Volatile accretion history of the terrestrial planets and dynamic implications

Francis Albarède ()
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Francis Albarède: Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Université Claude-Bernard Lyon 1, and CNRS, 46 allée d’Italie, 69007 Lyon, France

Nature, 2009, vol. 461, issue 7268, 1227-1233

Abstract: Where did we get the water? Water is essential to life on Earth, so the question of where our water came from has a certain fascination. Francis Albarède reviews evidence for the hypothesis that at the time of the giant Moon-forming impact, both the impactor and the proto-Earth were essentially dry and only much later gained volatiles by accretion of wet material delivered from beyond the asteroid belt. He concludes that the introduction of this water into Earth's mantle may have triggered plate tectonics, and that this mechanism may also have worked for the young Venus, but seems to have failed for Mars. This paper is available as part of our International Year of Astronomy package on http://go.nature.com/Z35PCw .

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1038/nature08477

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