No living creature on Earth would be able to survive without water, and the presence of this crucial component on other planets and in liquid state is the main hint for astronomers that life could be dwelling on those objects. But considering that Earth was a hellish fireball about 4.5 billion years ago when it just formed, it’s been a huge mystery for how the tremendous abundance of water appeared over time.
A team of French scientists led by Cosmochemist Laurette Piani tried to solve the great puzzle once and for all. Their conclusion was that Earth’s water could have been contained in its building blocks.
Enstatite chondrites (ECs) could represent the answer
Enstatite chondrites are a type of meteorites that feature a closer chemical match than the previously-suspected carbonaceous chondrites, which were water-rich meteorites.
Piani and her colleagues from the Universite de Lorraine used the mass spectrometry technique to measure the quantity of hydrogen in 13 enstatite chondrites. The outcome was that the rocks contained enough hydrogen in them to provide Earth with at least three times the water mass of its oceans.
Piani declared:
We found the hydrogen isotopic composition of enstatite chondrites to be similar to the one of the water stored in the terrestrial mantle,
However, the researchers don’t rule out the possibility that other vast amounts of water were carried to Earth by comets, which is a similar idea that can also describe how life began on our planet. Known as the panspermia, the theory says that the first amino acids, which are the building blocks for life, were carried to our planet by comets and asteroids. Going further, those amino acids may have been slowly evolved into more complex and intelligent organisms like animals.
All of the Earth’s water covers about 70% of the planet’s surface, and we can expect this percentage to increase if more glaciers will melt over the next years.
