New research: Earth probably had water from the very first day

Genesis says that there was plenty of water on Earth from the beginning. Image courtesy of NASA.


Joel Kontinen

”Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” This is how Genesis describes the birth of our planet.

Astronomers who believe in the Nebular Hypothesis or some other natural explanation of how the solar system was formed have assumed that in the beginning Earth was too hot for liquid water.

The origin of the Earth’s oceans has been a mystery for astronomers. They have suggested that comets might be a plausible source of water. However, the water on comets differs considerably from the water we find on Earth. Asteroid impacts cannot solve the riddle, either, since their elements differ from those on Earth. For instance, they have more platinum than we have.

Nora de Leeuw, a chemist at University College London, and her colleagues made a computer simulation of Earth's birth process. They conclude that dust particles could be able to cling on to water at 630 degrees Celsius ( 1,166 degrees Fahrenheit). They thus suggest that there could have been liquid water on Earth from the very beginning.

Recently, they published their research results in the journal Chemical Communications.

Although the basic premise of Leeuw and her colleagues probably differs considerably from that what Moses wrote in Genesis, their research brings up serious weaknesses in naturalistic origin hypotheses and suggests that Moses knew what he was writing about when he said that there was water on earth at the very beginning:

” And God said, 'Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.' And it was so. God called the dry ground 'land,' and the gathered waters he called 'seas.' And God saw that it was good. ” (Genesis 1:9-10).

Source:

Shiga, David. 2010. Earth may have had water from day one. New Scientist 2785 (5 November).