Earth is the third planet from the Sun and is the largest of the terrestrial planets. The Earth is the only planet in our solar system not to be named after a Greek or Roman deity. The Earth was formed approximately 4.54 billion years ago and is the only known planet to support life.
- The Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing.
- The Earth was once believed to be the centre of the universe.
- Earth has a powerful magnetic field.
- There is only one natural satellite of the planet Earth.
- Earth is the only planet not named after a god.
- The Earth is the densest planet in the Solar System.
-The Earth is not actually round in shape; in fact it is geoid. This simply means that the rounded shape has a slight bulge towards the equator. So what causes this geoid shape? This happens solely because the rotation of the Earth which causes the bulge around the equator.
-The Earth tilts at roughly 66 degrees.
-Only 3% water of the earth is fresh, rest 97%salted. Of that 3%, over 2% is frozen in ice sheets and glaciers. Means less than 1% fresh water is found in lakes, rivers and underground.
-Asia Continent is covered 30% of the total earth land area, but represent 60% of the world’s population.
You may feel like you’re standing still, but you’re actually moving — fast. Depending on where you are on the globe, you could be spinning through space at just over 1,000 miles per hour. People on the equator move the fastest, while someone standing on the North or South pole would be perfectly still.
Geological history
In the very beginning of earth’s history, this planet was a giant, red hot, roiling, boiling sea of molten rock – a magma ocean. The heat had been generated by the repeated high speed collisions of much smaller bodies of space rocks that continually clumped together as they collided to form this planet. As the collisions tapered off the earth began to cool, forming a thin crust on its surface. As the cooling continued, water vapor began to escape and condense in the earth’s early atmosphere. Clouds formed and storms raged, raining more and more water down on the primitive earth, cooling the surface further until it was flooded with water, forming the seas.
It is theorized that the true age of the earth is about 4.6 billion years old, formed at about the same time as the rest of our solar system.
Scientists are still trying to unravel one of the greatest mysteries of earth: When did „life“ first appear and how did it happen? It is estimated that the first life forms on earth were primitive, one-celled creatures that appeared about 3 billion years ago. That’s pretty much all there was for about the next two billion years. Then suddenly those single celled organisms began to evolve into multicellular organisms. Then an unprecedented profusion of life in incredibly complex forms began to fill the oceans. Some crawled from the seas and took residence on land, perhaps to escape predators in the ocean. A cascading chain of new and increasingly differentiated forms of life appeared all over the planet, only to be virtually annihilated by an unexplained mass extinction. It would be the first of several mass extinctions in Earth’s history.
Space and galaxy 