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Life on Earth may have come from ancient lightning strikes, new study reveals

The spark of life.


Studies done by scientists at Yale University, U.S., and the University of Leeds in the UK have suggested that life on Earth may have been a result of lightning strikes dating back billions of years ago.

While scientists know that living organisms were already present on Earth as far back as 3.5 billion years ago, many believe that life could already have been around even much earlier than that.

The only problem with this assumption is that our planet at that stage still did not contain the right "ingredients" necessary for the creation of lifeforms – namely, enzymes, sugar, protein, and DNA.

To create these ingredients, elements such as carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus would have all been necessary. But scientists have so far believed these elements were still locked up inside the planet's insoluble minerals, rocks, and oceans, and were only made available later on.

Phosphorus is a key element needed for the creation of life on Earth. IMAGE: Image Of Elements

One of the prevailing theories is that at some point during that period, meteorites colliding with the Earth may have provided a valid supply of phosphorus, one of the elements that makes up the phosphate backbone of DNA and RNA – the molecules that act as the basis for all living organisms.

It was thought that these meteorites carried with them amounts of phosphorus in the form of schreibersite – a historically rare mineral on Earth, but commonly found in iron-nickel meteorites. However, researchers believe that the amount of impacts by these meteorites onto the Earth's surface would have still been too low to provide enough phosphorus.

The spark that made life possible?

The new studies, however, have now proposed a different possibility: A crazy amount of lightning strikes over the period of several billion years may have created stores of fulgurites – glass-like deposits of melted sand, soil, or rocks that contain the valuable schreibersite, and by relation, phosphorus.

A sample of fulgurite formed after lightning struck the sand on a beach. IMAGE: Geology In

In a separate investigation, the researchers examined a large and unblemished fulgurite sample formed when a lightning bolt struck the backyard of a home in Illinois. The samples indicated that fulgurites do hold sizeable amounts of schreibersite.

This essentially means that the insane amount of lightning strikes all those billions of years ago may have helped create the phosphorus needed to kickstart life on Earth.

While it's still just a theory, the new studies have worked to ascertain just how much phosphorus could have been created by the lightning strikes, and the findings have been supportive of the idea.

Led by Benjamin Hess from Yale University, the team utilized computer-derived models to estimate just how many lightning strikes there were during ancient periods compared to right now.

The models showed that our planet today sees about 560 lightning strikes annually, while Earth during its early years used to experience between one to five billion occurrences of lightning strikes per year, with about 100 million to one billion of them hitting the ground.

By all estimates, the numbers possibly add up to approximately a quintillion (or a billion billion) ground strikes, which may have played a big part in releasing all that phosphorus stored in the ground.

"Lightning strikes, therefore, may have been a significant part of the emergence of life on Earth," said Hess. "Unlike meteorite impacts which decrease exponentially through time, lightning strikes can occur at a sustained rate over a planet's history."

Another crucial observation arising from this study is that lightning strikes may also play a role in the formation of life on planets other than Earth.

"This means that lightning strikes also may be a very important mechanism for providing the phosphorus needed for the emergence of life on other Earth-like planets after meteorite impacts have become rare," Hess added.

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Cover image sourced from The Mercury News and