Full Citation: Meech K., and Raymond, S. N. (2020). Origin of Earths Water: Sources and Constraints. In Planetary Astrobiology (V. S. Meadows et al., eds.), pp. 325-354. Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, DOI: 10.2458/azu_uapress_9780816540068-ch013.
Abstract: We have only one example of an inhabited world, namely Earth, with its thin veneer of water, the solvent essential to known life. Is a terrestrial planet like Earth that lies in the habitable zone and has the ingredients of habitability a common outcome of planet formation or an oddity that relied on a unique set of stochastic processes during the growth and subsequent evolution of our solar system?
Ultimately, water originates in space, likely formed on dust grain surfaces via reactions with atoms inside cold molecular clouds (Tielens and Hagen, 1982; Jing et al., 2011). Grain surface water ice…
URL: https://doi.org/10.2458/azu_uapress_9780816540068