Introduction

Genesis 1:2 tells us, "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

Genesis 1:9 even confirms that there was no dry land until Day 3. So, if the earth is old, then was there a time when there was no land, no life, the earth was still taking form, it was completely under water, and it was dark?

The answer is yes.

According to a 2001 article in NASA Science News, “Tiny zircons (zirconium silicate crystals) found in ancient stream deposits indicate that Earth developed continents and water — perhaps even oceans and environments in which microbial life could emerge — 4.3 billion to 4.4 billion years ago, remarkably soon after our planet formed.”

What are Zircon Crystals?

Zircon crystals are the last remnants of the earth's first crust. They date to around 4.4 billion years ago (only 100,000 years after the earth formed) and were formed by extreme water saturation at extreme temperatures. One hypothesis for how such conditions could exist is the outgassing of steam from the earth's core, before the earth could solidify. It is thought by many that the water from our first oceans came from such outgassing. However, zircon crystals are the first evidence that this could have occurred so soon after the earth formed. Until this discovery, we couldn't look back beyond 3.9 billion years. Scientists had evidence that the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago, but just could not nail down earth's specific history. However, once the zircons were discovered, a story soon fell into place. That story is recorded on the moon.

Evidence on the Moon

If you have ever looked at the moon through a telescope, you would see it is filled with crators. Deep crators. A lot of them. Surprisingly, this tells us something about the earth's ability to sustain an early stable ocean... it couldn't, or at least not over entire the 500 million years that we are interested in.

 

As explained in a study at the University of Wisconsin, “One constraint on the presence of a stable hydrosphere on the Earth is the extensive meteorite bombardment experienced in the Early Archean [that has been] decued from the lunar record.” The study explains that the meteor impacts occurred between 4.4 and 3.8 Ga (Ga = "billion years ago"), noting that “recent work has documented a strong peak in impact intensity at ~3.9 Ga,” after which time, the impacts appeared to have stopped altogether. (We will return this point later)

 

What is interesting about these impacts is the effect they would have had on ancient oceans. The NASA Science News article suggests that (emphasis added), “…Until roughly 3.9 billion years ago, swarms of comets and meteorites whacked the young Earth often enough to occasionally vaporize the surface zones of the oceans and erase any life residing there.”  Consequently, “the earliest known evidence of microbial life on Earth comes from carbon isotope patterns investigated by Mojzsis and colleagues in 3.85-billion-year-old Greenland sediments.” (Astrobiology Magazine has a good article on this as well.)

 

This explains why mainstream scientists had not previously seen beyond 3.9 Ga... everything was getting destroyed by meteor impacts! Well, almost everything. The zircon crystals appear to be the only surviving remnant.

 

Controversy Within the Scientific Community

Between the process of outgassing and the occasional meteor-driven decimation of the resulting oceans, it is not clear which process created the heat necessary for the zircon crystals to form, assuming either one was the cause. Could it be a combination, or was yet another force at play?

A 2005 study of the temperature and moisture requirements for zircon creation between 3.85 and 4.4 Ga found that, “the most notable feature of these results is the low and restricted range of temperatures which, taken at face value, implies water-saturated melting conditions.”  These temparatures hover around 800°C.  But, under the earth’s then-pressure of 250 atmospheres, even this high temperature is too low to support general or spontaneous ocean vaporization.  This suggests that in addition to an ocean and meteor strikes, there may also have been continued volcanic and tectonic activity (Note: the tectonic plates were not yet hardened enough to create mountains, and any start at them would have been destroyed by the next meteor strike) occurring throughout this entire period. “The present results substantiate the existence of wet, minimum melting conditions at 4.35 to 4.0 Ga inferred from mineral inclusion studies and are consistent with the early Hadean hydrosphere hypothesis.”

In other words, the earth remained largely molten, even beneath the ocean, until the earth finally decreased in temperature some time approaching 3.9 Ga. According to the UoW study,“The earliest direct evidence for surface temperatures < ~100°C and [a] terrestrial hydrosphere is [>=3.8 billion year old] metasediment from southwest Greenland.” In the meantime, as meteor's struck the earth, and vaporized the ocean, the heat of the impact, combined with the heat of the volcanism was enough to superheat the water to 800°C, just long enough for the zircon crystals form.

As described in the UoW article, the zircon was formed from super-heated water escaping the earth. It would have been pressurized enough within the earth to be liquid during outgas, only to be vaporized after its contribution to the zircon formation.  This subsequent vaporization suggests a cooling cycle after a given vaporizing cataclysm, such that the vapor would in fact condense back into an ocean that would endure for millions of years at a time… until the next cataclysmic meteor impact occurs.

Was Genesis 1:2 3.9 Ga?

Through our study of zircon crystal formation, it suggests that the waters God hovered over in Genesis 1:2 existed in the Hadean period.

We even have evidence that the sky was dark. According to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

“At Epoch 0 (3.9 billion years ago), the young Earth possessed a turbulent, steamy atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. The days were shorter and the Sun was dimmer [than today], shining as a red orb through our orange brick-colored sky. The one ocean that covered our entire planet was a muddy brown that absorbed bombardment from incoming meteors and comets. Carbon dioxide helped warm our world since the infant Sun was a third less luminous than today. Although no fossils survived from this time period, isotopic signatures of life may have been left behind in Greenland rocks.”

Whatever light did shine through could very well have been blocked by the last meteoric impact 3.9 billion years ago. And this process of condensation followed by reapted vaporization would have continued, had God not put a stop to it. As Genesis 1:2-3 reads... “2 And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.  3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” The meteoric bombardment ceased. The waters condensed back into the ocean, and what little light was reaching the earth could be seen through the atmospheric haze.