Earth may have been a waterworld covered by global ocean 3.2 billion years ago, study suggests

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In its early years, Earth may have looked like a post-apocalyptic waterworld, according to a new study.

A new study published Monday in Nature Geoscience suggests that Earth was likely covered by a massive ocean 3.2 billion years ago, possibly even like the future depicted in the 1995 Kevin Costner film "Waterworld."

"The history of life on Earth tracks available niches," Boswell Wing, an associate professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and coauthor of the research, said in a statement. "If you've got a waterworld, a world covered by ocean, then dry niches are just not going to be available."

In order to gather data, researchers analyzed more than 100 rock samples from across a dry area known as Panorama that's located in northwestern Australia's outback. Scientists compared it to analyzing coffee grounds to learn more about the water that flowed through it.

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Earth may have once been covered in a massive, global ocean. (Getty Images)

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The study adds to the ongoing debate about what, exactly, ancient Earth looked like.

"There was seemingly no way forward on that debate," said lead author Benjamin Johnson, who conducted the research during a postdoctoral position in Wing's lab at CU Boulder. "We thought that trying something different might be a good idea."

Researchers discovered a bit more Oxygen-18 atoms trapped in the stone around 3.2 billion years ago than one would find today.

Next, they theorized that the most likely explanation for that excess Oxygen-18 in the oceans was that there weren't any soil-rich land masses around to suck the isotopes up.

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