There’s been a growing consensus that meteors, for as much as they can obliterate life on a planet, might have been responsible for creating it, too.
A recent scientific review published in the 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, the Haughton crater in Canada, and the Chicxulub crater off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. They found that when massive meteors strike, they generate intense heat and fracture the surrounding rock, creating craters that are loaded with minerals and energy. Add water, and you get hydrothermal systems capable of sustaining microbial life.
These systems run on chemical energy, like the ecosystems discovered around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor in the late 20th century. According to the researchers, these hydrothermal environments created by meteor impacts could last for centuries or millennia, all the while providing a stable environment in which life can emerge.
Meteor Impacts May Have Helped Kick-Start Life on Earth, Scientists Say
One of the best examples of this on earth, according to the researchers, is the Haughton crater. It formed around 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 on the surface. Geological evidence of the crater suggests it has an ancient and active system of mineral deposits, fractured rock formations, and ancient water flows, all deep beneath an otherwise hostile landscape.
Early Earth, which was covered by warm water, would have been hospitable to this process. Since many of these major impacts occurred largely in our oceans, that 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 might have. Mars certainly shows signs that similar hydrothermal activity may have existed at one point. The same goes for the icy moons of Europa and Enceladus, where subsurface oceans and heat sources have already been detected. None of this is definitive proof that life began as a meteor impact, but it does offer an interesting idea: destruction and creation are tumultuous, often the result of calamitous destruction, but all vital parts of life.
The post Life on Earth May Have a Violent Origin Story, Scientists Say appeared first on VICE.
