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Earth is teeming with life today, but at that place was a fourth dimension in the distant past that our planet was as inhospitable every bit yous can imagine. Frequent asteroid and comet impacts during Earth's start few hundred million years made the surface molten and the air poisonous, but something might have been alive back then. A team of Japanese scientists studying the oldest rocks on Globe has found new evidence to support the existence of life during the "Tardily Heavy Bombardment" flow. To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm, "Life, uh, finds a way."

Earth's history is broken up into four eons. Nosotros alive in the fourth, known as the Phanerozoic. It started 542 million years ago, which is when complex multicellular life began to appear. This is besides when macroscopic fossils brainstorm to appear in rock formations. The first era of Globe is known as the Hadean Eon, taking its proper name from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. Scientists literally named this time "hell on Earth" because of the apocalyptic conditions. The surface was regularly vaporized by big impacts, including 1 that most probable created the moon.

It seems hard to believe that something could live in such an environment, but scientists have been looking at ancient rocks in northern Canada and southern Greenland to find out for certain. In this most recent written report, geologists from the University of Tokyo surveyed rocks from the Labrador region of Canada. These rocks are as old as four billion years, merely half a billion younger than the Earth itself. Surprisingly (and controversially), the team reports show of long-dead organisms in the rock.

According to pb researcher Tsuyoshi Komiya, the rocks extracted from Canada comprise traces of biogenic graphite (see in a higher place). Over the course of billions of years, microscopic fossils would have been compressed and heated. The predicted result of such a process is small flecks of graphite like those found in the Japanese team's samples.

What the Hadean Eon might take looked like. Credit: Tim Bertelink/Artistic Commons

If these are indeed the remains of living organisms, they could exist iii.95 billion years onetime. That could push button back the origins of life to the belatedly Hadean Eon, just not all researchers are convinced. The researchers did not straight engagement the graphite samples to show they were 4 billion years old. Instead, they relied on geological dating of the stone, inferring that if the rock is 4 billion years old, then the supposed biological remains are too.

This is an interesting piece of evidence, and some scientists are willing to entertain the possibility that life existed in the Hadean Eon. However, additional dating will be required to make this the scientific consensus.