Rice University petrologists have found Earth most likely received the bulk of its carbon, nitrogen and other life-essential volatile elements from the planetary collision that created the moon more than 4.4 billion years ago. (Rice University)
The question of how life-essential elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur came to our planet has been long debated and is a clearly important and slippery scientific subject.
Did these volatile elements accrete onto the proto-Earth from the sun’s planetary disk as the planet was being formed? Did they arrive substantially later via meteorite or comet? Or was it the cataclysmic moon-forming impact of the proto-Earth and another Mars-sized planet that brought in those essential elements?
Piecing this story together is definitely challenging, but now there is vigorous support for one hypothesis — that the giant impact brought us the elements would later be used to enable life.
Based on high pressure-temperature experiments, modeling and simulations, a team at Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences makes that case in Science Advances for the central role of the proto-planet called Theia.
“From the study of primitive meteorites, scientists have long known that Earth and other rocky planets in the inner solar system are volatile-depleted,” said study co-author Rajdeep Dasgupta. “But the timing and mechanism of volatile delivery has been hotly debated. Ours is the first scenario that can explain the timing and delivery in a way that is consistent with all of the geochemical evidence.”
“What we are saying is that the impactor definitely brought the majority supply of life-essential elements that we see at the mantle and surface today,” Dasgupta wrote in an email.
A schematic depicting the formation of a Mars-sized planet (left) and its differentiation into a body with a metallic core and an overlying silicate reservoir. The sulfur-rich core expels carbon, producing silicate with a high carbon to nitrogen ratio. The moon-forming collision of such a planet with the growing Earth (right) can explain Earth’s abundance of both water and major life-essential elements like carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, as well as the geochemical similarity between Earth and the moon. (Rajdeep Dasgupta; background photo of the Milky Way galaxy is by Deepayan Mukhopadhyay)
Some of their conclusions are based on the finding of a similarity between the isotopic compositions of nitrogen and hydrogen in lunar glasses and in the bulk silicate portions of the Earth. … Read more
