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Originally Posted by Jim Colyer
I thought Earth's atmosphere came from volcanos and that it rained for a million years to create the oceans.
My cousin told me, he heard on a science program that Earth's water came from meteorite impacts.
What is true?
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Many years ago, PBS aired a series called Miracle Planet. That series delt with the formation of the universe, solar system, and planets as I recall. Anyway, in one of the episodes, they demostrated how by adding heat to meteroite material water would begin to vaporize and then cool and condense into liquid form. The source water was trapped inside the meteorite material. It was postulated that as meteorites and other space stuff fell to the surface of the forming earth, the water was released due to the heat. Before there was sufficient gravity and atmosphere, the water vapor would simply return to space. Later, it began to get trapped in the forming atmosphere where later it condensed and rained down onto the earth surface.
The demonstration of releasing trapped water from space debris by the addition of heat sure made it appear like a plausible explanation.
