For this they willingly are ignorant of,
that by the word of God the heavens were of old,
and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
2 Peter 3:5
"For many years the dominant view among planetary scientists was that the earth’s oceans were primordial. That is, they thought that the oceans’ water came from material that formed the earth 4.6 billion years ago and that the water condensed into oceans right away. This view dramatically changed three decades ago when most scientists embraced the theory that the moon resulted from a grazing impact by a Mars-sized body early in the earth’s history. That impact would have vaporized and removed what primordial oceans might have been present, leaving behind a parched earth.Because comets have high water content, planetary scientists next turned to them to provide water for the earth’s oceans. Comets are small, so it would have required the collision of a few thousand large comets to provide enough water to equal the content of the oceans. Most astronomers think that comets were much more plentiful in the early solar system. Furthermore, they also think that the solar
However, this idea has encountered a difficulty. Water contains hydrogen, and hydrogen has two stable isotopes. Most hydrogen atoms have a single proton in their nuclei, but a small percentage of hydrogen atoms have a proton and a neutron in their nuclei. We call this heavier isotope of hydrogen deuterium (normal hydrogen sometimes is called protium). In the earth’s oceans, a little more than 0.01% of hydrogen atoms are deuterium. In recent years, astronomers have measured the deuterium abundance in about ten comets. The first six comets so measured had deuterium about twice that of earth. Most astronomers were unconcerned about that, because they thought that these six comets came from the Oort cloud, while they thought it more likely that comets from the Kuiper belt delivered the earth’s water. This thinking supposedly was confirmed by the measurement of deuterium in Comet 103P/Hartley four years ago, which found a near-match for terrestrial deuterium abundance.
However, measurements late last year showed that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko had deuterium abundance 3 ½ times greater than that of earth. This comet too is supposed to be from the Kuiper belt, yet it has the highest deuterium abundance yet. It is a mystery why the deuterium abundance of comets varies so much, but it has become clear that the average deuterium abundance of comets, whether they come from the hypothetical Oort cloud or the Kuiper belt, is significantly higher than the earth’s. This effectively eliminates comets as the source of the earth’s oceans.
Mr. Beatty briefly discussed a proposal that primordial water on the earth may have been transported deep into the earth whereupon it was later reintroduced to the surface through volcanic activity. But the removal of surface water in this manner would have required that plate tectonics be operating from the very beginning; however, most planetary scientists think that plate tectonics came along a billion years after the earth formed. Since this is much too late to have saved primordial water before the hypothetical large impact that formed the moon, that suggestion probably is not correct.
Biblical creationists know that the earth’s oceans are primordial. 2 Peter 3:5 explicitly mentions the importance of water in the early creation." AIG
