Bottled Water History

Ours is the blue planet, and the hallmark of life on Earth is water. But where did this colorless, odorless liquid first come from?

Recent discoveries in astrophysics suggest that water is not native to Earth but rather was imported from the edges of our solar system as ice trapped in comets. Scientists think this water was first delivered here more than four billion years ago. During the meteor shower that gave the Moon most of its craters, Earth received five hundred times more "hits" than its moon did; since the planet has a greater critical mass than its satellite, Earth was also able to hold on to much of the water from the ice.

Today about three thousand brands of bottled water and mineral waters are available around the world. The growing trend has generated a large demand, and almost every day a new bottled water brand or company is born.

When you open a bottle of Fiji Water today you drink the rain water that fell around 450 years ago at the time Balboa discovered the Pacific. Carbon dating tells that the what we drink today from a bottle of Fiji Water is rain that fell more than 450 years ago, and it has been percolating ever since through layers of silica, basalt and sandstone.

A Natural History Of Bottled Spring Waters
by Francis H. Chapelle, Katy Flynn Brown

"Many people consider ground water deep beneath their feet as mysterious, perhaps even supernatural. To clarify matters, hydrogeologist Frank Chapelle has written a definitive history and science of subsurface water in his Wellsprings, a book both accessible to the lay reader while being filled with startling nuggets of information pleasing to the professional water scientist."—Donald Siegel, professor of earth sciences, Syracuse University.