Sunday, July 8, 2018

IS A SEARCH FOR THE ORIGIN OF WATER ON EARTH ALL WET?

The asteroid hypothesis for how water appeared on Earth has found support, according to a recently published article.* Basically, the assertion is that asteroids bombing Earth brought the water here.

The new support comes from laboratory experiments said to re-create asteroid crashes on a miniature scale. Scientists made marble sized pellets of antigorite, which is found in the kind of rocks that it is believed may have delivered water to Earth. Pumice was baked to a high temperature and then bombarded by the pellets at 5 km per second. Some water vapor released by the impacts apparently was captured by the melted rock and glass formed from the impacts. The article goes on to say that it is yet to be determined how the captured water could escape from rocks and actually form oceans.

One reasonably could ask how many asteroids hitting the Earth it would take to create all the surface water, ground water and atmosphere water that Earth has. Then again, maybe the point is that where water came from doesn't really matter because we have all the water on Earth that we are going to have.

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*Grossman, "Fake Asteroids Buoy Water theory,"
Science News, May 26,2018, p.12


© Daniel J. Kucera 2018

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