The question of the origin of water on Earth, or more accurately put, the question of why there is clearly more water on the Earth than on the other planets of the Solar System, has not been clarified. There are various popular theories as to how the world's oceans were formed over the past 4.6 billion years.
Contents |
Some of the most likely contributing factors to the origin of the Earth's oceans are as follows:
A sizeable quantity of water would have been in the material which formed the Earth.[1] Water molecules would have escaped Earth's gravity more easily when it was less massive during its formation. Hydrogen and helium are expected to continually leak from the atmosphere, but the lack of denser noble gases in the modern atmosphere suggests that something disastrous happened to the early atmosphere.
Part of the young planet is theorized to have been disrupted by the impact which created the Moon, which should have caused melting of one or two large areas. Present composition does not match complete melting and it is hard to completely melt and mix huge rock masses.[2] However, a fair fraction of material should have been vaporized by this impact, creating a rock vapor atmosphere around the young planet. The rock vapor would have condensed within two thousand years, leaving behind hot volatiles which probably resulted in a heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere with hydrogen and water vapor. Liquid water oceans existed despite the surface temperature of 230°C because of the atmospheric pressure of the heavy CO2 atmosphere. As cooling continued, subduction and dissolving in ocean water removed most CO2 from the atmosphere but levels oscillated wildly as new surface and mantle cycles appeared.[3]
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4400 Ma, very soon after the formation of the Earth.[4][5][6] This requires the presence of an atmosphere. The Cool Early Earth theory covers a range from about 4400 Ma to 4000 Ma.
In fact, recent studies of zircons (in the fall of 2008) found in Australian Hadean rock hold minerals that point to the existence of plate tectonics as early as 4 billion years ago. If this holds true, the previous beliefs about the Hadean period are far from correct. That is, rather than a hot, molten surface and atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, the earth's surface would be very much like it is today. The action of plate tectonics traps vast amounts of carbon dioxide, thereby eliminating the greenhouse effects and leading to a much cooler surface temperature and the formation of solid rock, and possibly even life.[7]
That the Earth's water originated purely from comets is implausible, as a result of measurements of the isotope ratios of hydrogen in the three comets Halley, Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp by researchers like David Jewitt, as according to this research the ratio of deuterium to protium (D/H ratio) of the comets is approximately double that of oceanic water. What is however unclear is whether these comets are representative of those from the Kuiper Belt. According to A. Morbidelli [8] the largest part of today's water comes from protoplanets formed in the outer asteroid belt that plunged toward the Earth, as indicated by the D/H proportions in carbon-rich chondrites. The water in carbon-rich chondrites point to a similar D/H ratio as oceanic water. Nevertheless, mechanisms have been proposed[9] to suggest that the D/H-ratio of ocean water may have increased significantly throughout Earth's history. Such a proposal is consistent with the possibility that a significant amount of the water on Earth was already present during the planet's early evolution.
In the primordial seas hydrogen sulfide and in the primitive atmosphere present carbon dioxide was used by sulfide-dependent chemoautotrophic bacteria (prokaryotes) with the supply of light energy for the creation of organic compounds, whereby water and sulfur resulted:
The greatest proportion of today's water may have been synthesized biochemically through mineralisation and photosynthesis (calvin cycle).
|
|
Wikis
Search
