The origin of life is a hotly debated and studied topic. It is important for many different reasons both scientific and philosophical. Understanding where life began on Earth would help scientists to be able to experiment in similar environments. In addition, it would also help astronomers to know where to look on other planets or moons to see whether life has formed.

Most experts agree that one of the key starting points of life is RNA forming and being able to replicate.

For a long time, one of most common theories was that this first happened in a warm pond where there were lots of amino acids, which may have first come from meteorites. Another popular option is that RNA first formed and replicated in the ocean near hydrothermal vents. This is a good option because the temperatures are warmer here and there are abundant nutrients to help encourage this type of activity.

Philipp Schwintek is a PhD student at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, however, has proposed an additional possibility. He published a paper saying that another possible location where life could have started is in the porous rocks of volcanic islands.

This is, he suggests, a good option because it fits a number of requirements for RNA to form and replicate. Specifically, the nutrients are plentiful and there is a rapid and frequent changing in temperature, which it is believed could help with this process. In a statement, Schwintek said:

“We investigated a simple and ubiquitous geological scenario where water movement through a rock pore was dried by a gas percolating through the rock to reach the surface. Such a setting would be very common on volcanic islands on early Earth which offered the necessary dry conditions for RNA synthesis.”

They performed a number of experiments to try to get more information about how these environments would have behaved. He said:

“Our expectation was that continuous evaporation would lead to an accumulation of DNA strands at the interface. Indeed, we found that water continuously evaporated at the interface but the nucleic acids in the aqueous face accumulated near the gas/water interface.” Also in the statement, it was said, “We hypothesized that the circular fluid flow at the interface provided by the gas flux, alongside passive diffusion, would drive strand separation by forcing the nucleic acids through areas with different salt concentrations.”

It is important to point out that this does not prove that this is where life formed, or even that life indeed could form in this type of environment. The paper does, however, provide some interesting information that will warrant more research.

This preprint paper is available on eLife.

Could life have started on volcanic islands?

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