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

[rebewranger]

Primordial Earth Had a Major Difference in Its Skies We Didn't Realize Until Now
David Nield - Yesterday 7:00 PM

 
Standing on Earth almost 4 billion years ago would have been an incredibly hot, desperately lonely, and very short experience – what with there being no oxygen. Now, new research suggests there would have been less lightning around than there is in modern times as well.
 
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 actually less common on the early Earth than previously thought, that affects those calculations.

To dig deeper, researchers examined how streamer discharges – the sparks that start lightning – might have formed in an atmosphere dense in carbon dioxide and molecular nitrogen, as the atmosphere of the primordial Earth is now thought to have been.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/primordial-earth-had-a-major-difference-in-its-skies-we-didn-t-realize-until-now/ar-AAWgLeB?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=65c655dd39154d44a6ee882badc0b7d0

[Smokin Joe]

Interesting. I knew about the lack of oxygen, from banded iron formations to placer uranium deposits, but hadn't considered the effect of atmospheric chemistry on electrostatic discharge rates or intensities. That doesn't mean Miller and Urey were wrong, just that the mechanism they postulated may be overrated in its contribution to the formation of early organics, or that a different mechanism may be involved.

Pinning down a more precise idea of the composition of that proto atmosphere might be one way to to better assess the possibilities.