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Between oceans, glaciers, polar ice caps, and lakes,
watery goodness covers almost 71% of Earth’s surface.
And that’s pretty special—Earth is the only one of the rocky planets in our solar system with this much water.
So when it comes to BIG questions, one of the biggest is where did Earth’s water originally come from?
One new study says maybe…the Sun?. But to get there, we gotta start a little further back.
For decades, planetary scientists and astrobiologists have been building two competing hypotheses
for just how Earth got so gosh dang WET.. Option one: Water was inside the Earth when it formed in the first place.
The idea goes that minerals in the mantle of our ancient, primordial Earth stored hydrogen and oxygen.
When those minerals melted in the natural course of geothermal activity,
the hydrogen and oxygen dissolved together in the magma as water.
When that magma got spewed out onto Earth’s surface via volcanoes, the water came too.
Alternatively, maybe those elements stored in Earth’s minerals were vaporized by an impact from some comet or asteroid…
possibly even the BIG impact we think created our moon!
Those vaporized elements combined and settled on the Earth’s surface, resulting in our life-giving liquid.
But option two is an answer that doesn’t come from so close to home.
Many scientists think that water was just chillin’ on comets, meteorites, asteroids, etc., out in space.
When these guys crashed into us…hey presto, water on Earth!
Where this gets a little sticky though, is the numbers.
/ˈremnənt/
small remaining quantity of something. Small parts left of thing that has been destroyed.
/ˈīsəˌtōp/
each of two or more forms of same element. Chemical element nearly identical, but with differing weights.
/ˈastəˌroid/
small rocky body orbiting sun. Very small planets that move around the sun.
/ˈsərfəs/
relating to or found on surface of something. Top layer of the ground or of water. To give (road) a top layer.
/ˈplanət/
celestial body moving round star. One of the bodies that orbit the sun.