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March 17, 2021 03:30 am
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/CIz0nhmZdUk/lightning-may-have-created-an-ingredient-needed-for-life-to-evolve
Lightning May Have Created an Ingredient Needed For Life To Evolve
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In 2016, a family in Illinois thought that a meteorite had hit their backyard. They called up the geology department at nearby Wheaton College to say that whatever struck their property had started a small fire and had left a weird rock embedded in the scorched dirt. "Meteorites, contrary to popular belief, are cold when they hit the ground," says Benjamin Hess, who was an undergraduate at the college but is now a graduate student at Yale University. "My professor readily figured out that that was probably a lightning strike." When lightning strikes sand, soil or stone, it immediately melts the materials into a glassy clump known as a fulgurite, or lightning rock. When geologists excavated the fulgurite in Illinois, they found something unexpected inside -- an important ingredient for life that had long been thought to be delivered to early Earth by meteorites. A report on the find, in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that this could have been a way for lightning to have played a key role in the emergence of life. When the researchers dug out the fulgurite in Illinois, they first saw glassy bits on its surface. Below that was a thick, tree-root-like structure extending down about a foot and a half. Hess and two colleagues at the University of Leeds analyzed the minerals inside and found one called schreibersite. This reactive mineral contains phosphorus, an essential element for life. Phosphorus "really plays a key role in a lot of the basic cell structures," says Hess. For example, it makes up the backbone of DNA. Phosphorus was abundant in early Earth, but geologists know that it was mostly inaccessible because it was trapped inside nonreactive minerals that don't dissolve easily in water. One explanation for where the phosphorus came from is meteorites, which can contain reactive minerals like schreibersite. But, according to the researchers, lightning offers an alternative source as it doesn't destroy an entire 100-kilometer area when it strikes and there could have been 1 billion to 5 billion lightning flashes every year when life firm emerged, about 3.5 billion years ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/CIz0nhmZdUk/lightning-may-have-created-an-ingredient-needed-for-life-to-evolve
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