Life on Earth may have a violent origin story, scientists say
There has been a growing consensus that meteors, as much as they can wipe out life on a planet, could also have been responsible for creating it.
A recent scientific review published in Journal of Marine Science and Engineering and detailed on the Rutgers University website examined three major meteor impact sites worldwide. The sites include Lonar Lake in India, Haughton Crater in Canada and Chicxulub Crater off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. They found that when massive meteors hit, they generate intense heat and fracture the surrounding rock, creating craters filled with minerals and energy. Add water and you get hydrothermal systems capable of sustaining microbial life.
These systems run on chemical energy, just like the ecosystems discovered around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor at the end of the 20th century. According to the researchers, these hydrothermal environments created by meteor impacts can last for centuries or millennia, all the while providing a stable environment in which life can arise.
Meteor impacts may have helped spark life on Earth, scientists say
According to the researchers, one of the best examples of this on earth is the Haughton Crater. It was formed about 31 million years ago, in what is now the Canadian Arctic. It retained enough heat to sustain hydrothermal activity for thousands of years despite freezing conditions at the surface. Geological evidence for the crater suggests that it has an ancient and active system of mineral deposits, fractured rock formations and ancient water flows, all deep beneath an otherwise hostile landscape.
The early Earth, which was covered in warm water, would have been hospitable to this process. Since many of these major impacts took place largely in our oceans, this combination of heat, water and minerals could have made meteor craters the ideal incubators for early microbial life that eventually led to us.
If it happened here, it could happen on other planets. And there is evidence that it may have. Mars certainly shows signs that similar hydrothermal activity may have existed at one time. The same applies to the icy moons of Europa and Enceladus, where underground oceans and heat sources have already been discovered. None of this is definitive proof that life began as a meteor strike, but it does provide an interesting idea: destruction and creation are tumultuous, often the result of catastrophic destruction, but all vital parts of life.
