It has been eons since people have been wondering how and when our planet got one of the most basic elements of life—water. While scientists are busy searching water elsewhere in the solar system, a latest study has revealed something fascinating.
Water being one of the most important components of life on Earth has undergone intense study for decades. The latest study in the origin of life with water has revealed that water did not form on Earth. Rather, it was brought along with meteorites about 2 Million years post the formation of our blue planet. As per the researchers, this element of life was brought along with the angrites. Angrites are defined as a rare water-rich group of basaltic meteorites that once fell on Earth.
The study of this finding was published in a journal named Geochimica and Cosmochimica Acta. The team involved researchers from MIT who found that the chemical composition of water present on Earth is a perfect match to the water present on these angrities. This is a major indication that the water present on these asteroids had the same source as the water on Earth.
According to the researchers, the water on Earth arrived when the planet was in its initial stages with size that was just twenty percent of its present size. The lead author of the study, Adam Sarafian, working at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at MIT, stated that it is a fair assumption that the water on Earth accumulated in the early stages of development of Earth which cooled down the planet to stabilize liquid water.
Earth was formed fully around 4.5 billion years prior today. During this phase, Mars was already ahead of our planet by 20-Million-Years. The Red Planet outgrew ours with the presence of water, stable mass and many other chemicals such as carbon, chlorine, and fluorine. Being a planet on the inner side of the solar system, Mars had to run through a lengthy phase of dry and hot simultaneously. At this time, Earth was a protoplanet with just a surface consisting of molten magma. With such extreme temperatures, it was impossible to find water on Earth, where even carbon was volatile that flaunts a melting point of about 4,800 degrees in Celsius scale.
The researchers derived a melt composition from measuring olivine, which is a mineral commonly found in the basaltic meteorites. The researchers tested it for the presence of volatile elements such as carbon, hydrogen, fluorine along with chlorine to derive the melt composition of the same. It was derived from the composition that the angrite rocks consisted of about twenty percent of the planet’s present water content. This might not seem much but it was a good amount in order to bring down the temperature of the Earth taking shape. Scientists have also speculated that apart from water, life might also have come down from the meteors that fell down on Earth millions of years ago.