There are certain fundamental questions that most of us ask at one or more points in our life. One of the questions – how did life begin – is a science-spanning question that requires chemistry, biology, geology, and planetary science to begin to approach, and as we get better at working together to study our solar system, the possible story of life is getting more and more interesting.

Trying to understand the earliest periods of our world’s history is complicated by the lack of ancient land preserved in our current landscape. Only a couple of places retain relics of the most distant past. One of those regions is Quebec’s Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (NSB). This band of rock was once part of an ancient seafloor located near hydrothermal vents. In the modern ocean, we find life clinging to the sides of similar vents that release heat and various nutrients. This is life that requires no sunlight and thrives in its own deepwater ecosystem.

The rocks in the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt are between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years old, and researchers have gone fossil hunting in these rocks. Researchers sliced a fist-sized rock into narrow slices and scanned them with microscopes to look for signs of biological structures. While many of the “possible bacterial life” they found – things that looked like tubes, filaments, and ellipsoids – could also be the result of chemical reactions, they also found what they describe as “a stem with parallel branches on one side that is nearly a centimeter long.” Researchers have not found a way to explain this stem except as life.

These results are published in Science Advances in a paper led by Dominic Papineau, who explains: Using many different lines of evidence, our study strongly suggests a number of different types of bacteria existed on Earth between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago. This means life could have begun as little as 300 million years after Earth formed. In geological terms, this is quick – about one spin of the Sun around the galaxy.

Let’s take that conclusion and look more broadly at our solar system. This result implies life can form very quickly once a world starts to solidify and cool. Evidence points to both Venus and Mars having vast oceans early in their history. There is also the tantalizing possibility that Europa has this kind of deep ocean vent today. We have no idea if life forms easily or if it was an impossibly improbable event that started life on Earth. If life does form easily, we can look forward to potentially seeing similar fossil finds on Mars and similar life living its best life on Europa. And that is awesome.

More Information

UCL press release

“Metabolically diverse primordial microbial communities in Earth’s oldest seafloor-hydrothermal jasper,” Dominic Papineau et al., 2022 April 13, Science Advances

“Evidence for early life in Earth’s oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates,” Matthew S. Dodd et al., 2017 March 2, Nature