Study probes the planet's turbulent past to explain where oceans came from

The origin of water on our planet is a hot question: Water has immense implications for plate tectonics, climate, the origin of life on Earth, and potential habitability of other Earth-like planets. In a recent study in Physical Review Letters, a Skoltech professor and his Chinese colleagues suggest a chemical compound that--although now extinct--could have preserved water deep underground in the violent era when massive collisions must have evaporated the Earth's surface water.