Watering the Earth

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Scientific paper

Despite our living embedded in the Earth environment, the origin of water on Earth is one of the most puzzling enigmas in the planetary sciences. Our planet that spawned our watery origins presently carries enough surface water in vapor or liquid form to cover the entire planet to a depth of about 3 km. Earth has substantially more water than scientists would expect to find at 1 A.U. Other compounds and elements also readily vaporize at Earth's distance. Previous proposed solutions to the puzzle considered comets as a viable source of the water, until spectral analysis of the comets Halley, Hyakutake, and Hale-Bopp, during their near-Earth passes in 1986, 1996 and 1997 showed that the abundance of the deuterium isotope of water is twice that found in Earth's water. Recent dynamical models [1] and the current best geochemical and water abundance data indicate that parent bodies from an overlooked region in the solar system, the inner asteroid belt, are promising as the primary source for Earth's water.
References
[1] O'Brien, David P.; Morbidelli, Alessandro; Levison, Harold F. (2006), Terrestrial Planet Formation with Strong Dynamical Friction, Icarus in press.

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