Scientists told how the conditions for the origin of life appeared on Earth
Miscellaneous / / March 04, 2022
The planet was once a hot ball with an unbreathable atmosphere.
Researchers at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, put forwardA wet heterogeneous mantle creates a habitable world in the Hadean a bold theory about how life-friendly conditions formed on Earth. It's all about unusual rocks that interacted with the atmosphere, forming the necessary chemical compounds.
Jun Korenaga and Yoshinori Miyazaki explored the earliest years of the earth. Approximately 500 million years ago, the surface temperature of the planet was 204 °C. Earth's atmosphere resembled that of Venus - for example, the level of carbon dioxide was 100,000. times higher than modern values (0.03-0.045 volume percent in dry air). In such conditions, life could hardly have arisen.
Scientists have suggested that a certain natural factor led to a sharp reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide. They modeled the Earth in its original state, taking into account the features of atmospheric physics, fluid mechanics and thermodynamics, and put forward several theories.
The most plausible was the hypothesis that the Earth's surface was covered with pyroxene, a dark green mineral with a high content of magnesium. Now it is no longer on the planet, and significant concentrations of magnesium are practically not found in modern rocks.
Molten Earth gradually cooled. Its mantle is a rocky layer 3,000 meters thick. m, in which there was a lot of moisture - dried up and hardened.
Pyroxene reacted with carbon dioxide to form carbonates. As a result, the level of CO2 decreased steadily in the atmosphere. Gradually, the Earth became habitable, and the first organic forms appeared here.
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