The Emergence of an Urable Earth: How Early Planetary Evolution Shaped the Chemical Window for Life’s Origin

Description

Meng Guo, Zekun Meng, Siyu Liu, and Simon Redfern review early Earth history in two thousand twenty-six. They use a new lens: urability, a planet's shifting capacity to host the chemistry that starts life. Early Earth is the only natural record of how a world becomes able to spark living systems. Urability is not one steady state but a passing overlap of many conditions.

The needed overlap joins liquid water, mild temperatures, suitable ocean acidity and salt, key elements, air that shields and holds gases, and shallow land for wet-dry cycles. Magma oceans, late impacts, and growing continents moved each dial over time, creating trade-offs. Carbon-rich air may have eased nitrogen fixation but kept seas hot and acidic. The review maps these tensions across the Hadean and early Archean.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13608292