A new study suggests that Earth may have been a “waterworld” with no landmasses around 3 billion years ago. The age of planet Earth is 4.5 billion years. The term “waterworld” is used to describe a planet with no landmasses, no continents, and span of only ocean. The concept of a “water world” has been popularly depicted in the movies Waterworld and Interstellar.
The study was published Tuesday in the esteemed peer-reviewed journal, Natural Geoscience, by two researchers from the University of Colorado-Boulder and Iowa State University. The study was sparked when they found an ancient piece of marine sediment in Western Australia. The piece was nearly 3.2 billion years old and was examined by co-author Boswell A. Wing at the University of Colorado in collaboration with co-author Benjamin W. Johnson.
Johnson told USA Today that without the presence of significant crust (landmass), the ocean would have been the only place where life existed. Does that mean that all of us have evolved from marine species? The ancient piece of crust that was examined provides an “isotope archive” for the ocean. You can think of it like a telescope that lets you peer billions of years back in time, allowing us to see the variations in elements that the ocean contained.
The study revealed that the composition of water was much heavier than that of modern-day oceans. The ocean is basically water – and water is made out of H?O. The weight of the oxygen element of water is standard: 16u (15.999 u). The isotope archive in the piece that was found revealed that billions of years ago, an isotope of oxygen called oxygen-18 (weighing 18u, rather than 16u) was found more dominantly in the ocean water molecules compared to normal oxygen (oxygen-16).
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