A new study shines a spotlight on sulfur, a chemical element that, while all familiar, has proved surprisingly resistant to scientific efforts in probing its role in the origin of life.
Many artists have tried to depict what Earth might have looked like billions of years ago, before life made its appearance. Many scenes trade snow-covered mountains for lava-gushing volcanoes and blue skies for lightning bolts pummeling what's below from a hazy sky.
At the core of efforts to pull back the curtain on the emergence of life on Earth has been a concept known as the"RNA world," Ranjan said, referring to ribonucleic acid, a class of molecules that are present in every living cell and crucial to life as we know it. Recently, scientists have completed a half-century quest to make RNA molecules without biological enzymes, a huge step forward to demonstrating the RNA world. However, these chemical pathways all rely on a critical sulfur molecule, called sulfite. By studying rock samples from some of Earth's oldest rocks, scientists know there was plenty of sulfur to go around on the early, prebiotic Earth.
"No one has actually looked into this in depth outside of other contexts, mainly wastewater management," Ranjan said. While it's plausible that slow disproportionation could have allowed sulfites to accumulate, photolysis would have made that very unlikely except in certain environments such as shallow water pools, shaded from UV radiation, particularly if fed by surface runoff to provide mineral shields. Examples include underground pools or closed basin carbonate lakes, drainage-less depressions where sediments accumulate but water can only leave by evaporation.
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Fire but no brimstone: Where is the universe's missing sulfur?Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.
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