Fresh water appeared on Earth 4 billion years ago

June 3 () –

A study published in ‘Nature geoscience’ provides evidence that fresh water on Earth, essential for life, appeared about 4 billion years ago, 500 million years earlier than estimated.

Lead author Dr Hamed Gamaleldien, research associate at Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and assistant professor at Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates, notes that by analyzing ancient crystals from Jack Hills in the Middle East region Western Western Australia, researchers have pushed back the timeline for the emergence of fresh water to a few hundred million years after the formation of the planet.

“We were able to date the origins of the hydrological cyclewhich is the continuous process through which water moves around the Earth and is crucial to sustaining ecosystems and sustaining life on our planet,” says Dr. Gamaleldien.

“By examining the age and oxygen isotopes in small crystals of the mineral zircon, we found unusually light isotopic signatures dating back four billion years. These light oxygen isotopes are typically the result of alteration of rocks by fresh water. and hot several kilometers below the Earth’s surface. The evidence for fresh water at this depth in the Earth’s interior challenges the existing theory that the Earth. was completely covered by an ocean four billion years ago,” point.

For his part, the co-author of the study, Dr. Hugo Olierook, from the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University, emphasizes that the discovery was crucial to understanding how the Earth formed and how life emerged. “This discovery not only sheds light on the early history of the Earth, but also suggests that land masses and fresh water They set the stage for life to flourish in a relatively short period of time: less than 600 million years after the planet formed,” says Olierook.

“The findings mark an important step forward in our understanding of the Earth’s early history and open doors for further exploration of the origins of life,” he concludes.