Where on Earth has our water come from?

Highlights in Chemical Science ^ | Friday October 22, 2010 | Rebecca Brodie

[SunkenCiv]

Evidence that water came to Earth during its formation from cosmic dust, rather than following later in asteroids, has been shown by a group of international scientists.

The origin of the abundant levels of water on Earth has long been debated with the main differences in the theories being the nature of the material that carries the water, and whether the water came during or after planet formation.

Now, Nora de Leeuw at University College London, UK, and colleagues have used molecular-level calculations to prove that dissociative chemisorption of water onto the surface of olivine rich minerals, such as forsterite, is highly exothermic. And so when these mineral dust particles came together during Earth formation, gas-solid interactions could have resulted in water being adsorbed onto the surface of the dust particles. This means that water could have been part of the Earth from the very beginning.

Water could have been adsorbed onto minerals that created the Earth

'Our calculations indicate that it is viable for water to become adsorbed at the surfaces of dust particles in the interstellar medium, where planets are formed. The water is thus trapped and becomes incorporated into the Earth,' says de Leeuw.

De Leeuw's work challenges the common assumption made by astronomers that the Earth's water originated from bodies in the asteroid belt. 'The work will be of tremendous interest to those modelling the geology and habitability of extrasolar terrestrial planets,' comments Philip Armitage, an expert in astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, US.

[SunkenCiv]

• Volatile elements locked in moon rock -- 'This was unexpected because Earth is wet, and rich in chlorine and sulfur, so we'd expect the apatites from the Earth and Moon to be very different,' says Boyce. 'The results tell us that conditions existed in lunar rocks that could create apatite crystals that are very similar to those apatite crystals that grew from "wet" magmas on Earth,' continues Boyce. 'So we know the Moon has at least a little bit of water and these other volatile elements. But how much exactly is a matter of some debate.'

[SunkenCiv]

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe ·

[SunkenCiv]

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe ·

Google news searches: exoplanet · exosolar · extrasolar ·

[cripplecreek]

Well I just took a leak.....

[Venturer]

Just guess’s, some of them not even educated guess’s/

[mirkwood]

I am pretty sure that my water came from here first.

[antidemoncrat]

I bet God was glad to hear this.

[Ramius]

This means that water could have been part of the Earth from the very beginning.

Well, OK. What's so controversial about that?

[bgill]

From the faucet.

[null and void]

Cosmic colostrum?

[MHGinTN]

Water is likely to have been sourced in original minerasls and objects bombarding the forming planet. The minerals forming in space would have picked up water molecules before slamming into the early earth. The interesting thing is to understand how it is that a particular zone of solar system formations favors water over another region of the forming solar system. Since all the stuff of planets and stars now existing came from the furnaces of earlier stars, why did a general region of higher concentrations of water happen in our solar system?

[Soothesayer9]

Your initial sentence seems to slightly contradict the last sentence.

[US Navy Vet]

See Genesis 1

[KoRn]

I’ve always been curious about this question. I have yet to hear a theory that totally makes sense to me. It’s quite remarkable how MUCH water is on our planet. The only thing that we can say with certainty, water either formed here during the formation of the planet, or after. Either way, it came from ‘outer space’, because the ENTIRE planet came from ‘outer space’(it wasn’t always here). The Iron in your blood came from a Super Nova that happened at some time in the past, along with the raw materials that were used to create virtually everything in the room around you.

[MHGinTN]

During the formation of the gravity well that is earth at this particular distance from our star, water would have been attached )adsorbed) to the minerals and ‘star dust’ which was aggregating to form earth, plus the orbital pathway earth travels would have been ‘swept’ by the orbiting planet as it formed. If you look at the materials in abundance on the various planets, it appears that Earth and Mars and the asteroid belt are in a zonal distance from the star which is water rich, so to speak. Why, for instance, does earth have so much water and Saturn does not? And why are certain sized moons richer in water than other moons orbiting the gas giants?

[Mobties]

Does this mean that the “rising seas” claimed by the global warming cabal are due (if in fact the seas are rising) to cosmic dust and bits of the “dirty snowballs” of comets?

If so, I wonder who’s financing this scientist’s research.

[ROCKLOBSTER]

Where on Earth has our water come from?

Probably from an awful lot of hydrogen burning in the presence of oxygen.

[laweeks]

Um . . . If I should be so bold . . . ah . . . er . . . God?

[HangnJudge]

Probably from some variant of the CNO Nucleosynthesis Process
and some residual Protons hanging around...

[dangerdoc]

Gigantic picture of a bodice, I don’t get it and the guys with dial up are cursing you right now.