Not exact matches
The team found that passing such dirty steam through a zeolite crystal, such as the
mineral clinoptilolite, traps everything but
water,
hydrogen, helium and ammonia.
Next, Agee and his colleagues used a laser to extract
water molecules trapped within
minerals in the meteorite and fed them into a mass spectrometer to calculate the ratio of deuterium, a heavy isotope of
hydrogen, to ordinary
hydrogen.
Dan Shim suggested the
hydrogen could come from
water locked up in Martian
minerals.
They incorporated three basic ingredients in a solution of
water and
hydrogen peroxide: mycelium mushroom roots; perlite, a glassy volcanic
mineral used by farmers to aerate soil; and recycled paper.
In principle, the
hydrogen could come from the microbes, from
water interacting with certain
minerals, or from radiolytic reactions.
While bridgmanite is the most abundant
mineral in the lower mantle, they found that it contains too little
hydrogen to play an important role in Earth's
water supply.
The findings support the idea that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) lurked in hydrothermal vents where hot
water rich in
hydrogen, carbon dioxide and
minerals emerged from the sea floor.
It turns out that
water contained in some
minerals that get pulled down into Earth due to plate tectonic activity could, under extreme pressures and temperatures, split up — liberating
hydrogen and enabling the residual oxygen to combine with iron metal from the core to create a novel high - pressure
mineral, iron peroxide.
A plot of
hydrogen (middle) traces the locations of ice in the soil, while a map of hematite (bottom) shows where
water has altered surface
minerals.
It turns out that
water contained in some
minerals that get pulled down into the Earth due to plate tectonic activity could, under extreme pressures and temperatures, split up — liberating
hydrogen and enabling the residual oxygen to combine with iron metal from the core to create a novel high - pressure
mineral, iron peroxide.
«These
mineral -
water reactions are the restaurant at the bottom of the ocean of Enceladus, making goodies [i.e. molecular
hydrogen (H2) and methane (CH4)-RSB- that primitive microbes could eat,» said Lunine.
«The discovery of native molecular
hydrogen (H2) completes the set of what I would call the «basic» requirements for life as we know it: Liquid
water, organic molecules,
minerals, and an accessible source of «free» energy.
That makes it alkaline, with about 2.5 times fewer
hydrogen ions in a given fluid volume than pure (unnatural,
mineral - free)
water, which has neutral pH of 7.