Reconstructed setting· The columns of time
Hadean world
4.54 Ga → 4.03 Ga
Plumes of hot gas over molten ground, and nothing else: no landmass, no relief, no skyline. No other backdrop on the timeline is defined so much by what it refuses to draw.
What the evidence shows
The surface was molten, kept hot by accretion and then by the giant impact that formed the Moon, and no rock from it survives. Thinner steam plumes follow the dense ones, because oxygen isotopes in Hadean zircons record interaction with low-temperature liquid water before 4.3 billion years ago: the planet cooled enough for oceans sooner than anyone expected. The oldest surviving crustal material is a 4.4-billion-year-old zircon from the Jack Hills, and that is a grain, not a landscape.
Bounds and conventions
A reconstruction of a world from which no landscape survives. What the backdrop draws is held in place by chemistry and by modelling, never by an outcrop, and drawing no horizon at all is the honest part: nothing constrains the shape of a molten surface, only its heat.