Excerpt taken from U.S. News Online, June 9th, 1997.
Scientists hooted in 1986 when University of Iowa physicist Louis Frank theorized that small icy comets continuously pelt the Earth. The comets, he said, could be the source of water that filled the oceans and of organic compounds that might have been the precursors of life. At the time, Thomas Donahue of the University of Michigan, one of the world's leading atmospheric experts, sniffed, "I've yet to encounter any expert on atmospheric science that supports these notions." Another researcher snarled, "If this was correct, we would have to burn half the contents of the libraries in the physical sciences."
Get out the torches. Last week, Frank released stunningly conclusive evidence that he was right. Using three cameras on NASA's Polar satellite, Frank's team captured images of comets the size of a house plunging spectacularly into the atmosphere. The pictures suggest that between five and 30 comets hit the upper atmosphere every minute and break up. The ice becomes water vapor that later comes down as enough rain, Frank speculates, to raise the oceans' level by an inch in just 10,000 years.
The implications are staggering. Earth's water and life could have extraterrestrial origins. Periodic increases in cometary activity might have caused the ice ages, perhaps even the demise of dinosaurs. Someday, in fact, the entire planet could be flooded.
This time, Frank's scientific colleagues are nodding approvingly at his findings. The satellite observations show "definitively" that objects containing a lot of water are entering the atmosphere, Donahue conceded. "These results certainly vindicate Lou Frank's earlier observations."--William J. Cook