Could salt crusts be key ingredient for cooking up prebiotic molecules?
German scientists investigating the complex chemical mixture thought to be present in the early Earth’s oceans have found that amino acids can be ‘cooked’ into many other important chemical building blocks of life when embedded in salt crusts. Results of the laboratory experiments will be presented by Stefan Fox at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany, on Thursday 17 September. Approximately 4.5-3.8 billion years ago, the Earth was probably covered by a salty ocean, rich in organic compounds, dotted with active volcanic islands and short-lived continents. The team from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart has simulated some of the chemical processes that might have taken place along hot volcanic coasts during this Hadean era by evaporating solutions of artificial primordial seawater and then baking the salty residue in an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide to volcanic temperatures of 350 degrees Celsius. They found that compounds such as pyrroles, whic
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- Early Life On Earth: Could Salt Crusts Be Key Ingredient In Cooking Up Prebiotic Molecules?
- Could salt crusts be key ingredient for cooking up prebiotic molecules?
