Earth may have been a Waterworld secured by global ocean 3.2 billion years prior, the study recommends

In its initial years, Earth may have resembled a post-apocalyptic Waterworld, as indicated by a new investigation.

A new study published Monday in Nature Geoscience recommends that Earth was likely secured by a gigantic ocean 3.2 billion years prior, potentially even like the future portrayed 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 co-author 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."

To assemble information, specialists dissected more than 100 rock samples from over a dry territory known as Panorama that is situated in northwestern Australia's outback. Researchers contrasted it with dissecting coffee grounds to become familiar with the water that flowed through it.

The investigation adds to the continuous discussion about what, precisely, old Earth resembled.

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

Specialists found more Oxygen-18 atoms caught in the stone around 3.2 billion years prior than one would discover today.

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