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Oceans appeared on Earth millions of years earlier than believed, new study finds

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A new study conducted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), US, researching evidence of water on Earth and in the inner solar system, discovered that the oceans arrived on Earth much earlier than expected.

Lead author Adam Sarafian, said the answer to one of the basic questions was that oceans were always on Earth and they didn't emerge from a late process, as was previously thought.

Horst Marschall, a geologist at WHOI and co-author of the paper, asserted that with giant asteroids and meteors colliding, there was a lot of destruction and some people had argued that any water molecules that were present as the planets were forming would have evaporated or been blown off into space and that surface water as it exists on their planet today, must have come much, much later hundreds of millions of years later.

The study's authors turned to another potential source of Earth's water carbonaceous chondrites. The most primitive known meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites, were formed in the same swirl of dust, grit, ice and gasses that gave rise to the sun some 4.6 billion years ago, well before the planets were formed.

Co-author Sune Nielsen said that an implication of that was that life on their planet could have started to begin very early knowing that water came early to the inner solar system also means that the other inner planets could have been wet early and evolved life before they became the harsh environments they are today.

The study is published in the journal Science.

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