Did Volcanoes Cause the Creation of Life on Earth?

There are a number of theories regarding how life began on our planet. Some of them are fantastic, like the intentional seeding of Earth by aliens. Others are more scientific and carry a theoretical possibility of actually being true. One of such theories, developed fairly recently, is that first organic chemical components that eventually evolved into simple organisms were created due to chemical reactions of gases released by the Earth's volcanic activity.

Background

One point that all scientists agree on is that life on Earth began in the water. However, when the planet initially formed from dust cloud particles left over from the creation of the sun, it contained no water (Comins, 1993). However, rocks that formed when the dust condensed carried in them all chemical elements known to us today. The importance of this is in that when these rocks began to warm up as the Earth grew and pressed them together with their own weight, and some of the lighter components entered their gaseous state, some of these components began reacting chemically with others. The two most important to the creation of water were hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide.

By themselves, these two gases are noxious, toxic substances that contribute nothing to the creation of life. In fact, they are actually dangerous to life. Hydrogen sulfide, or sewer gas, is an insidious poison that irritates parts of the body covered with mucous membranes, such as eyes, nose, and throat. Sulfur dioxide, or tear gas, is a biting, choking gas that people smell right after lighting a match. However, when the two of them react, they produce pure solid sulfur, called sulfaterra, or yellow ground, and as a byproduct they form water vapor (Camp, 2001).

While the outside part of the Earth cooled into a crust, the inside continued to settle in on itself, growing denser and hotter and releasing more and more gases (Comins, 1993). When pressure from these gases grew too strong in some places, they broke through to create volcanic eruptions, sending large volumes of them into a close vicinity of the planet, where most of them became trapped by gravity. This is the way Earth's atmosphere was created (Comins, 1993).

As water vapor reached high into the new atmosphere, it would cool to the point of condensation and fall back to the surface as rain. Overtime, water accumulated in large indentations in the Earth's crust, creating oceans (Comins, 1993).

The importance of water to the beginning of life on Earth is enormous. It served as a perfect mixing medium for carbon-based compounds, or hydrocarbons, which served as building blocks for organic materials, and lighter metals, such as potassium, calcium, and iron - a combination that, with addition of nitrogen gas, eventually produced living organisms.

But without volcanoes, such mixing would have never taken place. They carried to the surface both the necessary metals and the gases that eventually would combine to form complex hydrocarbons.

Data/Observations

Measurements of gases during volcanic eruptions have shown that there are a number of chemical compounds that are being released into the atmosphere in gaseous form. The bulk of all the gases is water vapor, comprising 70 to 90 percent of all the released gases (Camp, 2001). Some studies put it at as high as 95 percent concentration among the volcanic gases (Fisher, 1997). Other gases are carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, vaporized hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, hydrogen fluoride, and hydrogen sulfide. Other gases, such as hydrogen, methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide, are present only in trace amounts (Camp, 2001). Metals, melted by the heat and reduced to molecular components by the violent release of accumulated pressure inside the volcano, react with various compounds while in the atmosphere, but being significantly heavier than all other elements in the atmosphere, they soon settle back to earth as part of ash particles (Riley, 2001).

As the gases remaining in the atmosphere cool, their temperature approaches the one most suitable for the creation of hydrocarbons. Two geologists at Washington University, Everett Shock and Mikhail Zolotov, who support the theory of life originating from volcanoes, have shown that when the temperature of these gases goes down into the 150 degrees to 300 degrees (centigrade) zone, environmental and chemical conditions become ripe for basic hydrocarbons to be formed from the abundance of hydrogen and carbon in the atmosphere (Fitzpatrick, 2000).

Conditions favorable for hydrocarbon synthesis also may be favorable for other life ingredients, such as amino acids and complex organic polymers, leading, perhaps, to self-replicating RNA molecules and eventually to all sorts of cells and diverse organisms (Fitzpatrick, 2000). This is what may have been happening in the early oceans, which were considerably warmer than the Earth's oceans today because of the planet's hotter core and thinner crust. No wonder some scientists named the oceans of the young Earth a "primordial soup" (Comins, 1993).

Implications

Of course, simply mixing chemical compounds in the oceans would not have led to creation of complex organic molecules and simple life forms. Additional energy would have been needed. This, most likely, came from the sun's ultraviolet radiation and the lightening generated by the storms (Comins, 1993). Lightening also was responsible for the release of more free oxygen as well as creation of the ozone layer - both components essential for proliferation of organic life. The oceans, meanwhile, absorbed excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus thinning it and simultaneously bringing it closer to the current state in terms of gas concentration ratio and temperature (Comins 1993). As early life evolved in the oceans, the conditions on the surface gradually improved to prepare the planet for its first land-based organic representatives.

Conclusion

While theories that are based on alien involvement are farfetched, even such scientific theories as life arriving to Earth inside a comet or meteorite have, at the present time, less of a possibility of being the correct ones over the theory of life being born from the planet's volcanic activity. The big reason for it is not in chemical or some other complex field, but in simple mathematics; it is much more likely that life has developed from non-organic compounds, slowly and under the right circumstances, than depend on a chancy encounter with a traveling heavenly body to bring to Earth the ready-made formula for life. We will never known for certain, of course, but common logic dictates to view the theory of volcanic activity as the likely one for the creation of life on earth.

REFERENCES

Camp, V. (2001). Volcanic Gases. From www.geology.sdsu.edu.

Comins, N.F. (1993). What If the Moon Didn't Exist? New York. HarperCollins Publishers.

Fisher, R. (1997). Effects of Volcanic Gases. From magic.geol.ucsb.edu.

Fitzpatrick, T. (2000). Volcanic gases could be source for origins of life on Earth and Mars. Washington University in St. Louis.

Riley, C.M. (2001). Volcanic Gases. From www.geo.mtu.edu.