http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/earth-s-water-may-have-come-from-comets-asteroids-or-something-else-entirely\/<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The argument persists: Did our oceans come from comets, or from asteroids \u2014 that is, from the same sorts of planetesimals that formed Earth in the first place \u2014 or, perhaps, from terrestrial encounters with dwarf planets such as the still-surviving Ceres, which, at a width of 900 kilometers, is the largest \u201casteroid\u201d in our solar system?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Interesting factoid: \u00a0Earth is remarkably dry.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMany people,\u201d write Jewitt and Young, \u201care surprised to learn that . . . ocean water constitutes only about 0.02 percent of the mass of Earth. \u00a0Put another way, if our planet was a 300,000 kilogram Boeing 777, then all the water in the oceans would have the mass of a single passenger. \u00a0Freshwater locked up in polar ice caps, clouds, rivers, lakes, soil and Earth\u2019s biota contributes only a tiny fraction to this total. . . . \u00a0As strange as it may seem, in actuality, Earth is some 100 times drier than old bone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The new (March 2015) issue of Scientific American contains an interesting article by two UCLA planetary scientists, David Jewitt and Edward D. Young. \u00a0 \u201cOceans from the Skies\u201d looks at the current state of the question \u201cWhere did Earth\u2019s water come from?\u201d \u00a0 There\u2019s a two-paragraph preview available here that might whet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>