During the Hadean (4.56 to 4 billion years ago) the Earth looked very different from now: it contained magma oceans and a poisonous atmosphere depleted of oxygen. What this exactly looked like is uncertain, while this knowledge is important to understand the environment the first lifeforms lived in.
Researchers reconstruct past climates by using organic remnants from micro-organisms captured in rocks. For the first life on Earth, this is impossible: organic molecules did not yet exist. Furthermore, Hadean rocks have already been recycled within the Earth – the original information they contained has already been overwritten.
And there is a third option: investigating the chemical composition of Hadean zircons. These minerals hardly weather and – contrary to the rocks in which they are captured – are barely chemically altered at high temperatures. Therefore, they sort of ‘capture’ the conditions prevailing when they were formed.
However: there is too little experimental data showing what climate conditions made zircons change chemical composition.
This project investigates how oxygen, zirconium, and silicon partition between zircon and the magma from which is crystallizes, and how temperature, pressure, water, and magma composition influences that process.
Why Prelife
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