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Oceans may have arisen on Earth billions of years earlier than believed

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ANI London

A new study researched on evidence of water on Earth and in the inner solar system saying that the oceans arrived early to Earth than expected.

The study conducted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) suggested that that it wasn't necessary since the right amount and composition of water was present at a very early stage.

Lead author Adam Sarafian, said that the answer to one of the basic questions was that their oceans were always here and they didn't get them from a late process, as was previously thought.

Horst Marschall, a geologist at WHOI and coauthor of the paper, asserted that with giant asteroids and meteors colliding, there was a lot of destruction and some people had argued that any water molecules that were present as the planets were forming would have evaporated or been blown off into space, and that surface water as it exists on their planet today, must have come much, much later hundreds of millions of years later.

 

The study's authors turned to another potential source of Earth's water carbonaceous chondrites. The most primitive known meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites, were formed in the same swirl of dust, grit, ice and gasses that gave rise to the sun some 4.6 billion years ago, well before the planets were formed.

Co-author Sune Nielsen said that an implication of that was that life on their planet could have started to begin very early knowing that water came early to the inner solar system also means that the other inner planets could have been wet early and evolved life before they became the harsh environments they were today.

The study is published in the journal Science.

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First Published: Oct 31 2014 | 12:31 PM IST

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