The building blocks of life on Earth may have been fueled by tiny sparks hopping between water droplets.
Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless world, but a dynamic one. Crashing waves, rushing streams, and roaring waterfalls churned up sprays of water into an atmosphere rich with carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and ammonia. Recent experiments suggest that those sprays of water may have helped jump-start chemical reactions that produced the building blocks of life.
