New studies show that perhaps 3 billion years ago, the Earth was the "water world." Using all possible methods of hydrothermal chemistry, scientists suggested that the entire surface was covered by the ocean and it was more like a fantasy world from Costner’s notorious film “The Water World”. Such conclusions subsequently should help to figure out where the simplest unicellular organisms came from on Earth for the first time.
Water world
All cases in the accessibility of certain niches, says Associate Professor of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boswell Wing. Thus, if everything is covered by water, then there is simply no place left for land. But the study was not only about whether the ocean was here. Scientists were worried about the average temperature, which may have been much higher than today.
Crazy place
A group of researchers paid great attention to an unusual geological object, called the Panorama area. It is located deep in Australia, in the northwest.
There you can still observe basalt, which formed the basis of the seabed more than 3 billion years ago. There are also hills crossed by riverbeds, now overdried. This is truly a crazy place, says Benjamin Johnson, one of the researchers.
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For just one day, here you can get to sites that in ancient times were a solid outer shell of the earth, which was previously almost impossible, and find yourself in places where water has been bubbling for billions of years, penetrating hydrothermal springs.
Clue
Scientists see a place in Australia as the key to unraveling the chemical composition of water in those days. Of course, there are no samples that could be investigated, but there are stones that interact with water and retain molecules in themselves.
Researchers compare a similar process to fortune telling on coffee grounds. But the analysis of more than 100 samples of stones and various rocks should open the veil of secrecy.
Some chemistry
Scientists were interested in two atoms, or rather the oxygen isotope, located in the stones. Lighter is called oxygen-16, and heavy is called oxygen-18. So, for a long time on earth there was more heavy oxygen than it is now observed. Although the differences are not so large, but still the difference is obvious. We can conclude that the chemical basis of sea water 3 billion years ago was different than now.
Lost in the water
The sensitivity of water to heavier oxygen is explained by the absence of clay soils. Today, the earth is covered with such components that are capable of disproportionately absorbing those isotopes that are heavier, so there is less oxygen-18 in modern ocean water.
The team suggested that the most likely explanation for such a large amount of oxygen-18 in ancient water was that it simply was not around the dry continents rich in soil. But it is precisely the earth that is capable of drawing isotopes. However, this does not prove that there were no dry islands at all. They were, and studies confirm this. However, there were so few of them that it did not have a special effect on the chemical composition of water.
Scientists say that everything they found does not prove that land islands could not stand out from the water, but they were kind of microcontinent. But there was no global formation of continental soils.
