Scientists have discovered a lake that could be a good match for Darwin’s “warm little ponds” where life got started on the primordial Earth.
Key points
- A team of scientists from the University of Washington made the discovery when they found a shallow “soda lake” in western Canada that seems to have the chemistry and conditions that a small body of water would have needed to facilitate the spontaneous synthesis of complex molecules that led to the emergence life on Earth around 4 billion years ago.
- The findings could help solve a long-standing problem in explaining how life on Earth emerged and could also be applied to other planets in the solar system, like Mars and Venus.
