By Will Hall, Message Executive Editor
AMES, Iowa (LBM)—A joint research team from the Iowa State University and the University of Colorado have helped dispel the long-held notion that the earth’s oceans resulted from water transferred to the planet via ice trapped in space objects and released upon impact of these meteorites with the earth.
Instead, they say, in a newly released report in the journal, Nature Geoscience, that from the start the whole earth was covered in water, consistent with Genesis 1:1-2 which states that “In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void … and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
The research team had set out to measure the temperature of the early Earth. But they learned from measuring isotopes of ancient rocks that the chemical history of these rocks indicated the earth was covered by a continuous ocean, with no continents at that time. Basically, they found an unexpected universal presence of oxygen-18, an isotope typically absent in areas with large landmasses.
Now the team plans to pursue the answer to the question: When exactly did the continents emerge, pushed out of the ocean by tectonic plates crashing together?
In this next step of their research, the team plans to investigate younger rock formations to piece together that timeline.
OTHER RESEARCH
This discovery follows by about five years a finding that likewise disputed the extra-planetary explanation about the source of Earth’s water, but also confirmed a key detail in the biblical account of Noah’s Flood.
In 2014, geologists found a rare diamond in Brazil containing a substance called ringwoodite, originating from the mantle of the earth, that layer of hot rock between the earth’s core and crust. After careful analysis of the diamond, combined with extensive seismological experiments, in 2017 scientists concluded that a “reservoir of water three times the volume of all the oceans [which covers 70 percent of the face of the Earth] has been discovered deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
“It’s good evidence the Earth’s water came from within,” said Steven Jacobsen, a geophysicist from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and one of the lead researchers in the study.
Genesis 7:12 reads, “and on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth.”
