and Venus were like when they formed?
