Thanks for the responses
EH. It may be a personal thing with me but something does not seem right or logical about the consensus guess on this subject of our oceans of water being derived from collisions of asteroids and the likes with our planet.
I call it a guess, because I haven't seen any real scientific evidence for how H2O formed there yet.
My imagination is that similar collisions by asteroids and dust must have occurred with all the other planets and with the moon, but none of them retained the amounts of water that we have retained. And if we had the conditions to retain the water, could we not have the conditions to form the water?
I asked two questions that no one has attempted to answer. If 'heat' is the hypothetical argument for planet Earth not being able to retain formed water molecules during its cooling stage, would that problem not be pervasive throughout the rest of the cooling universe where all of these asteroids and comets are forming?
I also asked about the possibility of OH radicles being present and bound to other elements in multiple forms until conditions became right for them to preferentially combined with H. In the absence of an answer, I did a quick search.
This is a 2016 article that suggests this type of possibility and to my mind it makes more sense to my imagination than the consensus one. I'm talking about a similar process being necessary in the other hot areas where the asteroids and things had to produce H2O anyhow --
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18018 --
"We show that the mineral goethite, FeOOH, which exists ubiquitously as ‘rust’ and is concentrated in bog iron ore, decomposes under the deep lower-mantle conditions to form FeO2 and release H2."This is a 2018 article. I'm not sure of its implication in this interesting debate but it does suggest the latent potential for Fe compounds (at least; there could be scores of others) to store H2O in one form or another in hot, high pressure conditions --
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... 17GL075720 -
"A recently reported pyrite‐structured FeO2 was identified in the Fe‐H2O system at pressures greater than ~78 GPa after laser heating. The phase observed in this study has a unit cell volume 8%–11% larger than that of FeO2, produced in the Fe‐O binary system reported previously, suggesting that hydrogen might be retained in a FeO2Hx crystal structure."These are just the first couple of references I encountered and I feel sure that anyone in the business could locate many more.
I'll leave it at that and go against the current consensus, unless someone comes up with another more plausible angle.
If anyone does respond, it would be helpful if you provided evidence of how the water formed in the remote, at one time hot, asteroid belts, that could have been different from these last couple of suggestions.