Metal and the origin of life
Collisions, mergers, plate tectonics – you have to go back in Earth’s history to understand how minerals formed. Research by Robert Hazen, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and Professor of Earth Sciences at George Mason University in Washington and author of The Earth Story, suggests that microorganisms formed about four billion years ago are the largest contribution to the mineral. The wealth of the planet. Using the geological scenes of Hawaii, Australia, and Morocco, Hazen explains how the appearance of the first microorganisms on Earth decisively shaped the evolution of minerals. These microorganisms produced oxygen with the help of solar energy and thus caused the oxygen content in the atmosphere to rise sharply. It has radically changed this blue planet. Without these organisms, and without oxygen which is critical to many processes, many minerals would not exist. Comparison with other planets shows how strong this effect is on Earth. There are between 1,000 and 1,500 different minerals on Venus, about 500 minerals on Mars and no more than 350 types of minerals on Mercury. And there is a lot that can be found on Earth: about 4000. Thanks to this unique diversity, many different forms of life managed to appear that inhabited our planet thousands of years ago.
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