It is difficult to predict what the Earth would have looked like in the early years before life. Geological researchers have now found more evidence that it was somewhat different from the planet we live on today.
According to a new study of the Earth’s healthy features over its long history, our entire world was once surrounded by a vast ocean, with very little land at all. It was a very soft space rock.
So where the heck did all the rain go? According to a team of researchers led by planetary scientist Junjie Dong of Harvard University, miners deep inside the costume slowly drink the Earth’s oceans to leave what we have today.
“We worked out the storage capacity of water in the Earth’s hard shell as an action at healthy temperatures,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“We are finding that the storage capacity of water in a hot suit early on may have been less than the current level of water in the Earth’s suit, so the water more in the healthy today on living on the Earth’s surface early and creating larger oceans.
“Our findings indicate that the long-held notion that the size of surface oceans may have been virtually stable over a geological period may need to be reassessed.”
Deep underground, large amounts of water are thought to be stored in the form of hydroxy group fertilizers – made up of oxygen and hydrogen atoms. In particular, the water is stored in two high-pressure forms of the volcanic mineral olivine, hydrous wadsleyite and ringwoodite. Samples of deep underground wadsleyite could contain about 3 percent H2O by weight; ringwoodite about 1 percent.
Previous research on the two mines under the high pressure and temperature of the Earth’s crust today has led to the discovery of these storage capacities. Dong and his team saw another opportunity. They collected all available mineral physics data, and measured the water storage capacity of wadsleyite and ringwoodite over a wider temperature.
The results showed that both miners have lower storage capacities at higher temperatures. Because the baby Earth, created 4.54 billion years ago, was much warmer inside than it is today (and its internal heat is still decreasing, which is very slow and also has nothing to do with the external climate), it means water storage. the capacity of the healthy is now higher than it once was.
Furthermore, as more olivine minerals crystallize out of the Earth’s magma over time, the storage capacity of the healthy water would increase in that way as well.
Overall, the water storage capacity would make a big difference, even if the team was conservative with the calculations.
“Global cooling has a major impact on the Earth’s solid surface water storage capacity due to the storage capacity of mineral temperatures inside it,” the researchers wrote.
“Today’s healthy water storage capacity is 1.86 to 4.41 times that of today’s surface ocean mass.”
If the water stored in the mound today is greater than its storage capacity in the Archean Eon, between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago, it is possible that the world was flooded and the continents to cross, the researchers found.
This result agrees with the discovery of a previous study, based on the abundance of a particular isotope of oxygen stored in a geological record of the early ocean, which was on Earth 3.2 billion years ago way less land than it is today.
If this happens, it could help us answer burning questions about other aspects of Earth ‘s history, such as where life appeared about 3.5 billion years ago. Debate continues as to whether life was first created in saltwater oceans or in freshwater ponds on land masses; if oceans had captured the entire planet, that would have solved that mystery.
Moreover, the decisions could help us find life outside the country. Evidence shows that the ocean world is abundant in our Universe, so looking for signatures of these dirty planets may help us identify a world that could be hospitable. And it could strengthen the case for looking for life on the ocean world in our own Solar System, such as Europa and Enceladus.
In fact, it helps us to better understand the delicate evolution of our planet, and the strange, often hopeless, attempts at the path that led to humanity.
The research was published in AGU Advances.