The Old Testament 395
And the dry land was called Earth.
And the gathering together of the waters was called Seas.
And this happened on the third day
of the first month of a long lost year.
The hills melted like wax at His presence.
This is the beginning
of geo-history.
It is the path among the possible paths
which thy planet Earth has picked.
It was four-billion-four-hundred-million years ago.
And the last impact of a super giant
meteorite on Earth
had passed.95
And the original superdense atmosphere had to a
large extent been blown away -- the original
primordial gases had long been lost.
But the thinner atmosphere which remained was
still many times thicker than the
atmosphere in modern times.
Now the formation
of the Earth from smaller parts had left it
in a hot and violent state -- almost all
of Earth was molten rock.
And so Earth began the processes of cooling off.
And it came to pass that,
deep inside the Earth,
a hot molten region swelled and rose.
And it drifted up toward the surface of
the Earth where it released its heat and cooled.
And a cooler but still quite hot region
near the surface slowly sank.
And near the center of the Earth,
it absorbed heat, and it grew hot.
And when it grew hot enough,
it swelled and rose.
And such circulating, up-and-downward-moving currents
were happening everywhere within the Earth.
Molten Earth was in a turmoil.
And currents slowly moved Earth's heat
from its center to its outer layers.
Thus convection96 over
distances of thousands of kilometers
was occurring in the Earth.
And the heat that reached
the outer layers moved to Earth's surface and escaped.
And after passing through the atmosphere,
the heat entered into outer space as
radiation.
Now the surface of the Earth was solid.
But it was very hot and glowing red.
And it was dry -- the surface was so hot
that no drop of water could exist on it
without it being vaporized.
____________________
95 During the next several hundred-million years,
many impacts would still occur but by objects smaller than
multi-hundred-kilometer-sized asteroids.
96 The flow of heat by motion
of the medium is called convection.
Copyright ©1999 by Jupiter Scientific Publishing Company
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