Yoshihiro Furukawa at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan unveiled an amazing discovery. He claims that extreme chemical reactions fired up by meteorite impacts may have started life in the early oceans. Meteorites striking the primordial oceans, the paper's authors say, could have supplied significant amounts of carbon, critical to life, and created a sort of chemical pressure cooker by the force of their impacts.

The researchers report in Nature Geoscience today that they replicated the impact of a chondrite, a common type of meteorite, striking the ocean at about 1.25 miles per second. They reached their conclusions by firing meteorite-like balls of iron and carbon into a mixture of water and ammonia, was supposed to resemble the oceans billions of years ago.

In the experiment, the researchers found that the iron and carbon were heated by the impact and reacted with hydrogen and nitrogen to form biomolecules, including fatty acids, amines and the amino acid glycine. Some of these organic molecules might have evolved as a precursor to life; the rest might have sunk to the deep crust and mantle to become graphite or diamond, they say.

Previously other researchers have suggested similar processes for the creation of organic molecules on Earth, including lightning strikes or chemical reactions surrounding hot, volcanic vents in the deep sea.

Oceans began to form about 4.3 billion years ago, when meteorites were hitting Earth about 1000 times more frequently than they do today, says Furukawa. "This study is the first to show that an amino acid can be synthesized by a naturally possible mechanism on the early Earth," he says.