They’re dazzling, priceless… at times, even glowing. How can one not fall in love with rock sand minerals? I mean, the colors, the shapes and they’re the building blocks of modern civilization. We wouldn’t have televisions, we wouldn’t have automobiles, we wouldn’t have buildings without the mineral riches that we have. But could rocks and minerals also solve the greatest mystery of all time? The origin of life.
The rocks we pick up tell a story that life couldn’t have occurred without rocks. Could cold, lifeless stone hold the key to every living thing on Earth? From Australia, to Morocco, Nova goes around the world and back in time to investigate the origin and evolution of life. Look at a rock and you think ah, well, nothing. but this holds the signature of life. From its first spark… People were saying they’ve made Frankenstein in a test tube… …To the survival of the fittest. These were immense creatures. Sharks that may have been 50 or 60 feet.
Was it the secret link between rocks and life that made the difference?
Life’s rocky start. Right now, on Nova. The ancient market of Marrakech, a chaotic, colorful gathering place teeming with life for thousands of years, the perfect place to ask how did this exotic, beautiful and sometimes bizarre thing called life, begin? How did Earth go from a lifeless, molten rock… to a living planet? Full of diverse and spectacular creatures. it’s a question that has long perplexed scientists.
source: Deep Carbon Observatory / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)
Now, Robert Hazen, a geologist, is trying to show we are missing an essential ingredient in the recipe for life. -look at that vein of calcite… Rocks. Nothing seems more lifeless than a rock. it’s inanimate, it’s the antithesis of a living thing, but we’re beginning to realize that rocks played an absolutely fundamental role in the origin of life. Hazen is out to expose a secret relationship between rocks and life that helped drive both the origin of life and its evolution into complex creatures.
This is a very new set of understanding and the more we look, the more we see that life depends on rocks, rocks depend on life. This has been going on for four billion years. As a geologist, it’s no surprise that Hazen is searching for answers written in stone.
But is Robert Hazen right? Are rocks the missing spark of life?
The history of Earth is unimaginably long. If it were sped up to the equivalent of a single day, all of humankind from the earliest skeletons to the invention of the iphone would have occurred in only the last four seconds. Dinosaurs were still roaming earth about20 minutes before that, but the creation of our planet occurred more than 23 hours earlier, two cycles on this clock or 4.5 billion years ago. Comprehending Earth’s vast history is a formidable task. It is four and a half billion years of change, but you can divide it into half a dozen ways of describing Earth through time.
Bob Hazen has come up with another way to visualize Earth’s long history that reveals this special relationship between rocks and life. He has divided it into six stages, each represented by a different color to understand how we ended up with green earth, the planet we now know, requires us to turn the clock back to before there was any life at all.
Stage one was the creation of black Earth. Back in Morocco, Hazen and Adam Aaronson, a meteorite expert, seek out a small rock from the beginning of our cosmos. -Wow look at this pile here.-yeah. These are meteorites. Rocks that have fallen from space. -This is Tamta. This is the one that fell 20 kilometers up the road from here. People saw it fall. A recent meteorite fall in Siberia was captured in videos that have shown up on Youtube. Other space rocks have ended up for sale here in Morocco. -Say you’d buy this without doing tests… -I’ll drop the cash right now here and give me a good price. Meteorites here can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. That may seem a steep price for a lump of rock, but these are some of the very oldest objects in our solar system. This is the oldest object you could ever hold in your hand. It’s 4.6 billion years old and is formed before Earth formed. This is the very first solid material, the very first rock in our solar system and these came together to build all the planets. Our Earth was created out of the rocks and dust present at the start of our solar system. Over time, small fragments of orbiting rock collided, coming together into the planet circling the Sun. At first, Earth was molten with temperatures in the thousands of degrees, but in the cold vacuum of space this hot rock began to cool and change. Nothing. Not a speck of dust is believed to have survived from the period of black Earth. It was a hellishly unpleasant time. Volcanoes spewed hot lava from deep inside the planet. When it cooled, it covered Earth with its first rock called basalt and it was black. It seems like a desolate landscape, but some ingredients that life will need are already here in these rocks. Look inside and you begin to understand how intriguing even an ordinary rock is. Every rock, you slice it open you look inside, there’s something special. Rocks are made up mostly of minerals, which are crystals like quartz or diamonds. Looking through a microscope at super thin slices of a rock lets you see its mineral composition. This is the rock Peridotite, made up of small crystals, including olivine and pyroxene. Even a simple black basalt rock, spewed from a volcano, becomes a patchwork of colorful minerals. It’s sort of like a fruitcake, you know I slice it open, there’s nuts and there’s dried fruit and maybe some lemon peel. It’s made of lots of little things and it is not until you slice into that fruitcake that you see all the stuff inside that makes it special. What makes them special is not only their beauty. Minerals have remarkable chemical and physical properties and area source of many of the elements — nature’s building blocks. That is why they are essential in our modern world to make everything from skyscrapers taller — mobile phones smaller. Extract the element molybdenum from the mineral molybdenite to make steel stronger. Or add a pinch of cobalt and your iphone battery will last longer. Minerals are the fundamental building block of societies. We wouldn’t have televisions, we wouldn’t have auto mobiles, we wouldn’t have buildings without the mineral riches that we have.
to know more visit https://mysteryofgalaxy.blogspot.com/2020/08/mystery-how-life-started-on-earth.html