According to textbooks, Earth was dry before it was bombarded by water-containing rocks from the icy outer solar system. But that's not what a new study has found.
Earth has vast oceans today, but our planet was a dry rock when it first formed — and water was a late addition, rained down in asteroids from the icy outer solar system., adds weight to a competing idea that Earth was actually born 'wet'.A new study shows that meteorite rocks of the type that built the Earth contain the building blocks of waterWater is abundant in space and is made up of hydrogen created in the Big Bang and oxygen released from dying stars.
Dr Piani and colleagues analysed 13 rare meteorites that come from remnants of rocks that orbited the inner solar system when it was very young — before planets formed."At least three times the amount of water in the Earth's oceans can be provided by these enstatite chondrites," said Dr Piani. Like the meteorites, rocks in the mantle also contain a lot of oxygen bound up with minerals, which can be liberated under certain circumstances, and combine with the hydrogen to form actual water — H20.
"It looks like what people thought was really dry rock has enough water — if you accumulate a lot of it — to explain Earth's water," noted NASA geochemist Anne Peslier, who wrote an accompanying editorial in Science.have been challenging the long-standing textbook theory about how Earth got its oceans.
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