Primordial serpentinized crust on the early Earth

Primordial Comet Mantle" Irradiation Production Organic Crust

Laboratory data and corrected estimates of cosmic ray dose are used to predict the thickness and survivability of the cosmic rayproduced, primordial comet mantle ("crust"). These results support the hypothesis that the refractory mantle produced by cosmic ray irradiation of a new comet may be able to survive a comet's entry into the inner solar system for many revolutions. Because this mantle m...

Primordial Noble Gas in the Earth

Chemical differentiation of the Earth: the relationship between mantle, continental crust, and oceanic crust

The average chemical compositions of the continental crust and the oceanic crust (represented by MORB), normalized to primitive mantle values and plotted as functions of the apparent bulk partition coefficient of each element, form surprisingly simple, complementary concentration patterns. In the continental crust, the maximum concentrations are on the order of 50 to 100 times the primitive-man...

Cavitation-Induced Synthesis of Biogenic Molecules on Primordial Earth

Despite decades of research, how life began on Earth remains one of the most challenging scientific conundrums facing modern science. It is agreed that the first step was synthesis of organic compounds essential to obtain amino acids and their polymers. Several possible scenarios that could accomplish this step, using simple inorganic molecules, have been suggested and studied over the years. T...

Featureless spectra on the Moon as evidence of residual lunar primordial crust

We report the global distribution of areas exhibiting no absorption features (featureless or FL) on the lunar surface, based on the reflectance spectral data set obtained by the Spectral Profiler onboard Kaguya/SELENE. We found that FL sites are located in impact basins and large impact craters in the Feldspathic Highlands Terrane, while there are no FL sites in the Procellarum regions nor the ...