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AFP – Lightning strikes may have provided primordial Earth with enough phosphorus to support the emergence of life, according to a new study on Tuesday that offered an alternative explanation for the birth of living organisms.
Phosphorus is an essential building block for life as we know it, forming basic cellular structures and the double helix form of DNA and RNA.
Billions of years ago on early Earth most of the available phosphorus was locked in insoluble minerals.
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However, one mineral, schreibersite, is very reactive and produces phosphorus capable of forming organic molecules.
Since most of the schreibersites on Earth originate from meteorites, the emergence of life here has long been believed to be linked to the arrival of extraterrestrial rocks.
But schreibersite is also contained in the glassy rock formed by lightning in certain types of clay-rich soils.
Lightning strikes the sky in Nagykanizsa, Hungary on Friday, June 26, 2020 (Gyorgy Varga / MTI via AP)
Researchers in the United States and Great Britain have used advanced imaging techniques to analyze the amount of phosphorous mineral formed in each lightning strike.
They then estimated how much schreibersite might have been produced in the eons before and around the time of life’s emergence on Earth, about 3.5 billion years ago.
“Lightning strikes on early Earth may have provided a significant amount of reduced phosphorus,” Benjamin Hess, lead author of the study from Yale’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told AFP.
“And by synthesizing the best of our knowledge of the conditions of early Earth, I think our results support this hypothesis.”
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Hess and colleagues estimated that lightning could have produced between 110 and 11,000 kilograms of phosphorus per year.
Using simulations of the climate on early Earth, they said that while meteor strikes began to decline after the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago, lightning strikes have overtaken space rocks. for phosphorus production about 3.5 billion years ago.
This August 13, 2012, an archive photo, taken with a long exposure, shows stars in the night sky during the Perseid meteor shower near Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev desert in southern Israel. (AP Photo / Ariel Schalit)
This moment coincides with the origin of life.
Hess said research has not entirely ruled out meteorites as another source of vital phosphorus.
“The impacts of meteors at the time of the emergence of life are much smaller than thought ten years ago,” he said.
“But I don’t see our work as a competition against meteorites as a source of phosphorus. The more sources, the better. “
He said he wanted to know if lightning strikes produce traces of phosphorus on other planets where meteor strikes are rare.
“Meteor impacts decrease over time while lightning, at least on Earth, is relatively constant over time,” Hess added.
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