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Earth's Water Didn't Come From Outer Space
sciencehabit writes "Where did Earth's oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth supplied its own water, leaching it from the rocks that formed the planet. The finding may help explain why life on Earth appeared so early, and it may indicate that other rocky worlds are also awash in vast seas."
If this is true, then most earth sized rock planets in the habitable zone are also having water by default. Whoa, this simplifies the drake equation.
...everything is from outer space. In fact we are flying through outer space right now.
Sound like you are flying high in your own personal inner space
Not Invented Here - NOT
This news goes in hand with the parsimonious explanation that the Earth is the endogenous source of life, too.
I habitually distrust news that relate any process on Earth as influenced by Venus, Mars, or 'Outer Space'. Remember what a fool they made out of Bill Clinton with the 'bacteria from Mars'...
Invented Here - YES!
Um ... By definition, no.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The water we drink must have been reprocessed many times for eons by living beings. ...) for a while and vice versa.
Remember that the amount of sedimentary rocks made of dead stuff is much larger than
the total of oceans. This implies that striclty speaking each molecule has been dissociated
and recombined with different oxygen and hydrogen atoms. Many O and H atoms now in
water have been in other compounds (CO, H2SO4,
Keep up, will you? The water, which is the lifeblood of living things, came out of stones.
I wonder how much this removal of water from the rocks depends on the earth having a hot mantle? If the mantle were cooler, then the water would stay there instead of being cooked out as steam and being able to re-condense else where. This is massively speculative of course - but could part of the reason mars no longer has a liquid ocean be that since the planet has cooled now, all it's water is locked up back in the rocks again? Is the fact that we have a hot interior on our planet the main driving factor that allows us to have a liquid ocean?
Seems to be that a very high proportion of the "ugly bags of water" (ST:TNG) infesting the surface must have come from "outer space", in the colloquial sense.
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A hot mantle isn't something that happens by chance. When a planet forms, it involves large chunks of *stuff* coming and binding together - that is, coming from a dispersed position of high gravitational potential to a compressed position of much lower gravitational potential. All of that GPE has to go somewhere, and most of it went into thermal energy, hence the heat at the Earth's core. Mars is much smaller than Earth = less GPE to liberate = less core heat. Of course the fact that Mars is too small to hold on to a substantial atmosphere also plays a part.
What I'm saying is that any sufficiently large rocky planet almost by definition has substantial core heat. It's not really much of a coincidence that the Earth has a hot mantle. Probably, any large rocky planet of about the same age as Earth (i.e. orbiting a population I star) has plenty of core heat left.
qntm.org
Whatever drug you are taking, take less. Or much more.
Also, I can't resist citing my favorite xkcd quote: "While the author's wildly swerving train of thought did at one point flirt with coherence, this brief encounter was more likely a chance event than a result of even rudimentary lucidity"
Creations claiming that this paper is talking about the Fountains of the Deep and science has proved the Flood in
3
2
1...
Everything that exists on this planet was the output from stars. Therefore, everything on Earth came from outer space, including it's water. The only question is when did the water arrive relative to the majority of the other star debris.
Reading the conclusions of the fine article, I notice "...the more probable source for early water oceans [on Earth] is the collapse of the planet's steam atmosphere..." and "... these oceans may not persist over billions of years on smaller planets against the processes of atmospheric escape and continuing impact blow-off..."
It is a clue also that the title is about early oceans. This paper has nothing to do with the origin of Earth's present oceans but rather discusses early, pre-bombardment phase water and also more massive rocky planets.
Jeez, you forgot to mention Superman! What kind of a nerd are you?
The whole water from the large bombardment period never really made that much sense to me. It always seemed like grasping at straws. The idea that water/ice was either in rocks, or just part of the mass that coalesced into the earth makes far more sense. There is water vapor in Saturn's rings, so why wouldn't there be water vapor in the dust cloud the earth formed from?
So no, the Earth isn't in outer space. But neither is water. It's a void.
Of course the earth is in outer space. It doesn't have to be outer space to be in outer space. Oceans are large bodies of salt water, but you can be in the ocean without being salt water. Your Xbox360 came in a cardboard box, even though the definition of 'cardboard box' would explicitly exclude the Xbox360 from being part of it.
If you're surrounded by the void, then you're in the void. The earth is in outer space.
Then again maybe I should get a resounding "whoosh!"
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