- 3122 - LIGHTNING - brought life to Earth? Lightning is not such a one-off event. If atmospheric conditions are favorable for the generation of lightning, elements essential to the formation of life can be delivered to the surface of a planet. The oceans are enormous and humans are just a drop in the bucket.
----------------------- 3122 - LIGHTNING - brought life to Earth?
- Lightning strikes were just as important as meteorites in creating the perfect conditions for life to emerge on Earth. Minerals delivered to Earth in meteorites more than 4 billion years ago have long been advocated as key ingredients for the development of life on our planet.
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- Scientists believed minimal amounts of these minerals were also brought to early Earth through billions of lightning strikes. Researchers have established that lightning strikes were just as significant as meteorites in performing this essential function and allowing life to manifest.
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- Life could develop on Earth-like planets through the same mechanism at any time if atmospheric conditions are right.
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- Researchers were studying large and pristine sample of fulgurite, a rock created when lightning strikes the ground. The sample was formed when lightning struck a property in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA.
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- The Glen Ellyn sample is a large amount of a highly unusual phosphorous mineral called “Schreiber site“. Phosphorus is essential to life and plays a key role in all life processes from movement to growth and reproduction. The phosphorous present on early Earth's surface was contained in minerals that cannot dissolve in water, but schreibersite can.
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- Most models for how life may have formed on Earth's surface invoke meteorites which carry small amounts of schreibersite. This research finds a relatively large amount of schreibersite in the studied fulgurite.
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- Lightning strikes Earth frequently, implying that the phosphorus needed for the origin of life on Earth's surface does not rely solely on meteorite hits. This also means that the formation of life on other Earth-like planets remains possible long after meteorite impacts have become rare.
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- These phosphorus minerals made by lightning strikes surpassed those from meteorites when the earth was around 3.5 billion years old, which is about the age of the earliest known micro-fossils, making lightning strikes significant in the emergence of life on the planet.
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- Lightning strikes are far less destructive than meteor hits, meaning they were much less likely to interfere with the delicate evolutionary pathways in which life could develop.
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- The early bombardment is a once in a solar system event. As planets reach their mass, the delivery of more phosphorus from meteors becomes negligible. Lightning, on the other hand, is not such a one-off event. If atmospheric conditions are favorable for the generation of lightning, elements essential to the formation of life can be delivered to the surface of a planet.
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- Generations of lightning strikes could mean that life could emerge on Earth-like planets at any point in time. This opens the door to several future avenues of investigation, including search for and in-depth analysis of fresh fulgurite in Early Earth-like environment; in-depth analysis of the effect of flash heating on other minerals to recognize such features in the rock record, and further analysis of this exceptionally well-preserved fulgurite to identify the range of physical and chemical processes.
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- Just or fun this also leads us to the hypothetical questions, what would happen to the ocean level if everyone on Earth went for an ocean swim at once.
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- If you fill a bathtub all the way to the top and hop in, you know you’re in for a soggy cleanup. The water overflows because your body pushes it out of the way – something called displacement. Since the tub has a solid bottom and sides, the only direction the water can go is up and out.
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- The amount of space an object takes up is the volume of water that overflows the tub and is equal to the volume of your body.
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- Now think about a situation where the bathtub is only half full. As you hop in, the volume of your body still pushes the water up. You can calculate how much the water level in the tub will rise with a few simple math equations.
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- Suppose the bathtub is a rectangular box. You can figure out how much the water level will rise when you sit down in the tub by considering how much volume you are adding to the tub and what size area you are spreading this volume over. The amount the water level rises is equal to the added volume divided by the area.
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- For a bathtub that is 5 feet long and 2 feet wide, the area is 10 square feet. Lets figure out your body’s volume. To make the math easier, let’s suppose that you, like the bathtub, are also a rectangular box. Let’s say you are about 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide (from left to right) and 1 foot deep (from front to back). The volume of your body would be 4 feet x 2 feet x 1 foot, or 8 cubic feet.
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- When you sit down, you are adding the volume of approximately half your body to the tub. This means the height of the water level rise is equal to the volume of half your body, divided by the area of the tub. Using the estimates above, this leads to a water level rise of 4 cubic feet divided by 10 square feet, which equals about 5 inches.
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- You can think about the oceans as a gigantic bathtub. More than 70% of the Earth’s surface is ocean, giving this bathtub an area of about 140 million square miles. To figure out how much the water will rise, we need to know the volume of people sitting in it and divide it by this ocean area.
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- There are almost 8 billion people on Earth. Human beings come in all sizes, from tiny babies to large adults. Let’s assume the average size is 5 feet tall with an average volume of 10 cubic feet.
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- Only half of each person’s body would be submerged when they sit down, so only 5 cubic feet adds to the water level. With 8 billion people total, you can calculate 5 x 8 billion which gives a whopping 40 billion cubic feet that would be added to the oceans.
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- This volume would be spread over the vast area of the oceans. Using the same bathtub math as before, we divide the 40 billion cubic feet of volume over the 140 million square miles of ocean.
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- The total rise in sea level would be about 0.00012 of an inch, or less than 1/1000th of an inch. If everyone completely submerged themselves, this would double the answer to 0.00024 inches, which is still only about the width of a human hair.
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- The oceans are enormous and humans are just a drop in the bucket.
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- Also see - 1497 - Lightning is surprising astronomers because it is emitting Gamma Ray bursts that are hard to explain. Using data on lightning physicists still come up short for runaway electrons having the energies to create Gamma Rays. Something else must be involved?
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- April 12, 2021 LIGHTNING - brought life to Earth? 3122
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