Maryasa Krivitskaya                                                                                                Earth Science

Current event #1

Earth’s Water Existed 135 Million Years Earlier than Thought

            Until recently, scientists believed that water existed on Earth for about 4.5 million years. Lately scientists found evidence that this number isn’t exactly accurate. The latest research and evidence shows that water actually began to develop on Earth 135 million years earlier that the precious number. This evidence was found in the meteorites in Antarctica, which were broken of from the asteroid Vesta, which is currently in asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists discovered that Vesta contains similar element compositions and the same origin of the elements. Nitrogen, for example, was proven to have formed from the same element composition as of the nitrogen which formed on Earth.  Having similar element compositions, Vesta provides scientists with an example of what Earth looked like in its earlier stage. Scientists have also found evidence that there was water in the inner core of Earth which evaporated towards the surface of Earth. Before, scientists only looked into the existence of water molecules in the surface of the Earth and they didn’t consider that there could have been water in the center of the Earth. There was also a bit of water molecules found in the rocks of the moon, which was one of many evidences that showed scientists that a part of the earth was broken off when it was forming, which later came to be our moon.

            “The planets held on to the water somehow,” Sarafian said. “That’s going to make people rethink how planets are made.  This is one of many questions that are rising from the discovery that there was water in the center of the Earth. Water is one of many factors which allow scientists today to compare Earth to other objects in the universe. By finding water in other planets, we can assume there might be life, since we know from existing on Earth; any living thing needs water to survive. Water that is found in other bodies in the universe, give scientists similar bodies to Earth to look at, which provides them with more clues on how Earth was first formed. The whole idea of water allows scientists to discover new theories about our home planet.

            The author of this article did a good job with getting straight to the point, but there was some lack of explanations in the article. For example, the author didn’t quite explain the whole reason of water in the center of the Earth. This made me question how did the water exist in such high temperatures on Earth? How was water stored under such high heat? The article also makes me wonder whether all living thing need water. What if living things on other planets did not need water to survive? Although this article states its main idea, at the end I am left with a lot of unanswered questions.