Where did the oceans come from?

Great post overall. Agree completely you’ve hit *the *big idea.

Ref the snip above I couldn’t resist …

Remember folks, 100% of what you see in our solar system, from ginormous distant Jupiter to a tiny baby’s hand, is nothing but the leftover sludge of solar system formation. Carry on. :smiley:

The Book of Genesis states God did it. (and it was good, oooooh sooooo goooood)

Well, according to Genesis 7:21, the Flood wasn’t all that good.

the morning after?

It’s all cool, in 9:13-15, God said, “Sorry about that Flood stuff, I’m inventing rainbows for you all, enjoy.”

May God help me in my ignorance. I swear that the first thought that occurred to me on seeing the OP’s question was “Rain”. It took around 10 seconds for me to realize the idiocy of that thought. :slight_smile:

The flood was a good thing, and great thing even, killing all the evil peoples so humans never again would have to deal with the likes of Donald Trump …

Ha, ha, just joking …

But there is a certain simplicity to the idea that God created the oceans … and moose … so we can all say to God “My, what a wonderful world”

Moderator Note

While we allow a certain amount of joking around, etc. after the question has been factually addressed in GQ, we do not allow political pot-shots in this forum. Keep the political pot-shots out of GQ.

My apologies … that rule is well known to me … sorry to have caused you, and the other posters, any grief …

There is also the “Snowballs from Space” Theory of Louis Frank, which states that the Earth is being constantly bombarded with 20-40-ton mini-comets (or “snowballs”).

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-05-29/news/9705290201_1_earth-planet-snowballs

BTW, internet estimates for the depth of the oceans (mono-ocean?) if the Earth was perfectly smooth are about 2.5-3 km.

Here is one from the Straight Dope.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=513922

3km is about 3.5 x 10^5 inches, which would take 3.5-7 billion years to accumulate by snowballs alone by current rate estimate provided by Frank.

By my calculations, 3 km is 118,100 inches. That would take 1-2 billion years to accumulate by Frank’s estimate.

Ummm, yes. Not sure which buttons on my calculator were mis-pressed to give me my figures.

I wonder where all the extra water goes? It surely can’t all be turned to organics, can it?Split to hydrogen and oxygen, with hydrogen gas floating away?

Maybe it falls off the edge of the world.

Some random (and bad due to formating limits) formulas for random “rocks”

Gypsum: CaSO4 -2(H2O)
Calsite: CaCO3
Hematite: CaCO3
Dolomite: CaMg(CO3)2

If you look at the composition of the sun, which has more than 99% of the mass of the solar system in the following link, water is almost inevitable.

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/C/Chemical+Composition

Well, the question presumes that Frank’s theory is correct. As far as I know, it’s not accepted by most scientists.

Arizona scientists highly skeptical of small comet theory

Assuming Frank’s … unconventional … idea is true, an inch of influx every 10-20K years would be easy to not notice. Because there is some non-zero outflux as well and the only thing we could detect by historical sea levels, ice cores, etc., is the net of the two fluxes.

One point in Louis Frank’s favor is that we’re here assuming these icy comets impacted the Earth at a constant rate … all these comets could have come in over a fairly short period of time (I’m looking at you, Late Heavy Bombardment, don’t be trying to hide behind mama) …

However, we still need a mechanism the prevents these icy comets from being part of the original material of the proto-Earth … if there are enough icy comets to bring water in, then a goodly chunk of them would have here all along …

One of the latest theories is that, at some point early on, Jupiter’s orbit brought it closer to the sun and a lot of water was brought with it when Earth was still forming. This from the episode of How the Universe Works titled The First Oceans.
In the same episode they stated that after analyzing samples of water from comets (Rosetta mission?) and asteroids it was found the water in them didn’t match the water found on Earth. As I recall, the difference was the number of neutrons/protons - e.g. heavy water. Plus, as pointed out in previous posts here, the number of comets needed to bring all that water to Earth was beyond likelyhood.

Sorry I don’t recall the details - I’m old.

But that’s not Frank’s theory. He’s not claiming that water came from comets early in the earth’s history, which is a rather well accepted theory (or was, until the recent results that MostlyCarbon alludes to). Frank’s theory is that the mini-comets are continuing to impact the earth today, every day, and he claimed that data from the Polar satellite confirms this.