{"id":51915,"date":"2026-10-12T17:02:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T21:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=51915"},"modified":"2026-10-11T08:02:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T12:02:07","slug":"university-of-new-mexico-scientists-turned-up-to-70-percent-of-the-iron-oxide-in-dry-melted-basalt-into-iron-and-water-within-3-hours-a-hint-that-earths-water-may-have-formed-this-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/university-of-new-mexico-scientists-turned-up-to-70-percent-of-the-iron-oxide-in-dry-melted-basalt-into-iron-and-water-within-3-hours-a-hint-that-earths-water-may-have-formed-this-way\/51915\/","title":{"rendered":"University of New Mexico scientists turned up to 70 percent of the iron oxide in dry, melted basalt into iron and water within 3 hours, a hint that Earth&#8217;s water may have formed this way"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The water came out of a rock that had none left to give. In a lab at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, Susmita Garai and her colleagues first melted basalt in a stream of helium until it was bone-dry, then switched the gas to hydrogen, and when they later cracked open the sealed glass tube that held what had condensed in a trap chilled with liquid nitrogen, they weighed it right away with the water still inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to the study, published September 24 in Nature Geoscience, 20 to 70 percent of the iron oxide in the melted rock turned into iron metal within 15 to 180 minutes at 2,192 to 2,372 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 to 1,300 degrees Celsius), and the oxygen it gave up left with the hydrogen as water vapor, which is the same reaction the team argues could have given a young Earth its water without any help from comets or asteroids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A PhD project in Albuquerque<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Garai, who did the work for her doctorate in the university&#8217;s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, led the study, and her co-authors are Zachary Sharp, a Distinguished Professor who directs the university&#8217;s Center for Stable Isotopes, the geophysicist Peter Olson and Anthony Gargano, who is also affiliated with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An earlier, longer version of the paper is the second chapter of her <a href=\"https:\/\/digitalrepository.unm.edu\/eps_etds\/453\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">dissertation<\/a>, dated July 2026, and in its introduction she explains why the planet is worth the trouble: &#8220;Earth is the only known planet that simultaneously hosts liquid water, a thin atmosphere, molecular oxygen, surficial phosphorus, a magnetic field, active plate tectonics, and the Moon.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Halley&#8217;s comet had the wrong water<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For a long time the favorite answer was comets, until the European probe Giotto caught up with Halley&#8217;s comet in 1986 and measured how much heavy hydrogen its water carried compared with normal hydrogen, and the ratio came out about twice that of most water on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"New link found between water and planet formation | ESOcast Light\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/YVfPKdginYU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ESOcast Light on a new link found between water and planet formation. Video: European Southern Observatory (ESO)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;It didn&#8217;t match at all,&#8221; Karen Meech, a planetary astronomer at the University of Hawai&#8217;i, told <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/where-did-earth-get-its-oceans-maybe-it-made-them-itself-20260612\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Quanta Magazine<\/a> for a June 12 article on the origin of the oceans, published three months before the New Mexico paper. In the same piece Ashley King, a meteoriticist at the Natural History Museum in London, said that &#8220;comets sort of fell out of favor,&#8221; and that &#8220;the community is probably more favorable of asteroids than comets these days.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Asteroids have a weak spot of their own, because they would have had to hit Earth at the right time, after its molten phase, which the magazine describes as a matter of luck, and the dissertation version of the new paper puts its alternative in five words: &#8220;No exogenous source is required.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The idea of homegrown water was already gaining ground before this study, partly thanks to diamond-anvil experiments in which Harrison Horn of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sang-Heon Shim of Arizona State University and others squeezed hydrogen against laser-melted rock, and Shim, who was later one of the peer reviewers of the New Mexico paper, told Quanta in June how hard that work had been: &#8220;We broke a lot of diamonds.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A rain of molten pebbles<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The New Mexico scenario runs on pebble accretion, which starts with a young star wrapped in a disk of gas and dust, the kind of disk where astronomers have imaged <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/new-images-capture-footprints-of-baby-planets-around-newborn-stars-which-could-be-forming-in-just-hundreds-of-thousands-of-years\/26730\/\">footprints of baby planets around newborn stars<\/a>, and in which a small planet can grow quickly by sweeping up pebbles from a millimeter to a centimeter across, so quickly that the dissertation says the process can build bodies from the mass of Mars up to that of Jupiter while the gas disk lasts, which it puts at 3 to 5 million years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"900\" height=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/hl-tauri-disk-alma.jpg\" alt=\"ALMA image of the dusty disk around the young star HL Tauri\" class=\"wp-image-51921\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/hl-tauri-disk-alma.jpg 900w, https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/hl-tauri-disk-alma-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/hl-tauri-disk-alma-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/hl-tauri-disk-alma-768x768.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ALMA image of the disk around the young star HL Tauri, where planets are thought to be forming. Image: ALMA (ESO\/NAOJ\/NRAO) (CC BY 4.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Many of those pebbles would be chondrules, the tiny beads of once-molten rock that can still be found packed inside stony meteorites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A growing planet also pulls in hydrogen and helium from the disk, and the earlier studies cited in the dissertation suggest that around an Earth-size protoplanet the bottom of that atmosphere could pass 3,000 kelvin (about 4,940 degrees Fahrenheit) at some 200 times sea-level air pressure, hot enough that, as the dissertation chapter puts it, &#8220;Chondrules and other millimeter-size pebbles settle thousands of kilometers through the high-temperature portions of nebular atmospheres at terminal speeds of a few meters per second and may spend hundreds of hours above their melting points.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The published paper gives a figure for one case, a planet with 0.7 times Earth&#8217;s mass, where a 0.04-inch (1-millimeter) pebble stays molten for 9 days, &#8220;which is 72 times longer than our longest experiment (3 h),&#8221; according to a figure caption, after which the iron sinks to the core and the rest ends up in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/a-volcano-may-have-erupted-remnants-of-earths-primordial-magma-ocean-material-so-ancient-it-could-come-from-the-planets-earliest-chapters-of-fire-and-rock\/34825\/\">magma ocean that covered the early Earth<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Basalt from the seafloor did the job<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are no 4.5-billion-year-old pebbles to borrow, so, according to the dissertation, the team used basalt from the East Pacific Rise, a synthetic basalt with no phosphorus in it and a picrobasalt mixed half and half from basalt and olivine, hanging samples of about 100 milligrams (0.0035 ounce) in tungsten wire baskets inside a tube furnace, next to a thermocouple calibrated against the melting point of gold, and putting larger ones, from half a gram to a gram (0.018 to 0.035 ounce), into molybdenum crucibles in an induction furnace whose temperature they read with an optical pyrometer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Helium went first, and it drove the original water out of the rock and cost the glass some sodium and sulfur but nothing else, while hydrogen, once the gas was switched, started pulling sulfur, phosphorus and iron out of the melt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In one induction run, listed in a table in the dissertation, 1,000.7 milligrams (about 0.035 ounce) of basalt gave off 20.3 milligrams of water in 15 minutes, and the team trapped that water in a stainless steel loop chilled with liquid nitrogen, weighed it and measured its hydrogen isotopes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Under the electron microscope the cooled glass came out dark, dotted with bright specks of new iron, and an X-ray scan of one melt, which the dissertation turns into a 3D video, shows the metal scattered in pink through glass colored teal. The published summary is blunt about what that means, saying the measurements &#8220;show large amounts of water generated by hydrogen reduction of iron oxide to iron metal within several hours,&#8221; where reduction simply means taking oxygen away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Phosphorus may explain Mars<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The new iron also &#8220;strongly sequesters phosphorus, stripping it from the silicate,&#8221; the authors report, and in the natural basalt the iron grains came out round because phosphorus had lowered their melting point, while in the melt without phosphorus the iron grew as solid crystals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mars and Earth differ in exactly this way, and the paper offers a reason: &#8220;Transfer of this metal to the core offers an explanation of the low phosphorus content of Earth&#8217;s mantle relative to Mars as well as the low Fe\/Mg ratio of Earth&#8217;s primitive mantle.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The dissertation, citing earlier estimates, gives the Martian mantle about 1.8 times more iron oxide and 9 times more phosphorus than Earth&#8217;s primitive mantle, and argues that Mars was simply too small to hold an atmosphere hot enough to melt falling pebbles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Far more water than Earth kept<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The supplementary notes estimate that &#8220;Over 100 ocean equivalents of water may have been dissolved into the Earth during pebble accretion,&#8221; a number that could move a lot, since it depends on what the pebbles were made of and on how much oxygen sits in Earth&#8217;s core, which the dissertation calls &#8220;another matter,&#8221; with published estimates running from almost none to 5 percent by weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The gas around the young Sun had very little deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen, and the team calculates that losing 80 to 90 percent of that water to space, light hydrogen first, would bring Earth to its present-day isotope value, while what remained would still be &#8220;well within the range of estimates for Earth&#8217;s present-day water,&#8221; which they cite as fewer than 12 oceans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Other researchers are also looking inside the planet, and one recent study suggested that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/a-discovery-in-the-earths-core-casts-doubt-on-the-origin-of-much-of-the-planets-water-and-forces-us-to-rethink-what-we-knew-about-the-formation-of-the-oceans\/30317\/\">Earth&#8217;s core may store many oceans&#8217; worth of hydrogen<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Skeptics are not convinced yet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Pebble accretion itself is still argued over. In a 2024 <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2411.09271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">review posted to arXiv<\/a>, Alessandro Morbidelli of the Coll\u00e8ge de France, Thorsten Kleine of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz concluded that &#8220;the pebble accretion scenario is unable to match these constraints in a self-consistent manner,&#8221; and Olson and Sharp, writing with Anders Johansen of the University of Copenhagen, replied that &#8220;as much as 70% of Earth&#8221; could have formed by pebbles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The June Quanta article, which did not discuss the New Mexico experiments, also gathered doubts about the related idea that hydrogen reacting with a magma ocean could make Earth&#8217;s water. &#8220;I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s certainly possible that some water could be generated by reaction with hydrogen early on,&#8221; Quentin Williams, an experimental geophysicist at UC Santa Cruz, said then, before adding, &#8220;How much might be generated is, however, pretty enigmatic.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Johansen, who defends pebble accretion, was doubtful about that magma ocean route for a planet of Earth&#8217;s size, telling the magazine, &#8220;I&#8217;m a little bit doubtful whether you can have this for an Earth-mass planet,&#8221; and Horn, talking about how much hydrogen pressure the reaction seems to need, said, &#8220;Earth is right on the edge of where that kind of thing can start happening.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What a 3-hour test can&#8217;t settle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The samples were small, from about a tenth of a gram to a gram, and they were Earth rocks and a lab copy instead of real chondrules, and the longest run lasted 3 hours while the model&#8217;s pebbles stay molten for 9 days. The ocean totals also lean on inputs that the dissertation itself calls highly uncertain, such as how much of the iron in chondrules was already metal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The authors think the process could happen elsewhere, writing that &#8220;Earth-sized exoplanets built from pebbles may inherit oceans of water this way, representing a step towards habitability,&#8221; which bears on worlds such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/astronomers-describe-an-exoplanet-that-may-be-an-ocean-world-and-the-idea-of-a-water-covered-planet-puts-the-search-for-hidden-life-back-on-the-table\/33170\/\">a possible ocean world around another star<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The full study was published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41561-026-02118-7\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Nature Geoscience<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As for where the oceans really came from, Meech told Quanta in June that she doesn&#8217;t expect a single winner among comets, asteroids and a homegrown source: &#8220;I suspect it was a combination of all of them.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Image: ESO\/L. Cal\u00e7ada (CC BY 4.0)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The water came out of a rock that had none left to give. In a lab at the University of &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"University of New Mexico scientists turned up to 70 percent of the iron oxide in dry, melted basalt into iron and water within 3 hours, a hint that Earth&#8217;s water may have formed this way\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/university-of-new-mexico-scientists-turned-up-to-70-percent-of-the-iron-oxide-in-dry-melted-basalt-into-iron-and-water-within-3-hours-a-hint-that-earths-water-may-have-formed-this-way\/51915\/#more-51915\" aria-label=\"Read more about University of New Mexico scientists turned up to 70 percent of the iron oxide in dry, melted basalt into iron and water within 3 hours, a hint that Earth&#8217;s water may have formed this way\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":51914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51915"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51936,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51915\/revisions\/51936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}