New Evidence Confirms That Ancient Earth Really Was a Serene Water World

Taking a peek at the history of Earth before life started to bloom on it is not an easy task. However, geological detectives have recently discovered evidence that Earth was completely different in the past than what it is today.

Earth Was A Water-Logged Planet

A new analysis of the mantle of our planet throughout its history shows that it was once drenched in water with few to none land masses at all. Earth was a soggy space rock in our Solar System. The question in front of us now is where did the vast amounts of water go? Planetary scientist Junjie Dong of Harvard University and team have discovered the answer to this query. They stated that the minerals deep within Earth’s mantle absorbed the water and left behind what we see today.

The researchers penned in their paper, “We determined the water storage capacity in Earth’s solid mantle. It was done as a component of mantle temperature. We find that water storage capacity in a hot, early mantle may have been more modest than the measure of water Earth’s mantle right now holds, so the extra water in the mantle today would have lived on the surface of the early Earth and shaped greater oceans. Our outcomes propose that the long‐held assumption that the surface oceans’ volume remained almost steady through geologic time may should be rethought.”

Searching For Water In The Mantle

If the water put away in the mantle today is more noteworthy than its storage capacity in the Archean Eon, somewhere in the range of 2.5 and 4 billion years prior, it’s conceivable that the world was overwhelmed and the continents overwhelmed, the specialists found. This finding is in concurrence with a past report that found, in light of a wealth of specific isotopes of oxygen protected in a geological record of the early sea, that Earth 3.2 billion years prior had way less land than it does today.

If so, it could help us answer several inquiries with respect to different parts of Earth’s set of experiences, for example, where life arose around 3.5 billion years in the past. There’s a continuous discussion pertaining to whether life surfaced in saltwater oceans or freshwater lakes ashore masses; if the Earth was inundated by oceans, that would tackle that secret. The research has been published in AGU Advances.