Volcanoes and the origins of life | Tamsin Mather

We don't really understand how life got going on this planet. There are various candidates for where the first molecules of life might have evolved, and some of those candidates are deeply volcanic.

About Tamsin Mather "I am a professor of Volcanology. My work brings together expertise in volcanology/magmatism, atmospheric chemistry and paleoclimatology/stratigraphy. This combination allows me to tackle problems ranging from acute volcanic hazards and air pollution events in the present-day to the role of volcanism in the long-term evolution of our planet’s environment over its geological history and much in between. I am a 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My main research interests centre on the science behind volcanoes and volcanic behaviour. My motivation is to understand volcanoes as (a) a key planetary scale process throughout geological time, vital for maintaining habitability as well as driving environmental change, (b) natural hazards and (c) resources (e.g., geothermal power and the development of ore deposits)."

Key Points • If you look at the Moon in the night sky, you are seeing more basalt with the naked eye than you'd ever get to see from looking at a view anywhere on the planet Earth. The Moon’s dark maria supplied the first hand-collected extraterrestrial rocks, anchoring our understanding of planetary volcanism. • Mars’s fixed crust allowed Olympus Mons to grow to the Solar System’s largest volcano, illustrating how the absence of plate tectonics can magnify volcanic scale. Io’s intense tidal squeezing by Jupiter drives constant eruptions, proving that gravitational flexing can power volcanism without significant internal heat. • Volcanoes are a planetary-scale process. There are lots of different ways that volcanoes change a planet. They move elements around from different parts of the solid planet, but they are also really instrumental in building an atmosphere, which is incredibly important in terms of the surface environment. • Volcanoes might have the potential to be instrumental in directly kicking life off, but they're certainly instrumental in building the sort of environment we need to be able to evolve life – and certainly to be able to evolve complex life such as ourselves.