Building and Maintaining a Habitable World and the Early Conditions that Could Favor Life’s Beginnings on Earth and Beyond
The Hadean, once thought to be uninhabitable and tumultuous, has more recently been recontextualized as a clement time in which oceans, land, and life likely appeared on Earth. This non-exhaustive chapter follows multiple threads from planet formation to the origin of life.
We place significant emphasis on the solar system context for the Earth, the timing and nature of crustal formation and the evolution of the surface and atmosphere. Several scenarios for prebiotic chemistry are also discussed including atmospheric photochemistry, wet-dry and freeze-thaw cycles, and hydrothermal vent systems. We attempt to draw connections between the large-scale, planetary processes and various origin of life pathways to illustrate possible overlaps and correlations.
In detail, we conclude with and discuss the “impact of impacts” to show how asteroid and comet impacts during the Hadean may have affected many of these processes and scenarios, from generating land to altering the chemical composition and oxidation state of the early Earth’s atmosphere and surface.
Christopher K Jones, Michaela Leung, Chenyi Tu, Saleheh Ebadirad, Nate Marshall, Lin Tan, Tim Lyons
Comments: 18 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in “The Archean Earth” (ed.: M. Homan, P. Mason, R. Ernst, T. Lyons, C. Heubeck, D. Papineau, E. Stueeken, R. Mazumder, A. Webb, W. Altermann), Elsevier
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph); Geophysics (physics.geo-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2410.23344 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2410.23344v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.23344
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Submission history
From: Michaela Leung
[v1] Wed, 30 Oct 2024 18:00:01 UTC (1,090 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23344
Astrobiology,
