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    "headline": "Earth may have made its own oceans; hydrogen turned 80% of molten rock’s iron oxide into metal and water",
    "description": "Earth may have made hundreds of oceans of water as it grew, University of New Mexico tests show, as hot hydrogen stripped oxygen from molten rock.",
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    "articleSection": "Science",
    "keywords": "Nature Geoscience, Susmita Garai, University of New Mexico, Zachary Sharp",
    "articleBody": "Earth may have brewed hundreds of oceans’ worth of water on its own while it was still forming, with no help from icy comets. A team at the University of New Mexico found that molten rock exposed to hot hydrogen gave up nearly 80% of its iron oxide in hours, and the oxygen freed in that reaction left as water vapor. That number matters because it turns a dry rock into a water factory. If the early atmosphere could do this at scale, a planet does not need wet material shipped in from the cold outer solar system to end up with seas. How the New Mexico team cooked rock in hydrogen for up to 3 hours Graduate student Susmita Garai led the work with professor Zachary Sharp, planetary scientist Peter Olson and Anthony Gargano, who is also affiliated with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Their paper, Experimental simulation of water formation on Earth from dry pebble rain, appeared in Nature Geoscience on 24 September 2026, and the university described it in a release on 26 October. The idea starts with pebble accretion, meaning a planet grows by sweeping up countless millimeter-to-centimeter grains of rock. Once a young Earth was massive enough, it would have held a thick, scorching envelope of hydrogen. Pebbles falling through that gas would melt, and the iron oxide inside them could swap its oxygen to the hydrogen, leaving iron metal behind and making H2O. To test it, the group melted dry, iron-bearing volcanic rock (the mafic kind found in ocean-floor basalt) at 1,200 to 1,400 degrees Celsius, roughly 2,190 to 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit. Some samples sat in flowing hydrogen and others in flowing helium as a control. Runs lasted between 15 minutes and 3 hours. Nearly 80% of the iron oxide turned to metal, but only in hydrogen In hydrogen, close to four-fifths of the iron oxide became metallic iron, with water vapor as the by-product. In helium, nothing of the kind happened, which shows the hydrogen itself drives the chemistry rather than heat alone. Sharp said the speed and size of the effect caught the team off guard. “We were quite surprised to find that extrapolation of our work suggests that hundreds of oceans worth of water were likely produced in this way,” he said in the university’s release. The paper reports a second result. The new iron metal soaked up phosphorus from the melt. The authors suggest that if this metal sank into the core, it could help explain why Earth’s mantle holds less phosphorus than the mantle of Mars. The team also argues the process should not be unique to us. “Here we show that virtually any Earth-sized planet should have water by this newly identified mechanism,” Sharp said. What one lab study cannot yet tell us This is a single set of laboratory runs scaled up by calculation, not a measurement of the ancient Earth. The “hundreds of oceans” figure is an extrapolation from small samples to a whole planet, and the university says pinning down how much of today’s water really came from this route will need more research. A planet that makes water can also lose it. Much of any vapor produced in a hot hydrogen envelope could have escaped to space, so the amount made and the amount kept are two different numbers. Comets and water-rich asteroids may still have added some share. For perspective, here is how the competing ideas line up: Delivery: water arrives later on comets, asteroids or icy pebbles from beyond the snow line. Home-made: water forms in place as dry pebbles react with a hydrogen atmosphere during growth. Mixed: both routes contribute, with the balance still unknown. Badiyaa has covered other clues about water on young worlds, including a 4.1-billion-year-old Mars meteorite altered by water, and the odd physics of hot water freezing faster than cold. The next test is in the data. The team’s measurements are posted openly on the Dryad repository, and the paper’s model inputs for a pebble-built Earth sit in its supplementary tables, ready for other groups to rerun with different atmospheres and escape rates. Further reading Nature Geoscience: Experimental simulation of water formation on Earth from dry pebble rain Image: Tim Bertelink, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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