Baffin Island Provides Insights into Origin of Earth's Water (1 of 3) (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Baffin Island Provides Insights into Origin of Earth's Water (1 of 3)

Caption

An aerial photograph showing the most recent eruption at the Holuhraun lava field in Iceland. This eruption was fed directly from the Iceland mantle plume, and a proportion of the gas emitted is thought to be water vapor sourced from this plume. We measured Baffin Island and Icelandic rocks where plume water was trapped inside the rocks, rather than being degassed into the atmosphere. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Nov. 13, 2015 issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by L.J. Hallis at NASA Astrobiology Institute in Honolulu, HI, and colleagues was titled, 'Evidence for primordial water in Earth's deep mantle.'

Credit

Photograph by Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson

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