New Report: "Meteorites Hitting Early Earth's Oceans May Have Helped Spawn Life"

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Many theories about the origins of life on Earth posit that prebiotic compounds may have arrived from outer space on asteroids or comets. But a new study suggests that extreme chemical reactions fired up by meteorite impacts may have jump-started life in the early oceans, rather than delivering its building blocks preformed. Meteorites striking the primordial oceans, the paper's authors say, could have supplied significant amounts of carbon, critical to life, and created a sort of chemical pressure cooker by the force of their impacts to synthesize the foundations of biological molecules.

The researchers report in Nature Geoscience today that they replicated the impact of a chondrite, a common type of meteorite, striking the ocean at about 1.25 miles (two kilometers) per second. The team did this by subjecting chemical constituents of chondrites (iron, nickel and carbon), as well as water and nitrogen, believed to be plentiful in the early atmosphere, to shock compression. The resulting pressures and temperatures, which likely exceeded 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius), yielded a variety of organic (carbon-based) compounds, such as fatty acids and amines. And when ammonia, which a previous study showed impacts could produce, was added to the starting mix, the experiment also yielded glycine (a simple amino acid).

Study co-author Toshimori Sekine, a researcher at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, says he was surprised by the output from the experiment, adding that "there are many additional molecules we found but didn't analyze yet." Lead author Yoshihiro Furukawa, a PhD candidate at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, says that in light of the results, "we can say those ocean impact events [were] very effective processes for the production of various biomolecules on the early Earth." He is quick to note, though, that it is unclear how much or how many of these biomolecules would be needed to initiate life.

Link: Article: "Meteorites laid groundwork for early life"

Link: Article: Rock and Roil: Meteorites Hitting Early Earth's Oceans May Have Helped Spawn Life