Inefficient water degassing inhibits ocean formation on rocky planets: An insight from self-consistent mantle degassing models

Abstract

A sufficient amount of water is required at the surface to develop water oceans. A significant fraction of water, however, remains in the mantle during magma ocean solidification, and thus the existence of water oceans is not guaranteed even for exoplanets located in the habitable zone. To discuss the likelihood of ocean formation, we built two models to predict the rate of mantle degassing during the magma ocean stage and the subsequent solid-state convection stage. We find that planets with low H${}_2$O/CO${}_2$ ratios would not have a sufficient amount of surface water to develop water oceans immediately after magma ocean solidification, and the majority of the water inventory would be retained in the mantle during their subsequent evolution regardless of planetary size. This is because oceanless planets are likely to operate under stagnant lid convection, and for such planets, dehydration stiffening of the depleted lithospheric mantle would limit the rate of mantle degassing. In contrast, a significant fraction of CO${}_2$ would already be degassed during magma ocean solidification. With a strong greenhouse effect, all surface water would exist as vapor, and water oceans may be absent throughout planetary evolution. Volatile concentrations in the bulk silicate Earth are close to the threshold amount for ocean formation, so if Venus shared similar concentrations, small differences in solar radiation may explain the divergent evolutionary paths of Earth and Venus.

27 pages, 11 figures

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• The James Webb Space Telescope
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• The interior and atmosphere of the habitable-zone exoplanet K2-18b
• The habitability of a stagnant-lid Earth
• Vertically resolved magma ocean-protoatmosphere evolution: H${}_2$, H${}_2$O, CO${}_2$, CH${}_4$, CO, O${}_2$, and N${}_2$ as primary absorbers
• Early volatile depletion on planetesimals inferred from C-S systematics of iron meteorite parent bodies
• Scaling of plate-tectonic convection with pseudoplastic rheology
• Dynamics of atmospheres with a non-dilute condensible component

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• Super-Earths and Earth-like Exoplanets
• A dry Venusian interior constrained by atmospheric chemistry
• Eta-Earth Revisited II: Deriving a Maximum Number of Earth-like Habitats in the Galactic Disk
• Water versus land on temperate rocky planets
• Born Dry or Born Wet? A Palette of Water Growth Histories in TRAPPIST-1 Analogs and Compact Planetary Systems
• The Diffusion Limit of Photoevaporation in Primordial Planetary Atmospheres
• Carbon Cycle Imbalances on Arid Terrestrial Planets with Implications for Venus