RE: Earth may have underground 'ocean' three times that on surface
June 26, 2014 at 11:47 am
(This post was last modified: June 26, 2014 at 12:32 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(June 26, 2014 at 1:16 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: Do you have any idea how many comets it would have taken to bring all of the water to Earth? You guys are insane! The Earth makes its own damn water as well as its own gases and petroleum.
1st, you have to get an idea of how many comets there were in the protoplanetary nebula around the infant sun, and how many of them still remains.
There is probably about a trillion comets still orbiting the sun. There were probably a hundred or a thousand times more when the planets were forming.
During earth's formation, something like ten billion comets collided, merged, and coalesced to add their material and water to earth.
Basically, for a period of about ten million years after progenitors of earth first started to form in the protoplanetary nebular around the sun, roughly ten thousand Haley's comet's worth collided with the progenitor components of the earth each year.
Roughly one Haley sized comets every 40 minutes for roughly ten million years. That's the ball park of how many comets it took.
Most of the water the comets took with them evaporated back out into space during initial and subsequent collisions. But many oceanfuls of water remained behind on earth.
[corrected and order of magnitude error]
(June 26, 2014 at 11:37 am)Luckie Wrote: ????
Yeah. The water in the mantle is chemically bounded to the rocks. It's not in a liquid state. These rocks won't even feel wet if you somehow can touch them.
