Its estimated that approximately 2/3's of the earths surface is covered by water. Roughly 326 million cubic meters of water in the earths oceans alone; staggering!
This does not include the water locked in the polar ice caps, nor in the bodies of organic life. Ground water, lacustrian environments, and the atmosphere all contain large amounts of water as well.
The question is: Where did all the earths water come from?
This question was first put to me by Rolfe Erickson, Professor of Geology during a lecture discussion many years ago.
Dr. Erickson, or as we know him, Rolfe, an Igneous Petrologist posed this question to an entire senior class. At the time, it was a very challenging question for us, and I laugh now thinking back at some of our answers. However, many of us “knowledgeable” students sat there with wrinkled foreheads, and blank looks on our faces.
After about 10 or 15 minutes of wild guesses and blank stares, Rolfe came out with:
“It’s really quite simple. All the water now present on the earth derived from the earths rocks themselves.”
After a few minutes, some of those blank stares began to spark with serendipitous thoughts of understanding; we were after all studying Igneous Petrology.
The igneous process.
Take for example, that when a volcano erupts, a large portion of what issues forth comes as volatile emissions, or gases. A very large component of the volatile erupting from a volcano is what? Yep, you guessed it - water vapor.
Do you agree? Disagree? Don’t care? Interesting? Insightful?