Where Earth's Water Originally Comes From | Naked Science | Spark

Of all the planets we know, ours is unique, the only one that has

water

, we take it for granted, but without this magical liquid, life could not exist. Where our

water

comes

from. It is one of the greatest mysteries of

science

from the depths of the Earth to the ends of the Earth. space begins the search for the source of our water The Earth is the only planet in the solar system with liquid water 330 million thousand cubic covers more than 70% of the planet and even makes up about 60% of our bodies, we know a lot about the water, except

where

it

comes

from, when we think about

where

the Earth's water came from, it's not that simple because we think that all the building blocks of the Earth were probably completely dry.

If the Earth formed without water, then where do our oceans come from? It's a bit like a crime scene, the crime happened a long time ago and the evidence has been tampered with, so it's a lot like being a detective: you have to look back in time to try to understand what happened ago. 4 or 2 billion years. difficult problem for the first time scientists from different disciplines are working together to find the origin of Earth's water the answer has the most surprising implications we do not know of any organism that does not require liquid water to live and therefore we will wonder how it acquired a planet It is water, in essence, we are hinting at the question of what makes a planet capable of supporting life.

To unravel this mystery we must go back in time and look for clues about the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. The sun is a newborn star surrounded by a vast disk of gas and dust over millions of years. This disk of matter condenses to form the planets far from the sun. It's so cold. Planets like Jupiter form with icy cores closer to the sun. It is more than 1,000°. hotter than it is today the Earth is formed from substances that condense at high temperatures such as rock and iron it is too hot for water The Earth is completely dry for scientists one possibility is that water has been transported by comets from the frozen debris of our outer solar system. mainly ice Toby Owen has been studying comets for over 40 years, as soon as people realized that comets had a lot of ice, it seemed reasonable that comets that hit Earth would have brought that ice with them and that the ice could have done it. melted and produced the ocean for 600 million years the early Earth is bombarded by hundreds of millions of icy comets comets are very primitive bodies that is what makes them so especially interesting the ice on comets is ice that has not been touched since the solar system was formed so if Comets brought all the water on Earth, then the water we drink, wash and swim in.

In fact, the water that makes up our bodies is older than the planet itself and comes from the edge of the solar system, but the evidence is still circumstantial. We need some clues to know. To find out how the Earth got water we need some clues in the Earth's water that we can relate to other things like comets to see if we can decide what the water brought fortunately the water contains the perfect clues to the

naked

eye the water looks the same but there is subtle differences depending on where it comes from. All water molecules are made of one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, but hydrogen comes in two forms.

Most of the hydrogen in water is normal or light, but a small fraction, the blue bits, are heavy. hydrogen, the ratio of heavy to light tells scientists where water comes from, you and me, and all animals, all trees, all oceans, all lakes and rivers on

earth

have the same ratio of hydrogen heavy to light hydrogen, which is our water is Earth's water, so the question is what is that ratio in the types of objects that could bring water to Earth to find the ratio of heavy to light hydrogen in the water of a comet that scientists need to get a sample Easier said than done One of the things that got people so interested in comets is that they are completely different from anything else in the sky, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. , this huge bright object appears, moves across the sky and then disappears again because astronomers never know when they will appear, most comets are out of reach, you'd have to have a spaceship in your garage, something like that, ready to operate at any time when one of those comets appears, but a comet has a special place in the hearts of astronomers.

It's not the biggest or the brightest, but it's predictable. Comet Hi is special because it is a large comet and yet it is one whose orbit we know, meaning we can predict when it will return to Earth. We can make that prediction very well in 1986. Once again, Al was within reach close enough to take a sample for Dr. Cary Liss. Just seeing his kite was the opportunity of a lifetime. In fact, I was excited about Comet Hal and at 1:00 in the morning we were outside looking at the sky. And I remember to this day that we saw Comet H very well and that was very inspiring to me because scientists knew where it would be.

They could build a space probe for a rendevu. The probe was designed to fly through Hal's tail. The things he gave us were not just here's a comet, this is what a comet looks like, here's the structure, but we could start doing chemistry, we could start understanding the composition of the comet, finally scientists can analyze the water of the comet. comet and find out if it is equal to water. on Earth on March 13, 1986 after traveling for 8 months jotto enters the tail of comet Hal then a crisis jotto hits a large dust particle traveling at 42 m per second Communications with the probe are intermittent there was a moment tense there when people thought all might be lost 32 minutes later Communications are restored probe samples water vapor in 's tail and sends data back to Mission Control astronomers are about to find out if water in a comet is the same as water on Earth, but When the results come in, the mystery deepens and what we discovered to our surprise was that the hydrogen in the comet's water was about twice as massive as the hydrogen in the comet. water on Earth, with twice as much heavy hydrogen as the water on Comet Hal.

Just like water on Earth, although it appears to taste and behave the same as Earth's water to scientists, this difference is crucial, it can only mean one thing: comets cannot have brought all of Earth's water, that's a very exciting result, it sort of frustrates this. Beautiful idea that comets brought all the water to Earth in terms of whether comets brought water to Earth, it was a revolution and a change and that's quite exciting. For years scientists thought that comets were the source of all the water on Earth, but now the evidence makes this impossible, so it was a very exciting result because it meant that you had to have some other source of water to produce the comets. oceans that we see and now we were going to have to go through the excitement of trying to find out what really happened In 2002, a chance discovery suggests that the answer could be closer to home, when the Earth first formed 4 billion and half of years.

It's too hot to form with water, but the planet now has water if it weren't for comets. He's been here all along to find out where the water comes from. Professor Steven Moyes is looking for clues about when he first appears as a geologist, he discovers the planet's past by looking at its rocks, but the past has a big hole in it which is called the hadian or dark period because no one knows anything about it. The problem with the first 500 million years of Earth's history for geologists has always been that you have a nightmare scenario where you have no rocks or minerals to investigate.

The early Earth is believed to be a ball of fire. molten rock but no evidence from this time is just a theory, then in 2002 Moyes makes an

earth

-shaking discovery, the oldest mineral sample ever found on our planet, a ziron crystal encased within these small grains is a Vital clue revealed by chemical analysis of zircon crystals. if they were formed in the presence of water more than 7 years ago mois found and dated almost 100,000 ziron crystals one is alone the oldest we have found so far is 4.38 8 billion years old now I would like to ascertain when this crystal was made the Earth was only 180 million years old if this line represents the age of the Earth then the dinosaurs became extinct here we go back about 4 billion years to the end of the dark period the Zircon Crystal was formed here we are talking about periods of time that are beyond comprehension, so for example, in this rock there are ziron crystals that are 13 days the age of the universe, so these things have been around for almost as long as the Earth has been a planet.

Talk about time capsules. The analysis shows this. The 4.4 billion-year-old zircon crystal forms in liquid water rather than on a dry planet. The crystal reveals that the early Earth already had water on its surface when we made the discovery, which was very, very exciting because it wasn't just a hunch, it was a real discovery. We didn't know what we would find. For years scientists thought that planet Earth was formed dry. Moyes' discovery means the theory is wrong. Professor Mike Drake is searching for a new theory of how the early Earth formed wet. Now the zerons tell you for sure when liquid water was formed. be present and that was about 4.4 billion years ago and suddenly we don't know where it came from, suddenly we have a major problem: we have to seriously consider the possibility that water was present in the basic components of the planet while it formed, but how could water exist in the building blocks if the blocks were boiling?

The answer requires another step back in time. I finally went back to what the system was like 4 and a half billion years ago before the planets existed. and we realized that we had these fine grains of dust embedded in a sea of ​​hydrogen, helium and oxygen and some of the hydrogen and oxygen reacted to form water, so we basically had dust surrounded by water. Over millions of years, dust and gas condense to form the Planets in the solar system far from the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, form with icy cores, but ice is not the only way planets can enclose water. in places where it is too hot to freeze.

Water can be locked in rocks, as evidenced by this mineral if you look closely. It looks very dry, if you touch it with your fingers, it is very dry, but the heat reveals its secret and now you can start to see that it is actually boiling into little balls of water. There is a lot of water coming out of this mineral, so A perfectly dry looking mineral can contain a lot of water when the solar system first forms the huge cloud of gas and dust after the heat of the little son. I think it's something interesting.

This piece will make 52 layers visible on mobile devices or the big screen all free no subscription required where the Earth forms it is over 1,000° Fahren too hot for such water-bearing rocks to form and build the planet, but little After its creation, the Earth manages to obtain water. Drake asks himself a new question: what if the first Earth catches water in another way, a way that no one ever imagined. One day I was drinking a nice cold drink and I looked at the glass and it had condensation on the outside like this, you can see the water vapor on the inside if I run.

I put my finger around it and wondered if the same kind of process could have happened in the disk around the Sun, 4.5 billion years ago, could water have condensed into grains much like it did here? cold glass? It is completely different from water. containing rocks, if water vapor clings to planet-building dust grains, they could be the source of oceans, a completely new way for planets to form with water. He tests the theory with one of the main ingredients on planet Earth, the green mineral in this rock is olivine and olivewood is the most abundant mineral found on rocky planets it is also the mineral that was abundant in the uh dis around the young man Son 4.5 billion years ago wonders if all the olivine grains that form on the planet have water attached to them.

He uses a computer to calculate the interaction between olivine grains and water vapor. In the early solar system, water molecules stick to olivine crystals, so 30 g of olavine allows me to absorb about 0.3 ml of water, but I can't. You capture enough water to fill the oceans. Drake has to expand his calculations on how much water could stick to a pile ofolivine grains the size of the Earth. Frankly, when we started these calculations we had no idea how much water we could absorb. and we were truly amazed when we discovered that we could get 10 times the amount of water that is currently in the Earth's oceans.

Professor Drake believes that in the early forms of the Earth there are already billions of gallons of water that adhere to the billions of grains of dust that build the planet, it is really exciting to have found a new solution to one of the most important questions. fascinating and important things that humans face and that is why we have water, because without water we cannot exist, but Drake's theory is new and not everyone believes it. It has a flaw, not even he can explain the type of water our water has. a signature the ratio r of heavy to light hydrogen in Earth's water tells you where the source of Earth's water comes from should have a signature match, but water that condenses directly from the disk of gas and dust around us little son is very different; it would look and taste just like water on Earth, but would have six times less heavy hydrogen.

Now I don't want to pretend that we still have the full answer until we can show that we can get the right ratio of heavy to light hydrogen, we can't be sure that this process is responsible for the US oceans if Earth's water It does not come from the basic components that make up the planet. and it doesn't come from comets where it comes from Professor Alesandro Morbidelli has developed his own theory, suddenly everything fits and you feel like you understand you understand the part of your past that no one was there to observe the origins of Earth's water are finally ready If the origin of Earth's water is revealed, it is one of the greatest mysteries of current

science

.

Scientists are looking for a coincidence. There must be some place in space that has the same type of water as the Earth. The answer may be locked within. of this piece of rock and metal. Few people know more about these meteorites than Gary. Well, I grew up in the basement of a meteorite museum my grandfather had in Arizona, so he would go up and look at the meteorites and by the time I was two he knew all their names. Once you get stung by a bug like that, you can't get rid of it, whereas comets are made of ice and dust and they come. from the cold fringes of the solar system a meteorite comes from somewhere else orbiting around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter there are millions of pieces of rock and metal called asteroids about 200 M in diameter that weigh millions of tons remains of the formation of the planets Sometimes asteroids collide and fragments fall to Earth as meteorites, but what can they tell us about the origin of Earth's water?

The initial idea 100 years ago was that there was a major planet and it broke up and everything was dry and hot. Looking at meteorites under a microscope reveals a different view. image As we learned more about meteorites, it turns out that some of them are actually quite wet, few from water. This is a portion of a meteorite known as a carbonaceous condite. Most black matter is a mineral with water locked inside. A fragment of rock that was once part of an asteroid that formed 200 million miles away reveals that at this distance from the Sun, asteroids formed with water locked inside them, there is water in the asteroid belt and apparently it's always been there, but we didn't know how to do it.

Recognize if there is water in the asteroid belt identical to water on Earth to find out. Professor Hus measures the ratio of heavy to light hydrogen in water-containing meteorites. He can do this with an ion microprobe which we were actually very lucky to get. One of the first of this new generation of ion microprobe, the machine fires a beam of charged particles at the meteorite, expelling all the hydrogen atoms from the water. The heavy hydrogen and normal hydrogen are then separated so the ratio between them can be measured. What Dr. Hus discovers seems like a crucial piece of the puzzle: The ratio of heavy to light hydrogen in asteroid water varies, but some have exactly the same ratio as water on Earth.

It looks like scientists have finally figured out where Earth's water comes from. So the question is how two things from different parts of the solar system end up with the same type of water. Chemistry can't solve the puzzle, but mathematician Allesandro Morbidelli has a radical theory that could explain how water ended up in the asteroid belt. On Earth, the idea was really driven by measurements, by the fact that water on Earth is very similar to the water that we get from metals that come from the belt. Morbidelli took a revolutionary look at an old topic about what the planets are like in our solar system.

They were built before scientists observed the formation of the four planets closest to the Sun. They studied how matter near the Sun condensed into larger bodies and eventually formed the planets Mercury, Mars, Venus and Earth. Morbidelli has done something radically different. He is the first scientist to observe the formation of the eight planets of the solar system as a whole, from Mercury, the closest to the sun, to Neptune, 80 times further away, the solar system is completely interconnected and we cannot study the formation of one part of the solar system ignoring the other regions of it. system you can't study the planets in isolation because they are all linked by a force, the only force that matters is actually gravity, so these things are relatively simple, we don't need to invoke strange physics or strange forces or dark matter.

As the planets grow, they interact due to gravity. Morbidelli recreates this interaction with a computer model, giving you a front-row seat at the birth of the solar system, about a million years after the birth of the Sun, the disk of gas and dust in the inner solar system. condenses to form about 50 Min planets during the next stage these Min planets collide and form larger planets this demonstration shows what happens the oranges represent many planets near the sun it is too hot for them to form with water trapped inside A It gets colder as you move away.

At 230 million miles from the sun, it's cold enough for many planets to form with water-bearing rocks. The green vegetables represent many planets with water, the Earth will eventually have to form in this region, so in a region that is very hot where nominally there should be no water, if you look at the mini planet near the sun, the earth forms from local material, the Min planets orbit the sun in paths that are almost parallel, thus, many planets collide to form the Earth, is formed from dry material, but in this case the Earth. because it was formed from many planets that were dry, they will also be very dry, fortunately for us this is not what happened, so we need to revise our model because morbidelli looks at the solar system as a whole, the whole scenario changes, a new player enters, Jupiter, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and one of the first to reach its full size, it is 300 times more massive than Earth and in the early days of the solar system it is beginning to shed its weight represented by this silver ball.

Jupiter's enormous gravity alters orbits. Of the mini planets now the mini planets, particularly those that are further away, have a more irregular movement and in this way the mini planets can mix with each other. The Earth is now formed wet. Watch the formation of all eight planets at once and the Earth forms from a mixture. of many planets, some dry, some wet, this model explains how the Earth came to have water similar to that found in the asteroid belt, suddenly everything fits together and you feel that you understand, you understand a part of your past that no one was there to observe them.

The moments are fantastic, there are only a few moments like that in a scientist's career, but even if it happens once every few years, those moments are so exciting that they are worth years of work. Morelli's idea is now the leading theory of how the Earth came to be. It's water, but it's not the whole story at the moment, it's the best answer we have, but as we say, the devil is in the details, there are certainly some details we don't understand, so we have to keep working until we understand them all. For them, the question is what happened to the water on Earth during the continuous collisions with many planets the size of the Moon and Mars.

The energy of this collision is so high that it is capable of melting the entire Earth, plus it actually vaporizes a fraction of the water. Earth's rock if these collisions vaporize the rock How can the sprues survive? The origin of Earth's water remains unclear. Scientists have theories that they can bring water to Earth, but can they keep it here? The final stage of Earth's formation is a series of cataclysmic collisions. Can water survive? the process the answer is in the night sky Robin C has been working on the formation of the moon for 13 years. I think people are particularly fascinated by our moon because it has been our companion throughout all of human history and throughout all of Earth's history every human being who has ever lived has looked at the same Moon.

The moon was formed by a collision between the early Earth and a minip planet the main idea of ​​how the moon formed is known as the giant impact theory just as the Earth was finishing its formation The Earth experienced a collision with another flat object, something that was smaller than Earth but still comparable to the current planet Mars in its size, so this was a huge collision, the last of several giant collisions between many planets that make up Earth. Why this collision? The result will be a dry Moon and not a larger Earth. Robin has developed a computer model to discover that the key turns out to be the angle of impact when this collision first occurs.

It is at an oblique angle, the impacting planet divides into this long arm. of debris which then wraps around the earth to form a disk in no more than the span of a human lifetime, the debris disk condenses and forms the moon, so why isn't the moon wet if you spread that rock on a disk around? the earth so that the dis is very widespread and there is a lot of surface on which that rock can lose its water, then the water will tend to evaporate and be lost. The model explains why the Moon is dry but it does not explain what.

It happens to water on Earth, the impact of the formation of the moon is an event of such scale that it is almost difficult to understand if you have ever visited a volcano and seen molten lava coming out of the earth, that is what We mean by molten rock that has been the coldest material on Earth after this impact, if you continue to heat that material even more, it will eventually vaporize, forming the Moon. The impact was energetic enough to do both. These cataclysmic impacts should have expelled the water on Earth. The impact occurred approx. 4 and a half billion years ago and since this is the last cataclysmic collision that planet Earth suffers, the date is vital.

Professor Moyes' zircons reveal that the Earth had water 4.4 billion years ago, very shortly after the collision that formed the moon if the collision had destroyed the Earth. water to space where did the water in zircons come from? Since water was present here in liquid form and in abundance very early and shortly after the moon formation event, it means that the water was delivered very quickly right after the moon formed, which I believe. It is highly unlikely that there was already water present on or within the Earth before the giant impact that resulted in the formation of the Moon, so Earth's water survives this latest cataclysmic planet-forming process, but how do you think Professor Drake that water has been here since the St.

He has a theory about how it survives, so the collision of a marized object with the Earth is an incredibly violent event, it will melt the earth. Now the obvious question is if the Earth went through such a violent event, how did it manage to maintain its water, most people think that if you heat something, you boil all the water, but that's not really true. Any water in the earth will dissolve into that molten rock. That molten rock or magma is literally a sponge for water that you can dissolve in large quantities. amounts of water in liquid rock The early Earth is a giant fireball of molten rock dissolved inside there are billions of gallons of water, but how does this rock become our Blue Planet?

This redot molten Earth will have a lot of water and that water has to go somewhere when the planet cools the rocks in this Arizona desert reveal what happens when the rocks that cool solidify the rock that crystallizes deep in the planet will have the water stored in the minerals that crystallize here we have some micas this turns out to be a granite and that water will remain inthe planet for 4.5 billion years the rocks that solidify deep in the molten lava can retain water, but the lava near the surface forms a different type of rock any rock near the surface this one, for example, here You can see the holes in it, it's going to lose its water, uh, it's going to make little bubbles, which is what these holes are.

Now imagine there were rocks like this all over the planet, the crystallized water goes out into the atmosphere, just look at the mountain. I walk up behind me and imagine how much hot, steamy water could be coming out of these rocks as they crystallized across the planet. Water vapor escapes from the cooling rock. Earth's osphere is dense with vapor 100 million years after the impact that formed the Moon. The Earth has cooled enough to form a crust and there will be very hot rain that will fall on the planet's surface, run in rivers and eventually form the oceans, but the story still has one chapter left;

Many scientists believe that the Earth has more than one source. of water, where did all the water on Earth come from? According to the leading theory, the water arrived when many planets further out in the solar system collided with the early Earth, but scientists suspect this is not the whole story. Personally, I think there is more than one way. to bring water to Earth like comets analysis of comets shows that they cannot be the source of all our water, we can be pretty sure that comets must have brought some water because we know comets must have hit Earth , but the question is how much is the fraction that they contributed?

The solar system may have provided another source of water. We've been hit by comets and asteroids and some of the water may have come from there, but to me it's a no-brainer at least. Some, if not most, of Earth's water had to come from the absorption of water into grains before the planet formed, but did these different sources bring enough water to Earth to support life? It is now impossible to determine how much of Earth's water comes from which source. because water has been mixing for more than 4 billion years and during all that time the water on Earth has not only mixed but changed.

The Earth's oceans have basically gone through a lot of processes since the Earth formed, there is rain and snow and all of these things have caused the composition of the water to change a little bit so how much the water has changed, no one knows, but there is a place where we could find a chain of volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific on the big island of Hawaii that Dr. Gary Hus is searching for. the oldest water on earth the volcano on the hawaiian island is basically what is known as a hot spot, a place where lava constantly oozes out of the earth the rocks we are on in the hawan islands come from the deepest part of the Earth's mantle thousands of miles below the surface and provides us with a sample of material we could never get otherwise when looking at the water.

Encased in drilled rocks in Hawaii hus is actually looking at the water at the center of the Earth, water unchanged from day one, if you want to see what the composition of water on Earth is at the time it was formed, this is the bet. the only place you can look may find evidence that there is primordial water deep within the planet oh it's one of these guys oh that's cool his approach is unprecedented and early results suggest he might be onto something good this It's good, this is a great showcase for its purpose when we first found the clues we were definitely excited.

It appears that the water deep within the earth is different from the oceans and is significantly different, so different that it could be primordial water intact from the birth of the planet. This research could ultimately offer extraordinary answers to the question of the origin of Earth's water and Hawaii is not the only testing site. The team is also taking water samples from another hot spot, Iceland, if we can nail this down, for example, the Hawaiian volcano, and then we can go. to the critical point of Iceland and we get a different answer, not only do we now have differences between deep water and surface water, but we have differences between a volcano on this side of the earth and a volcano on that side of the earth, maybe There will be evidence of more than one source at this point one day deep in the planet they may find reservoirs of water Prim Moral different from each other such a discovery would mean one thing our water must have different Origins the implications are profound for years astronomers have been working towards a goal, scouring the skies for another planet like Earth, a rocky planet of the right size and temperature for liquid water and life, we now know of 250 other systems that have planets and we haven't found one.

Earth, there are still billions of systems left to explore, so the numbers are on your side. If you are looking for another Earth, we have 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Of those, we think about 10%, so one in 10 has a Sun-like star. I think maybe one in 10 of those stars has planets, so that's about a billion stars in our own galaxy. We believe that now they would have a planet similar to Earth, if it has water it is a different story. Does any Earth-like planet have water? Could there be some support for life? Current telescopes can't answer that question, but computer models can.

Dr. Shawn Raymond has come up with one. We take the example of observers, so with telescopes people go out and find giant planets orbiting other stars and then we take the orbits of those giant planets. and try to discover in that system could you still form a planet like Earth? Raymond's computer model shows how planetary systems form around stars. Some Earth-like planets end with water. We're modeling the formation of a planetary system here. All this red stuff is dry. blue things are wet, starts with many Min planets far from their Sun, blue ones have water closer where it's warmer, red ones dry out as planets form, start to cool like Earth, any planet enough Warm enough to have water it must orbit in the Dry Zone, this guy here will end up being a pretty good Earth analogue.

The model shows how wet mini planets from further away are attracted to collide with a mini planet in the Dry Zone like Earth and there you just saw. went from red to yellow to green, that's the water supply that happens right there and at the end of this particular simulation it's very wet the result is a planet in just the right place for water, another Earth using the Raymond model can calculate what it takes to form other Earths and how many there might be, so we asked what would happen if things were a little different than we think they are around this other star, how would that affect the formation of plants like the Earth and how would it affect the supply of water to those planets If Earth's water was delivered in more ways than one via comets and with water as one of its initial ingredients, suddenly the chances of finding an Earth-like planet with liquid water have skyrocketed, as well as the possibilities of finding extraterrestrial life.

This is a big deal because we are alone in the universe right, no one knows for sure, everyone is excited about life on other planets and what we are doing is a step to try to find life on those planets, it's really cool, I mean, it's very exciting and because scientists now think that planets can get water in more than one way, they are more confident than ever in the answer. When people ask me if there is life out there, I say yes and there is life. as we know it with a rocky planet to which they have brought water.

I think the answer would again be yes, so by finding out how the Earth got its water, we will be able to find out how likely it is that somewhere, perhaps millions of light years away, other extraterrestrial life forms exist.