New Study Reveals That Earth Was Born With Water

Earth’s water supply is vital to sustaining life. For those who wonder about the origin of life here on our planet, the question of where the water came from has always been a matter of curiosity.

Looking for traces of the existence of water on Earth, a team of scientists from California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory perused rocks from the Moon — Earth’s only natural satellite. The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research into where water on Earth came from

The team looked at the isotopic character of those rocks and came up with an answer that “the Earth-Moon system had very low levels of volatile elements prior to the impact,” Phys reported. Due to low ⁸⁷Sr, both of the colliding objects must have been dry initially, “and not much could have been added since.” For the research, rubidium-87 calculated from ⁸⁷Sr was used.

It is widely accepted that the Moon occurred when Earth and a Mars-sized planet collided, and that is called the giant impact theory. The collision resulted in a substantial amount of debris in Earth’s orbit, and the debris in question became the bright sky object we see in the night sky.

‘Born with it’ option

“Earth was either born with the water we have, or we were hit by something that was basically pure H₂O, with not much else in it,” said Greg Brennecka, cosmochemist and co-author of the study. “This work eliminates meteorites or asteroids as possible sources of water on Earth and points strongly toward the ‘born with it’ option.”

According to the research, the two giant objects that barged into each other “must have come from the inner Solar System, and the event could not have happened prior to 4.45 billion years ago”.

“There were only a few types of materials that could have combined to make the Earth and moon, and they were not exotic—they were likely both just large bodies that formed in approximately the same area that happened to run into one another a little more than 100 million years after the solar system formed,” said Lars Borg, lead author of the work.