Impact Melting of Frozen Oceans on the Early Earth: Implications for the Origin of Life

Details Impact Melting of Frozen Oceans on the Early Earth: Implications for the Origin of Life Impact Melting of Frozen Oceans on the Early Earth: Implications for the Origin of Life

Feb 1994

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994pnas...91.1248b&link_type=abstract

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 91, Issue 4, pp. 1248-1250

Physics

22

Scientific paper

Without sufficient greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the early Earth would have become a permanently frozen planet because the young Sun was less luminous than it is today. Several resolutions to this faint young Sun-frozen Earth paradox have been proposed, with an atmosphere rich in CO_2 being the one generally favored. However, these models assume that there were no mechanisms for melting a once frozen ocean. Here we show that bolide impacts between about 3.6 and 4.0 billion years ago could have episodically melted an ice-covered early ocean. Thaw-freeze cycles associated with bolide impacts could have been important for the initiation of abiotic reactions that gave rise to the first living organisms.

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