UMD Study Rules Out Melted Meteorites as Source of Earth’s Water

Water covers 71% of Earth’s surface, but no one knows how or when such massive quantities of it arrived on our planet in the first place.

A new study published today in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question. Led by University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Geology Megan Newcombe, researchers analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating in space since the solar system formed 4 1/2 billion years ago. They found that these meteorites had extremely low water content—in fact, they were among the driest extraterrestrial materials ever measured, leading researchers to rule them out as the primary source of Earth’s water.

“We wanted to understand how our planet managed to get water because it’s not completely obvious,” Newcombe said. “Getting water and having surface oceans on a planet that is small and relatively near the sun is a challenge.”

The team of researchers analyzed seven melted, or achondrite, meteorites that crashed into Earth billions of years after splintering from at least five planetesimals—objects that collided to form the planets in our solar system. In a process known as melting, many of these planetesimals were heated up by the decay of radioactive elements in the early solar system’s history, causing them to separate into layers with a crust, mantle and core.

After analyzing the achondrite meteorite samples, researchers discovered that water comprised less than two millionths of their mass. For comparison, the wettest meteorites—a group called carbonaceous chondrites—contain up to about 20% of water by weight.

This means that the heating and melting of planetesimals leads to near-total water loss, regardless of where these planetesimals originated in the solar system and how much water they started out with. Newcombe and her co-authors discovered that, contrary to popular belief, not all outer solar system objects are rich in water. This led them to conclude that water was likely delivered to Earth via unmelted, or chondritic, meteorites.

Newcombe said their findings have applications beyond geology. Scientists of many disciplines—and especially exoplanet researchers—are interested in the origin of Earth’s water because of its deep connections with life.

“Water is considered to be an ingredient for life to be able to flourish, so as we’re looking out into the universe and finding all of these exoplanets, we’re starting to work out which of those planetary systems could be potential hosts for life,” Newcombe said.