Did Cosmic Snowballs Create Earths Water Supply?
A small comet the size of a two-bedroom house caused a spectacular disruption 5,000 to 15,000 miles above the Atlantic Ocean on September 26,1996. The NASA Polar Spacecraft’s Earth Camera recorded a far-ultraviolet image of the comet’s disintegration, which was then superimposed on a view of Earth at the time of the event. The bright and long-lived trail ends over Germany. In an discovery that might revise textbook explanations of how our planet obtained its water supply, the NASA Polar spacecraft has suggested that thousands of tiny ice-containing comets are pelting the Earth every day. These images support the hypothesis that Earth’s water supply was created at least partly by house-sized, ice-filled comets, which strike the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and immediately disintegrate into water vapor. University of Iowa scientist Louis Frank proposed this idea in 1986, after analyzing earlier satellite pictures which contained curious “holes” in the images. Frank argued that the
