M
Mike Wehner
Guest
Based on what we know about the history of Earth, life is thought to have taken root here somewhere around 4 billion years ago, give it take a few hundred million years. That's an extremely large window of time when the very first single-celled organisms may have emerged, and scientists still aren't sure exactly how or why life began in the first place. What we do know is that life requires some basic elements — the so-called "building blocks" — and determining when those ingredients were present on Earth could help us figure out when life popped up, and how.
One of the building blocks is phosphorus, which is an essential component for the formation of cells. It's long been assumed that asteroids impacting Earth were the delivery mechanism for phosphorus, but new research suggests that it may have actually generated right here on Earth thanks to the activity of lightning. The work, which was published in Nature Communications, points to an early Earth where storms rolled across tropical regions, allowing for the formation of phosphorus and eventually life.
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Is lightning the reason that life exists on Earth? originally appeared on BGR.com on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 at 23:28:31 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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