Primordial Earth Had a Major Difference in Its Skies We Didn't Realize Until Now

It would have been hot, lonely, and very short to be standing on Earth 4 billion years ago. New research shows that there would have been less lightning in the past.

This could make a difference to any of the hypotheses that suggest lightning may have been involved in sparking the earliest life on our planet. If lightning strikes were less common on the early Earth, that affects those calculations.

The atmosphere of the primordial Earth is thought to have been rich in carbon dioxide and nitrogen, which may have caused streamer discharges to form.

In the nitrogen and carbon-rich atmosphere, you need stronger electric fields for a discharge to start.

There is a discrepancy between how electrons behave in the atmosphere and how they behave in a chain reaction.

We don't know what the atmosphere of early Earth was like. The scientists used the carbon dioxide and nitrogen hypothesis from the 1990s.

Methane and ammonia were the dominant gases in the atmosphere during the first billion years of Earth, according to an older proposal from Stanley Miller and Harold Urey.

The idea of lightning forming the building blocks of life on Earth was put forward by Miller and Urey, but in recent years the thinking over the atmospheric composition at the time has begun to shift.

Our simulations show that discharges in the Miller-Urey mixture incept at lower fields than in Kasting's mixture and partly on Modern Earth, which suggests that discharges in the atmosphere of Ancient Earth might have been more challenging.

If recent ideas about the atmosphere of the early Earth are correct, the process of producing and building up the prebiotic molecule key to life would have taken longer.

There are a lot of unknowns, and the researchers don't specifically quantify how much longer. They say the variations could potentially make a big difference in how frequent lightning strikes were.

Adding more models of atmospheric chemistry and expanding the scope of the research to include the entire lightning strike process are some of the things that need to be done here. We are still looking for answers to the biggest questions.

It is important to get a good theoretical understanding of what happened if lightning discharges were responsible for the production of prebiotics.

The big question is, where do all these prebiotic molecules come from?

The research has been published.