Throughout many epochs, sea levels have continued to rise and fall under the influence of global average temperatures, causing the Earth’s surface to change from time to time.
As science advances, we gather more and more evidence that between 3 and 5 billion years ago, Earth’s oceans contained twice as much water as we see today, enough to bring Mount Everest below the surface. seawater. It is possible that the amount of water that covered the continents prevented life from thriving on the Earth’s surface.
The land was “rare” for three to four billion years ago, researchers say.
In the mantle layer just below the Earth’s crust, researchers believe that an underground ocean is residing in the mineral layer. However, in the early chapters of Earth’s history, the mantle was four times hotter than it is today due to the influence of radiation. New research from the hydraulics industry shows that ancient minerals are difficult to hold water under conditions of high temperature and high pressure.
“That suggests that the water must have been elsewhere,’ Junjie Dong, a graduate student in the mineral physics department at Harvard University, asserts in the new report. Based on a model built from many previous experimental results, Mr. Dong concluded in a report published on AGU Advances:Most likely large amounts of water are stored on the surface“.
According to petrologist Michael Walter, Jinjie Dong’s report makes intuitive sense. “This is a simple idea, but it generates important observations”, he said.
The ocean many billions of years ago could have been much larger than it is today.
There are two minerals in the mantle containing large amounts of water, wadsleyite and ringwoodite, two variations of the volcanic mineral olivine, which will form under conditions of high pressure. These two mineral-rich soils make up 7% of the Earth’s mass, and even 2% of it contains water, says experimental mineralogist Steven Jacobsen.small town to big“.
Jacobsen and his colleagues recreated the two minerals by pressing rock powder under extreme pressure, and heating them to more than 1,600 degrees Celsius. Then, researcher Jinjie Dong’s team carried out research that showed wadsleyite and ringwoodite Holds very little water in high temperature conditions. From there, the team hypothesized that when the mantle layer cooled down, the amount of minerals holding water increased, plus the ability to absorb water was higher, the ocean covering the surface had gradually receded underground.
The above experiments are not the only pieces of evidence supporting the Earth-Earth theory. Geologist Benjamin Johnson claims that there is a lot of geological evidence to support the above arguments. The titanium content in the 4 billion-year-old zircon crystal indicates that it formed below. In Australia and Greenland, there are 3 billion-year-old patches of land bearing the structure of lava that has cooled in water.
The rock structure suggests they were once lava that cooled in water.
Studies written by Benjamin Johnson and Boswell Wing, two geologists from the University of Colorado, continue to provide further evidence. Once the outermost layer of the seafloor, the 3.24 billion-year-old soil sample found in Australia contained many heavy isotopes of oxygen, much higher than the concentrations found in the seafloor today. Because these heavy isotopes will disappear when it rains, the oxygen isotope content in the ancient soil sample shows that at 3.24 billion years ago, it did not have the opportunity to contact the atmosphere to catch rain. .
The conclusion of the study published in Nature Geoscience does not immediately confirm that the ocean 3.24 billion years ago was larger than the ocean today, but it is clear that most of the continent then was submerged.
Although the great ocean would prevent the land from being exposed, it could still explain why the continental plates moved so much in the early stages of Earth’s history. According to Rebecca Fischer, a petrologist at Harvard, the great ocean could have pushed more water into the cracks in the Earth’s crust, weakening the surface structure and causing the plates to shift dramatically. As the plate begins to sink, the hard mantle will continue to bend the plate, further causing the continental plates to move.
Geological plates by today’s definition.
Evidence of oceans covering the Earth shakes up theories about how life formed on Earth. Some researchers think life originated in hydrothermal vents deep in the sea, others suggest that life came from nutrient-rich standing puddles on the ground – shallower, more volatile pools that form layers of water. Chemical substances accumulate, substances gradually interact with each other to create life.
But as the theory of the Earth became more and more plausible, the formation of shallow pools of water on the Earth’s surface lost its persuasion; Without soil, there would be puddles, and seawater would dilute the chemical layers that took time to form. There have been some theorists who support the “shallow puddle theory” rethinking the origin of life, as more and more evidence for the Earth appears.
The submerged world theory is yet another reminder that the Earth went through many stages of evolution. Most likely, before the formation of Water Earth, the barren planet must have accumulated water from extraterrestrial bodies falling to the surface. If the amount of “alien” water was more, or the mantle layer was less absorbent, perhaps life would never have formed.
“Earth possesses a subtle system. Too much water, or too little water, everything could have gone wrong‘, researcher Dong concludes.
According to Sciene.org