Latest Hadean Stories

Investigating the history of water on Earth is critical to understanding the planet's climate. One central question is whether Earth has always had the same amount of water on and surrounding it, the same so-called "water budget". Has Earth gained or lost water from comets and meteorites? Has water been lost into space? New research into the Earth's primordial oceans conducted by researchers at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen and Stanford University...

Scientists in the New York Center for Astrobiology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have used the oldest minerals on Earth to reconstruct the atmospheric conditions present on Earth very soon after its birth. The findings, which appear in the Dec. 1 edition of the journal Nature, are the first direct evidence of what the ancient atmosphere of the planet was like soon after its formation and directly challenge years of research on the type of atmosphere out of which life arose on the...

Large bombardments of meteorites approximately four billion years ago could have helped to make the early Earth and Mars more habitable for life by modifying their atmospheres, suggests the results of a paper published today in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.When a meteorite enters a planet's atmosphere, extreme heat causes some of the minerals and organic matter on its outer crust to be released as water and carbon dioxide before it breaks up and hits the ground.Researchers...

A U.S. space agency-funded study suggests an intense asteroid bombardment nearly 4 billion years ago might have provided a boost for early life on Earth. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the research suggests the asteroids might not have sterilized the early Earth as completely as previously thought. The study focused on a particularly cataclysmic occurrence known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, or LHB, NASA said. This event occurred approximately 3.9 billion years ago...

The bombardment of Earth nearly 4 billion years ago by asteroids as large as Kansas would not have had the firepower to extinguish potential early life on the planet and may even have given it a boost, says a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.Impact evidence from lunar samples, meteorites and the pockmarked surfaces of the inner planets paints a picture of a violent environment in the solar system during the Hadean Eon 4.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, particularly through a cataclysmic...

The argument over whether an outcrop of rock in South West Greenland contains the earliest known traces of life on Earth has been reignited, in a study to be published in the Journal of the Geological Society on 23 February. The research, led by Martin J. Whitehouse at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, argues that the controversial rocks "˜cannot host evidence of Earth's oldest life', reopening the debate over where the oldest traces of life are located.The small island of Akilia has...

Analysis of minerals in ancient magmas paints new picture of early EarthA new picture of the early Earth is emerging, including the surprising finding that plate tectonics may have started more than 4 billion years ago "” much earlier than scientists had believed, according to new research by UCLA geochemists reported Nov. 27 in the journal Nature."We are proposing that there was plate-tectonic activity in the first 500 million years of Earth's history," said geochemistry...

A recent study has shown that tiny slivers of diamond forged on an infant Earth may contain the earliest traces of life.The crystals contain a form of carbon often associated with plants and bacteria.The researchers caution that their results are not definitive proof of early life but do "not exclude" the possibility."We're all a little sceptical," said Dr Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the paper.If the study is proven...

Arizona -- University of Arizona and Japanese scientists are convinced that evidence at last settles decades-long arguments about what objects bombarded the early inner solar system in a cataclysm 3.9 billion years ago. Ancient main belt asteroids identical in size to present-day asteroids in the Mars-Jupiter belt -- not comets -- hammered the inner rocky planets in a unique catastrophe that lasted for a blink of geologic time, anywhere from 20 million to 150 million years, they report in the...

NASA -- Research funded partly by NASA has confirmed the existence of liquid water on the Earth's surface more than 4 billion years ago. Scientists have found that the Earth had formed patterns of crust formation, erosion and sediment recycling as early as 4.35 billion years ago. Their findings came during a study of zircon crystals formed during the earliest period of Earth's history, the Hadean Eon (4.5 billion to 4.0 billion years ago). "NASA is interested in how early the Earth had...