Preliminary ScienceEarth and Environmental Science- Research Task 2005
...n the third day, God pulled land out from the waters. “He called the dry land Earth and the waters the Seas.”4 On the fourth day, He creates “lights in the sky”5 and then created two “great lights- the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night.”6 Part B) Scientific Views The galaxy in which our solar system is situated, is thought to have been created though “lumps of matter clumping together”7. According to the ‘Solar Nebula Theory’8 the sun was created “about 4.7 x 109 years ago from a cloud of gas and dust (a solar nebula cloud) …triggered by a supernova. As the solar nebula cloud rotated, it formed the sun. This rotating, and the process of accretion, the planets are formed (see diagram below). Accretion, by definition is the “increase in the mass of a celestial object by the collection of surrounding interstellar gases and objects by gravity.”9 A diagram of the formation of the solar system from Cambridge’s ‘Earth Environmental Science Preliminary Course’ Other solar systems in our galaxy are thought to have formed the same way. Denser atoms moved to the centre of the earth and less dense ones moved to the exterior. Melting and volcanism shaped the earth, as well as the bombardment by meteorites. The distance from the sun meant that water could exist on the earth as a liquid, rather than as a gas or completely as ice like on Mars. This liquid formed our oceans. Volcanos released gases into the atmosphere. This is all thought to have happened 4.6 billion years ago. The moon is a satellite, also formed by accretion, which became trapped in earth’s orbit. It emits no light, simply ‘reflecting’ the light from the sun. Part C) Comparison of cultural beliefs and scientific views. Idea Christian Belief Scientific View Who/ what created the earth, sun, etc A singular God created all things, including the earth, simply by telling them to exist. Many different processes, including accretion and volcanism formed the earth. How long the features took to make God created the stars, moon, sky land and oceans in four days. The different processes took many hundreds of billions of years, with the oceans alone taking millions of years to form. How land took shape God told the land to rise up from...