The first chapter of the formation of the earth moved quickly. New research shows that our planet has locked itself in its basic chemical composition in the three million years after the birth of the solar system.
This type of rapid chemical coalescence helped build a world, but there was a catch: these first ingredients did not include much of what life needs.
In detail shared from a recent study, the image that emerges is austere.
Early land had very few volatile organic compounds (VOC). The planet was short on water and carbon compounds, so life did not get the revival it needed.
These critical supplies probably arrived later, after the training of the planet’s interior tanks.
Scientists at the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern underline a subsequent event that has changed the earth’s chemistry enough to make life possible.
Study early land training
Scientists have timed the early formation of the earth using a short-term radioactive marker-manganese-53, which disintegrates in Chrome-53.
“A high precision time measurement system based on the radioactive decay of manganese-53 was used to determine the specific age,” said Dr. Pascal Kruttasch, the first author of the study.
“This isotope was present in the early solar system and was broken down to Chromium-53 with a half-life of around 3.8 million years.”
This half-life is well suited to events during the first millions of years, offering a clear “stopwatch” for very old materials.
Using this stopwatch, the team has reached age estimates with a better precision than a million years – the sharp razor for the dawn of the construction of the planet.
With these figures, they conclude that the fundamental composition of the proto-stand was established no later than three million years after the formation of the solar system.
Understanding chronology
Timing points to a planet that has been formed quickly but that started dry. At a time when the key reservoirs of the earth were in place – the coat, the crustal ingredients and the nucleus – the volatiles lacked largely.
This means that the essential elements of life had to arrive later, after the start plan has already been settled.
The team compared the isotopes of chrome in old meteorites with those of carefully selected earth rocks. Meteorites act as temporal capsules of the formation of the early planet.
The rocks of the earth, even after long and complex stories, can preserve the subtle isotopic fingerprints which record when the main tanks have separated.
Measure the chronology of land training
It is difficult to make such fine measures on materials from billions of years.
“These measures were only possible because the University of Berne has an internationally recognized expertise and infrastructure for the analysis of extraterrestrial materials and is a leader in the field of isotopes geochemistry,” explains co-author Klaus Mezger, professor emeritus of geochemistry at the Institute of Geological Scients of the University of Bern.
This technical capacity provides a solid verification of the chronology.
The manganese chrome system is sensitive to the period when the solar system has cooled, the solids formed and the planets assembled. With this precision, small synchronization changes appear clearly in the isotopes.
The formation of early land was dry
Volatile elements are exhausted at high temperatures. In the inner solar system, temperatures were high when the sun light up.
Dust and rock could enlarge and develop, but water and other volatiles have struggled to condense and accompany them.
Further on the sun, the colder conditions allowed ICE and gases to persist. The rocky material that built the earth formed in the hot area, so that the planet started with a deficit of water, compounds of carbon and sulfur.
This conclusion is based on evidence. Isotopic data adapts to a scenario in which the basic chemistry of the earth has been set early while the volatiles remained rare nearby.
Local and local local water additions in the interior region adapt much less to the measures because this region contained little to start.
Earth, Theia and the Moon
If the earth ended its “dry starts” early, the addition rich in water was to come later. A main candidate is a large collision – an impact of a body which formed further from the sun, where the volatiles were abundant.
You may have heard of Theia, an object the size of a March that had struck the young earth and produced the moon.
If Theia (or a similar body) came from a colder region rich in volatile, it could have provided a crucial water load of water and other ingredients.
This scenario aligns with data: rapid training followed by subsequent delivery which has changed the planet’s surface environment.
Without this delivery, the earth could have remained a rocky world with little water, even in orbit in the so-called living area of ​​the sun.
Implications for life
The location counts, but history counts as much. Two planets the size of an earth at similar distances from their stars can end very different if only one receives a late infusion of water.
The calendar, the source regions and the history of impacts determine if a planet develops oceans and an atmosphere capable of supporting biology.
This refreshes the way we think of “fair” conditions. Habitability is not guaranteed by orbit alone; It depends on the moment and how a planet acquires its volatiles, and if the early training is locked in a dry start.
More questions about early land training
Open questions remain on the giant impact. The next step is to study the collision event in more detail between the Proto-Stand and Theia.
“So far, this collision event is insufficiently understood. Models are necessary that can fully explain not only the physical properties of the earth and the moon, but also of their chemical composition and isotopic signatures, “concludes Kruttasch.
This modeling work will test how an impactor rich in volatile could provide earth water while explaining the makeup of the moon and the shared isotopic features observed in the two bodies.
With stricter clocks and better simulations, we can continue to press a simple and high issue: How did a dry and dry land become a humid world adapted to life?
The complete study was published in the journal Scientific advances.
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