Lab Study Shows Hydrogen Can Make Water in Rock

Experiments heating silicate rocks with hydrogen suggest early Earth could have produced its own water through a mechanism that also applies to other Earth-sized planets.

Updated on Nov. 4, 2026 in Geology

Isometric editorial illustration of dark rock pebbles falling through a hazy atmosphere toward a glowing planetary surface, with water droplets forming on their faces. — University of New Mexico researchers found heating iron-bearing rock with hydrogen produced water within minutes, a possible origin for Earth's water published in Nature Geoscience. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

Researchers at the University of New Mexico heated iron-bearing silicate rocks to between 1,200 and 1,400 degrees Celsius in hydrogen-rich conditions and produced water within minutes. The study, published in Nature Geoscience, suggests the reaction could have occurred during Earth's formation.

Why it matters

The findings offer a possible origin for Earth's water that does not depend solely on delivery from outside the planet. If the mechanism holds, Earth-sized planets elsewhere could be expected to have water, bearing on the search for habitable worlds.

Heating experiments at 1,200 to 1,400 degrees Celsius lasting 15 minutes to three hours converted nearly 80% of iron oxide to metallic iron in hydrogen while helium produced no such reaction. The extrapolation to hundreds of oceans of water is a projection from laboratory conditions, not a measured field result.

The players

University of New Mexico

A public research university in Albuquerque whose team conducted the high-temperature rock experiments.

The details

Graduate student Susmita Garai led the work with Zachary Sharp and Peter Olson. Hydrogen reacted with oxygen bound to iron in the rocks, leaving the iron as metal and forming water, and the researchers propose that silicate pebbles falling through a hot, hydrogen-rich atmosphere could undergo the same reaction.

4.5 billion years ago: water potentially produced during Earth's early formation
October 12, 2026: Nature Geoscience publishes the study

The Big Picture

The findings build on pebble accretion models of planet formation, which hold that small solid bodies gathered to build growing planets. The work shifts the question from whether water was delivered to whether it was produced in place during that accretion.

The result may shape how scientists judge which planets are likely to hold water, and therefore which worlds merit closer study. For most readers the findings remain a research result rather than a change in daily life.

The takeaway

Water on Earth may have been created during its formation rather than arriving only from space, a finding that applies to other rocky planets. The result is a laboratory-based hypothesis that future work will need to test further.