Earth's Early Atmosphere and Oceans, and The Origin of Life

As a graduate student at the University of Washington, Dr. Shaw focused on experimental geophysics, especially high pressure measurements of elastic properties. These studies continued through an NSF post-doctoral fellowship at Edinburgh, Scotland, at the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Minnesota, and to a lesser extent after he took up a position at Union College. During his time at Minnesota Shaw was awarded an American Geophysical Union Congressional Science Fellowship. He spent the year working for a congressman from Washington State on energy and environmental issues, and particularly on the formulation and passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. Dr. Shaw left Minnesota in 1988 to take up an endowed chair with the responsibility of restarting and developing a geology department at Union, a small private liberal arts college. At Minnesota he developed with a colleague a course in energy resources and policy, which we taught for about ten years and which he continued to teach at Union. About fifteen years ago Dr. Shaw initiated a course called “Great Moments in the History of Life” beginning with the origin of the universe and chemical elements and continuing through the Anthropocene. This revived an old interest in early Earth history and especially the conditions preceding and surrounding the origin of life. This book is the result of that revived interest.

• Introduction.- Accretional history of Earth.- Processes of degassing.- Atmospheric processing of degassed volatiles.- Early Archean “geography”.- Degassing processes.- Prebiotic chemistry – why we should pay attention to this.- Eigen’s hypercycle and the emergence of life.- How the carbon-rich surface is key to emergence of life.- Evolution of Earth starting with a carbon-rich surface.- Implications of this model.- Conclusions.