Standing on Earth almost 4 billion years ago would have been an incredibly hot, desperately lonely, and very short experience – what with there being no oxygen. Now, new research suggests there would have been less lightning around than there is in
, suggests that methane and ammonia were actually dominant in the atmosphere during the first billion years of Earth.It was Miller and Urey who first put forward the idea of lightning forming the building blocks of life on Earth, via experiments in gas-filled flasks, but in recent years the thinking over the atmospheric composition at the time has begun to shift.
"Our simulations show that discharges in the Miller-Urey mixture incept at lower fields than in Kasting's mixture and partly on Modern Earth, which implies that discharges in the atmosphere of Ancient Earth might have been more challenging to incept than previously thought," write the researchersWhat all of this means is that the process of producing and building up the prebiotic molecules key to life, via lightning strikes, would have taken longer if recent ideas about the...
The researchers don't specifically quantify how much longer; they only modeled one of the earliest stages in the process of lightning formation, and there remain a lot of unknowns. However, they do say the variations"could potentially make a big difference" in how frequent lightning strikes were. There's lots more work to do here, such as expanding the scope of the research to include the entirety of the lightning strike process and add in more models of atmospheric chemistry. Ultimately, we're still searching for answers to the biggest questions.
"If lightning discharges were responsible for the production of prebiotic molecules, it's important to get a very good theoretical understanding of what happened,"
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