The story so far
A planet takes shapeIllustrative view · not a map
Preparing your planet…

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4.54 billion years ago

A world born in fire.

Before there were oceans, continents or life, there was a growing world of rock. Collisions and gravity turned dust into a planet.

Earth assembled from material orbiting the young Sun. As it grew, impacts and radioactive decay supplied heat. Dense iron sank inward to build the core; lighter rocky material formed the mantle. This separation laid the foundations of the planet beneath our feet.

Key moments

  1. Earth assembles

    4.54 billion years ago

  2. Core and mantle separate

    Early Hadean

A planet under construction

Impacts, heating and differentiation shape the young Earth. The core separates from the rocky mantle, while the surface is repeatedly melted and rebuilt.

1.8 billion years ago

Nuna / Columbia. Continental cores gather into an early supercontinent.

This chapter is older than the model. The map starts 1.8 billion years ago.

Loading reconstruction…
Loading 1.8 billion years ago…
How to read these maps

The map moves today’s coastlines back to where they were; it is not a map of ancient shorelines. Ma = million years ago. The dot follows a point in present-day Australia.

Deep-time geometry is model-dependent; many oceanic plates and margins have been lost to subduction.

Cao et al. (2024), via GPlates. Reconstructed present-day coastline features, not ancient shorelines or plate boundaries. Discrete snapshots fade between positions; they do not trace a continuous path. Time steps vary, so playback is not a speed comparison. Smaller islands omitted. Data: CC BY 4.0; simplified for display. Model & methodology · Original dataset & license

Earth writes the story.
Rocks keep the record.

From ancient life to minerals shaped by heat and pressure, every specimen offers a way into geology. Continue exploring with Rad Rocks’ curated Australian rocks, minerals and fossils.

Explore the collectionSee the latest arrivals
Chapter 1 of 26: Birth of Earth. 4.54 billion years ago.