UK (CU)_ Researchers at Newcastle University’s School of Natural and Environmental Sciences have made a remarkable discovery which give us a better understanding as to how a source of oxygen that may have impacted the origin of life prior to the activities of photosynthesis. Scientists who have been searching for life on other planets often seek out any residue or prior traces of oxygen and water as life as we know on planet earth absolutely requires it. This discovery may demonstrate the way rocks synthesize hydrogen peroxide while moving along planar fractures.
In tectonically active regions, the dynamic nature of the Earth’s crust can lead to earthquakes and riddles to the subsurface with cracks and fractures lined with hyper reactive rock surfaces followed by water filtration down reacting with these defects on freshly fractured rocks reflecting those of the earth’s crust where water was added under anerobic conditions at different temperatures. The study also demonstrated the correlation of elevated temperatures in enhancing hydrogen peroxide and how a variety of mechanical chemistry reactions can lead to hydrogen peroxide synthesis.
Hydrogen peroxide has been the focus of many studies throughout the past decade where it was demonstrated that normal human cells can regulate hydrogen peroxide with the catalase enzyme hence giving it potential therapeutic possibilities, this could possibly be corelated to the study comparing the activities of hydrogen peroxide in the earth’s crust to its activities within cells.
Principal Investigator of the study, Dr Jon Telling stated that study demonstrated the impact that defective crushed rock and minerals act in opposition to the way ‘perfect’ mineral surfaces act where all these activities produce hydrogen peroxide, hence oxygen, water and crushed rocks with increased heat which would have been available during the initial stages of photosynthesis, could have impacted chemistry and microbiology in hotter regions where life may have begun.
