Are you really sure that the earth was having water while forming as a planet?
How is that while it was extremely hot?
The answer is yes. The earth was not always that hot it develop from the debri and dust containing water circling the sun and heated up from the internal radioactive decay. The origin of water on the earth is bonded water internally in the earth as it formed, released as the earth cooled, and from meteors that impacted the earth early in the history of the earth There is still a lot of water bonded to minerals in the internal earth.
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There’s as much water in Earth’s mantle as in all the oceans
There’s as much water in Earth’s mantle as in all the oceans
The deep Earth holds about the same amount of water as our oceans. That’s the conclusion from experiments on rocks typical of those in the mantle transition zone, a global buffer layer 410 to 660 kilometres beneath us that separates the upper from the lower mantle.
“If our estimation is correct, it means there’s a large amount of water in the deep Earth,” says
Hongzhan Fei at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. “The total amount of water in the deep Earth is nearly the same as the mass of all the world’s ocean water.”
The results add to mounting evidence that there is much more water than expected beneath us, mostly locked up within the crystals of minerals as ions rather than liquid water.
At least one team has previously
discovered water-rich rock fragments in volcanic debris originating from the mantle. Another group has conducted experiments suggesting that the water at these depths
was formed here on Earth rather than being delivered to the primordial planet by comets and asteroids.
“The vast amount of water locked inside rocks of this deep region of the mantle will certainly force us to think harder about how it ever got there, or perhaps how it could have always been there since solidification of the mantle,” says
Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Illinois, who wasn’t connected with the new research. “It’s a key question about the evolution of the Earth, which extends to extra solar planets as well.”
Model rocks
What Fei and his colleagues have now done is to infer high water content throughout the mantle transition zone through lab experiments on synthetic rocks used to model those typically found in that layer, as well as the one below.
Already, real-world geophysical and seismic measurements have revealed that the viscosity of the mantle transition zone is lower than that of the upper mantle above and the lower mantle below, which extends as deep as 2900 kilometres, right down to Earth’s core.
Through their experiments, Fei and his colleagues have now shown that the measured values of viscosity match those when the ringwoodite rock that dominates the mantle transition zone is saturated with water.
“This fits well with the geophysically observed viscosity in the mantle transition zone,” says Fei. “We therefore conclude that the mantle transition zone should be wet.”