Volcanic lightning during eruptions may have sparked life on Earth, new study suggests

The creation of life on Earth has always been a fascinating study for scientists, and there are many theories around it. In all those theories and studies, one thing was common, the existence of amino acids that make up the proteins on which all life depends.

Earlier, it was deduced as part of various studies that these amino acids reached Earth through atmospheric lightning and thunderstorms. However, a recentstudy suggests that these life-forming protein elements were also formed by volcanic lightning on Earth.

A team of geologists, scientists and mineralogists has now found evidence suggesting that volcanic lightning may have fixed amounts of atmospheric nitrogen, allowing life on Earth.

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Volcanic lightning might have started life on Earth

Nitrogen is a major component of the amino acids that group to make the protein essential to create life. Though nitrogen gas is abundant in the atmosphere, it cannot be converted into a more usable form by plants as the case is with carbon dioxide.

Plants instead take much of the nitrogen through a process called nitrogen-fixing, in which molecular nitrogen is converted into ammonia by nitrogen-fixing bacteria and blue-green algae.

But nitrogen-fixing bacteria didn’t exist when life first evolved, says Slimane Bekki at Sorbonne University in Paris, so there must have been a non-biological source early on. So, lightning from thunderstorms is one plausible origin.

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The famous Miller-Urey experiment in the 1950s demonstrated that lightning in Earth’s early atmosphere could have produced nitrogen compounds, including amino acids.

In addition to this, Bekki and his colleagues have shown that another source of nitrogen could have been lightning that occurs in ash clouds during some volcanic eruptions.

The team collected ancient volcanic deposits from various sites in Turkey, Italy and Peru, and analysed them to find nitrogen elements. Samples from these sites contained large amounts of nitrates.

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Testing showed that they were atmospheric and had not come directly from the volcano, which means lightning was their likely source. But the thing that stands out in their theory was the huge amounts of nitrates they found, which were more than enough to serve as a source for creating amino acids.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(With inputs from agencies)