ArticleNature2009
Microbial habitability of the Hadean Earth during the late heavy bombardment.
Article in Nature, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Hadean timeline for the emergence of the RNA World.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Emergence of an Urable Earth: How Early Planetary Evolution Shaped the Chemical Window for Life's Origin.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Dating the Bacterial Tree of Life Based on Ancient Symbiosis.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- Reproducible Ala-Gly oligomerization catalyzed by the natural Borate colemanite in prebiotic conditions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Origin of the RNA World in Cold Hadean Geothermal Fields Enriched in Zinc and Potassium: Abiogenesis as a Positive Fallout from the Moon-Forming Impact?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Dormancy in the origin, evolution and persistence of life on Earth.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Hot springs viruses at Yellowstone National Park have ancient origins and are adapted to thermophilic hosts.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Theoretical Improvements in Enzyme Efficiency Associated with Noisy Rate Constants and Increased Dissipation.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Identification of a deep-branching thermophilic clade sheds light on early bacterial evolution.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Plausible Emergence and Self Assembly of a Primitive Phospholipid from Reduced Phosphorus on the Primordial Earth.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2021Review
- Introduction-First Billion Years: Habitability.Astrobiology · 2021Review
- The "Water Problem"(Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- The very early evolution of protein translocation across membranes.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- The Role of Meteorite Impacts in the Origin of Life.Astrobiology · 2020Article
- Factoring Origin of Life Hypotheses into the Search for Life in the Solar System and Beyond.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Valine Radiolysis by HInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2020Article
- The Archean atmosphere.Science advances · 2020Review
- Precise radiometric age establishes Yarrabubba, Western Australia, as Earth's oldest recognised meteorite impact structure.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Ultradeep Microbial Communities at 4.4 km within Crystalline Bedrock: Implications for Habitability in a Planetary Context.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Impact Melt Facies in the Moon's Crisium Basin: Identifying, Characterizing, and Future Radiogenic Dating.Journal of geophysical research. Planets · 2020Article
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2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Lunar rocks and impact melts, lunar and asteroidal meteorites, and an ancient martian meteorite record thermal metamorphic events with ages that group around and/or do not exceed 3.9 Gyr. That such a diverse suite of solar system materials share this feature is interpreted to be the result of a post-primary-accretion cataclysmic spike in the number of impacts commonly referred to as the late heavy bombardment (LHB). Despite its obvious significance to the preservation of crust and the survivability of an emergent biosphere, the thermal effects of this bombardment on the young Earth remain poorly constrained. Here we report numerical models constructed to probe the degree of thermal metamorphism in the crust in the effort to recreate the effect of the LHB on the Earth as a whole; outputs were used to assess habitable volumes of crust for a possible near-surface and subsurface primordial microbial biosphere. Our analysis shows that there is no plausible situation in which the habitable zone was fully sterilized on Earth, at least since the termination of primary accretion of the planets and the postulated impact origin of the Moon. Our results explain the root location of hyperthermophilic bacteria in the phylogenetic tree for 16S small-subunit ribosomal RNA, and bode well for the persistence of microbial biospheres even on planetary bodies strongly reworked by impacts.
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