a bonobo humanity?

The early Earth – more cracks than facade?

Canto: So we’ve talked all too briefly about Earth’s probable formation and how its moon was formed some fifty million years later, and I’m not sure whether I want to go back further in time to try to answer some big questions about the solar system in general or the solar nebula, or forward to consider how life emerged from inanimate matter on this seething-hot, volatile planetary surface…

Jacinta: Well since we’re the blind leading the blind, it doesn’t much matter which direction we go. Let’s choose life.

Canto: Okay, but we’ll have a way to travel before we get there.

Jacinta: Well most of us learned at school that the Earth has a crust, a mantle and a core, and that the core is of iron and it’s really hot down there, and the crust is formed of plates that move around and go under each other, and that the atmosphere above the crust consists of layers, like the stratosphere and the ionosphere, and the atmosphere around us is around three-quarters nitrogen and a quarter oxygen with traces of other gases, and if it wasn’t like that we wouldn’t be here. But it wasn’t anything like that when the first life appeared.

Canto: Yes, it was very different, and it seems there’s more that we don’t know about the period between 4.5 and 4 billion BP than there is that we do know, if you know what I mean.

Jacinta: BP?

Canto: Before the Present. I got that from the excellent Stuff You Should Know podcast, and I’m going to use it from now on.

Jacinta: D’accord. So yes, we know that the early Earth was incredibly hot, reaching temperatures of 2000 celsius or more, but there’s also evidence from ancient amphibolite rocks and banded iron formations that there was water on the Earth, and plenty of it, 4.3 billion years ago. Which suggests an extraordinarily fast cooling down period, and where did all that water come from?

Canto: Yes I think we really need to look at this period, or what we know of it, to try and make sense of it, because it doesn’t quite make sense to me. A hot magma world, melted fom the inside out, but also bombarded from the outside by meteorites, then after the bombardment suddenly cooling from the outside in, and flowing with water. All in a couple of hundred million years?

Really?

Jacinta: That’s a long time actually. We’re hoping to live for a hundred years for some strange reason – a two millionth of our time-frame, if we’re very lucky.

Canto: Well it’s all relative, but where did this water come from? Some say it must’ve come from space, because that’s all that happened, meteors from out there crashing into here. Where else could it come from?

Jacinta: How do you trap water here when the surface temperature is so high? Water boils at 100c, right?

Canto: Under ‘normal’ atmospheric pressure. The early Earth was anything but normal.

Jacinta: Anyway it just doesn’t seem possible to get so much water from rocks crashing into us. There’s another alternative – the water was already here. So the original bits and pieces that formed the Earth – carbonaceous chondrites or whatever – contained water and this water somehow made its way to the surface.

Canto: Somehow. Leaving aside the rising-to-the-surface problem, carbon-rich chondrites are found in asteroids today, and they have apparently a similar water-plus-impurities ratio to our oceanic water, and that’s obviously very suggestive.

Jacinta: Yes and the isotopic ratios pretty well match, but they don’t for comets. Scientists have been able to measure the isotopic ratios in comets such as Halley and Hale-Bopp, and they don’t have anything like the proportions found in our oceans. I’m talking heavy water here, deuterium, but also protium which is another isotope of hydrogen.

Canto: NASA also launched a spacecraft, Deep Impact, to probe the constituents of a comet, Tempel1, and the results were negatory for its candidature as feeder of the Earth’s water, had it ever landed here, but of course not nugatory for astronomical research generally. But then, what comet is ever typical? Anyway, there’s a just-so story, sort of, that I watched on video recently, which explained the oceans, sort of. It told us that the planetesimals that created the Earth contained water locked inside, and that years of later volcanic activity released that water to the surface as steam, which condensed in the cool upper atmosphere and fell as rain. And the rain it rainèd every day.

Jacinta: So the Bible was right then?

Canto: More than forty days and nights – thousands of years, they claimed. But that made up only half the world’s oceans. The rest came from comets, they said. Now that seems unlikely, but replace comets with the right sorts of asteroids, and the recipe still works.

Jacinta: Well here’s another story, which is meant to explain how that heat-creating heavy bombardment came to an end.  The Earth’s bombarded surface was extremely hot, melting everything, even the rocks, and in this state the heavier elements such as iron sank to the centre, forming our core, which was vital in protecting us from the notorious solar wind – that incredibly strong force that has blown away the atmosphere of Mars.

Canto: Yeah, they say it kind of magnetised the Earth, and that was like a shield of steel.

Jacinta: Aka the magnetosphere, but I’m afraid that electromagnetism was a subject that transformed me into a gibbering mass of incomprehension at school.

Canto: I can’t say I understand it myself, but the magnetosphere works to almost perfectly preserve our atmosphere. We do lose a percentage to the solar wind every year but it’s so tiny that it’s not a problem. Another anthropic circumstance that proves the existence of God.

Jacinta: Hallelujah. So did this magnetosphere form before or after the formation of the moon?

Canto: God knows.

Jacinta: Goddess.

Canto: Sorry princess.

Jacinta: Princess, goddess, actress, countess, diminutives. They diminish.

Canto: Seamstress.

Jacinta: Temptress.

Canto: Watercress. Anyway it probably happened around the same time. The great crash that probably created the moon has been nicely computer-simulated by Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute – it’s well worth a look. The theory goes that this great glancing blow tilted the Earth and gave us our seasons, probably vital to life as we know and love it.

Jacinta: Yes but it would’ve heated up the planet even more, so I’m interested in the problem of the shift from this to our amphibolite rocks under water from nearly 4.3 billion years ago. Where the eff did that water come from? It steamed up from beneath the surface? Not likely. And from asteroids? Really?

Canto: Possibly. But according to this excellent Naked Science video, the best-preserved meteorites ever recovered came from a landfall in British Columbia in 2000. And when they investigated this meteorite material they found that it was made up of 20% water by weight, and that’s pretty significant…

Jacinta: Because water isn’t dense like rock is it, so that sounds like a lot of water. We’re learning a lot from this video, such as that meteorites don’t cause great fireballs or anything like that, because they’ve been tumbling about in cold space for eons, and their entry into the Earth’s atmosphere only heats up a few millimetres of the outer surface, and then only for a very brief period, so they pretty well instantly go cold again.

Canto: Right and maybe that explains something else; that a heavy bombardment of these big wet boulders – and apparently they’ve found that the further they are from us, the more water they contain – would’ve cooled the planet.

Jacinta: Interesting idea, which I’m sure someone’s thought of and maybe even computer modelled. Certainly it would help to explain the apparent speed with which the oceans were formed. So… I’m not really convinced, but in lieu of a better explanation I’ll take it on trust that the oceans were created in little more than a million years or so by a hailstorm of asteroids, together with water steamed up from below the surface. So now we have a somewhat cooler Earth, ready at last for some kind of life, but not as we experience it.

Canto: Right, we’re talking about an atmosphere containing virtually no oxygen. Made up mostly of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane.

Jacinta: And how do they know that? I’ve also heard hydrogen sulphide mentioned.

Canto: Yeah, upwellings from volcanic activity I believe.

Jacinta: So the stage is set for some sort of proto-life, with RNA or some precursor. And so the fun begins, if it hasn’t already.

Canto: Indeed it does. So that’s what we’ll be exploring next. I’ve even heard some researchers claim that water isn’t necessary for basic life to get started. Now there’s heresy for you.

Jacinta: That’s the fun of heresy these days, you don’t get burned alive for it, no more than a bit of gentle ribbing. I’m looking forward to the next post.