That's why each year on April 22, more than a billion people celebrate Earth Day to protect the planet from things like pollution and deforestation. By taking part in activities like picking up litter and planting trees, we're making our world a happier, healthier place to live.
According to earthday.org, Earth Day aims to “build the world's largest environmental movement to drive transformative change for people and the planet.” The movement's mission is “to diversify, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide.”
The first Earth Day in 1970 mobilized millions of Americans for the protection of the planet. On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans — 10% of the U.S. population at the time — took to the streets, college campuses and hundreds of cities to protest environmental ignorance and demand a new way forward for our planet.
Earth Day is an annual event celebrated around the world on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It was first celebrate in 1970, and now includes events in more than 193 countries.
Earth Day, there's only one
Apr 7, 2016
When the solar system settled into its current layout about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth formed when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust in to become the third planet from the Sun. Like its fellow terrestrial planets, Earth has a central core, a rocky mantle, and a solid crust.
The name Earth is an English/German name which simply means the ground. It comes from the Old English words 'eor(th)e' and 'ertha'. In German it is 'erde'.
In the first, Elohim (the Hebrew generic word for God) creates the heavens and the Earth, the animals, and mankind in six days, then rests on, blesses and sanctifies the seventh (i.e. the Biblical Sabbath).
3.5 billion years ago
We know that life began at least 3.5 billion years ago, because that is the age of the oldest rocks with fossil evidence of life on earth. These rocks are rare because subsequent geologic processes have reshaped the surface of our planet, often destroying older rocks while making new ones.
After things cooled down, simple organic molecules began to form under the blanket of hydrogen. Those molecules, some scientists think, eventually linked up to form RNA, a molecular player long credited as essential for life's dawn. In short, the stage for life's emergence was set almost as soon as our planet was born.
Today, we know from radiometric dating that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Had naturalists in the 1700s and 1800s known Earth's true age, early ideas about evolution might have been taken more seriously.
comb jelly
A comb jelly. The evolutionary history of the comb jelly has revealed surprising clues about Earth's first animal.
Scientists looked to the moon's mineral composition to estimate that the moon is around 4.425 billion years old, or 85 million years younger than what previous studies had proven.
The moon, researchers now say, likely formed about 50 million years after the solar system did, which is much earlier than the previous estimate of 150 million years after solar-system formation.
The Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago in a giant, spinning cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed under its own gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk.
Astronomers estimate that the sun has about 7 billion to 8 billion years left before it sputters out and dies. One way or another, humanity may well be long gone by then.
The moon is a very old soul, it turns out. A new analysis of lunar rocks brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts suggests that the moon formed 4.51 billion years ago — just 60 million years after the solar system itself took shape.