Image: University of Manchester.

Former postdoctoral fellow Maria Schönbächler (now at the University of Manchester) and co-authors Rick Carlson, Mary Horan, Tim Mock, and Erik Hauri, recently published a study in Science indicating that water and other key volatiles may have been present in at least some of Earth’s original building blocks, rather than acquired later from comets, as some scientists have suggested. Tiny variations in the isotopic composition of silver in meteorites and terrestrial rocks are helping scientists put together a timetable of how our planet was assembled beginning 4.568 billion years ago. For more information on this research, see the CIW press release.