Unexpected revelations about the origin of life on Earth from the Atlantic Ocean

(NLDO) - At the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a 1,268 m long mantle rock core has revealed the "witch's cauldron" that created life.

A 1,268-meter-long core of mantle rock collected by an international team of scientists is evidence of the so-called "biogenic reaction," the way the Earth turns the initial inanimate "building blocks of life" into the first components of an organism.

Scientists study rock samples from mantle cores taken from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge - Photo: CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

According to SciTech Daily, this rock core was collected by the ocean drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution from a tectonic window exposed along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

It is a diverging plate boundary that runs across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and is also the longest mountain range in the world, separating the Eurasian tectonic plate from the North American plate in the North Atlantic, and the African plate from the South American plate in the South Atlantic.

Professor Johan Lissenberg from Cardiff University (UK), the lead author of the study, said that recovering this mantle rock core is not only a record, but its greatest value lies in what it can tell us about the structure and evolution of the Earth.

They help explain many processes that still occur in reality, for example how magma forms for volcanic activity.

But more importantly, the paper published in the journal Science says the core has revealed how olivine, a mineral abundant in mantle rocks, reacts with seawater.

On the young Earth billions of years ago, this very reaction led to a series of chemical chain reactions, creating hydrogen and other molecules that could fuel life.

The authors believe this may be one of the fundamental processes for the origin of life on Earth.

Dr. Susan Q Lang, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA), co-author and leader of the Atlantic expedition team, said that the deep rock in the core they brought back was very similar to what was present on the planet's surface in its early days.

Analyzing them is therefore a window into the time that allows us to reconstruct the chemical and physical environments that existed on the early Earth, providing a steady supply of fuel and other favorable conditions over a long geological timescale to nurture the first life forms.

And it is this environment that could reveal how the seeds of life - possibly from space - were transformed into living creatures in what scientists call the "primordial soup", containing chemical reactions as mysterious and magical as a witch's cauldron.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/he-lo-dieu-kho-ngo-ve-nguon-goc-su-song-trai-dat-tu-dai-tay-duong-196240813082029485.htm