Ancient Earth May Have Been Water World, Geological Evidence Suggests

There's increasing evidence that about three billion or four billion years ago, oceans on Earth held almost double as much as water, enough to submerge the present time's continents on top of Mount Everest's peak.

Science reported that sea levels have risen and fallen with temperatures across the ages, although the total surface water of Earth was frequently assumed to be constant.

The said science information site specified that flood could have clued-up the engine of plate tectonics and made it much harder for life to begin on land.

The flood could have primed the engine of plate tectonics and made it more difficult for life to start on land.

Rocks in the layer today, the thick mantle of rock underneath the crust, are believed to repossess a worth of ocean water or more in their mineral structures.

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Layer, Four Times Hotter

Early in the history of Earth, though, the layer warmed by radioactivity was found to be four times hatter. Recent work that used hydraulic presses has exhibited that many minerals would be incapable of holding as much oxygen and hydrogen at layer temperatures and pressures.

The said occurrence proposes the water must have been someplace, said mineral physics graduate student Junjie Dong from Harvard University, who led a model derived from laboratory experiments published in AGU Advances. He added the most likely reservoir is the surface.

According to experimental petrologist Michael Walter, the research makes instinctive sense from the Carnegie Institution for Science. He also said that it is a simple notion that could have essential consequences.

Essentially, a pair of minerals discovered deep in the layer store much of its water currently. These minerals include wadsleyite and ringwoodite, both volcanic mineral olivine's high-pressure variants. Mineral olivine is described in Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry.

In connection to this, rocks rich in the said minerals comprise around seven percent of the mass of Earth, and even though two percent of their weight is water at present, a small amount contributes a lot. This was according to Northwestern University experimental mineralogist Steven Jacobsen.

Waterbound Earth

Jacobsen, along with others, has created these mantle minerals by squeezing powders of rocks to tens of thousands of atmospheres and heated them at 1600-degrees Celsius or higher.

Dong's team stitched together the experiments to show wadsleyite and ringwoodite hold a fraction of less water at higher temperatures.

Furthermore, as the layer cooled, the team forecasted these minerals themselves would turn abundant, adding their capability of soaking up as this planet aged.

Investigations are not alone in proposing a water-bound planet. According to Iowa State University geochemist Benjamin Johnson, there is absolutely clear geological evidence.

Titanium concentrations, he explained, in four-billion-year-old zircon crystals, as explained in Earth Observatory from Western Australia also proposed they formed underwater.

More so, some of the oldest-identified rocks on this planet, three-billion-year-old formations in Australia and Greenland, included pillow basalts, bulbous rocks, only forming as magma cools underneath the water.

Works led by Johnson and the Boulder-based University of Colorado geobiologist Boswell Wing provide more evidence. Specifically, samples from more than a three-billion-year-old chunk of oceanic crust left on the mainland of Australia were said to be far richer in a heavy oxygen variant compared to today's oceans.

Related information about water on Earth is seen on Geography Realm's YouTube video below: