Why does the Earth have more water than dry land?

Question

The Earth is 71% covered by water and 29% covered by land -- is there any specific reason why it is mostly water and not mostly land?

Answer 1

Because believe it or not when this earth was getting created back millions of years ago, comets came striking through the atmosphere.

As a comet approaches the inner solar system, solar radiation causes the water, frozen gases and other volatile materials within the comet to vaporise and stream out of the nucleus, carrying dust away with them. sometimes

but when hits earth when we weren't here, they melted from high temperatures creating Ho2 (water).

How we get oxygen?

Special rock some found out west AUSTRALIA release oxygen when in contact of water i am pretty sure.

Anyways i hope i helped out good luck mate.

Answer 2

To some extent, it's because the Earth is really quite flat.  Mt Everest is something like 7 miles high.  The Earth has a radius of 3959 miles.  So Mt Everest is a tiny bump about 0.0018 (1/565) of the radius.  That lets any water we have spread out quite a bit.

Answer 3

To answer this you need to consider the difference between oceanic and continental crusts.

Oceanic crusts are formed by the partial melting of the mantle at mid-ocean ridges.  This partial melting causes elements that are unstable in the mantle (known as incompatible elements) to move into the crust.

At subduction zones, oceanic crust is forced underneath continental crust, and is partially melted again.  This also causes incompatible elements to leave the oceanic crust and become a part of continental crust via volcanoes.  The leftover oceanic crust is recycled back into the mantle.

Over a very long time, this process has produced the continental crust that we know today, enough material to cover about 29% of the planet.  Geologists think that all the incompatible elements have been removed from the mantle, so it is unlikely that the area of continental crust will change greatly over time.

To answer your question, the composition and size of the earth when it formed determined how much continental crust could be produced.