Claudia

I am looking for informations on the Real Great Flood. Not the one of the bible, of course, but the one shortly after earth formation and prior to life apparition, which lead to condensation of water send in atmosphere by volcanoes and led to the creation of the oceans. Is this theory still accepted? And when is it supposed to have happened (In the first billion of years of earth, but more precisely?)

Coragyps

Off the top of my head - and I'll try to find some references this evening - there may have been several such floods up to about 3.9 billion years ago. The "late heavy bombardment" of big meteorites/asteroids about then likely evaporated all the water and a fair bit of rock from the early Earth, and what didn't escape into space would have rained back down. Pretty warm rain by today's standards......

Coragyps

Claudia - I didn't find much specifically about water on the early Earth, but Googling "late heavy bombardment" does bring up quite a few hits that get close to the subject. Several webpages talk about the problem of life possibly having arisen and then being exterminated a few times. The proposal of such very early life is not as well-supported as it was for a while, as the 3.8 Ga rocks that contained possibly biogenic carbon have had their isotope distribution explained by non-life processes: van Zullen et al., Nature, 418, 627-630 (2002).

There's an interesting paper, too, from Stanley Miller's group (he of the Miller-Urey experiment) - Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. , 91, 1248-1250, (1994). They propose that the "bombardment" could have helped early life along by melting the ice on a "snowball earth" back then. I don't know, however, if there's any geologic support for that early of an Ice Age.