{"id":652278,"date":"2026-05-06T20:45:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T20:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/652278\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T20:45:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T20:45:13","slug":"how-the-rise-of-continents-may-have-set-the-stage-for-life-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/652278\/","title":{"rendered":"How the rise of continents may have set the stage for life on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                    <img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-44599\" class=\"size-full wp-image-44599\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/boron_continents_life_earth_ubco.jpg\" alt=\"The earth as seen from space, with a focus on the continent of Asia.\" width=\"1000\" height=\"600\"  \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-44599\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The rise of Earth\u2019s continents may have tuned ancient oceans to just the right boron concentration for life to emerge, according to a new research study.<\/p>\n<p>Earth\u2019s earliest continents may have set the chemical stage for life by regulating boron levels in ancient oceans, a new study in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/ter.70040\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Terra Nova<\/a>\u00a0suggests.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Scientists have long proposed that boron helps stabilize\u00a0the fragile sugars needed to build RNA\u2014the molecule thought to have preceded DNA in early life\u2014making it an\u00a0essential\u00a0ingredient in life\u2019s origins.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But boron\u00a0operates\u00a0within a narrow window: too much, and it becomes toxic to biological systems; too little, and it may never have contributed to life getting started.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we\u2019re\u00a0talking about is a\u00a0geological\u00a0control system\u00a0for Earth\u2019s surface chemistry,\u201d said Dr. Brendan Dyck, Associate Professor of\u00a0Earth\u00a0and Environmental Sciences in\u00a0UBC Okanagan\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/science.ok.ubc.ca\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science<\/a>. \u201cThe growth of continents didn\u2019t just reshape the surface of the Earth\u2014it may have helped set the chemical conditions that made life possible in the first place.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Dyck and collaborator Dr. Jon Wade\u00a0from\u00a0the University of Oxford found that before significant landmasses\u00a0emerged\u00a0more than 3.7 billion years ago, boron concentrations in Earth\u2019s early oceans were\u00a0likely dangerously\u00a0high. The rise of granite-rich continental crust, they argue, changed that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The key was a\u00a0boron-containing\u00a0mineral called tourmaline, popularly known\u00a0as a semi-precious stone\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0also abundant in continental rock.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Tourmaline forms readily within granite-rich crust, locking boron away over geological time. As\u00a0Earth\u2019s\u00a0crust grew and weathered, boron was\u00a0slowly and steadily\u00a0released into surface\u00a0waters,\u00a0eventually stabilizing at concentrations close to those found in modern seawater.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This was\u00a0within the range that, according to current scientific thinking, life can use.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That stabilization, the researchers suggest, may have been especially important on the early Earth, where without it, the fragile chemical building blocks of life would have broken down before they could combine into\u00a0more complex\u00a0structures.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The findings also raise questions about the search for life on other planets. Rocky planets lacking granite-rich continental crust,\u00a0such as\u00a0Mars,\u00a0are unlikely to have surface waters with boron in a form life can use, suggesting that the geological evolution of a planet may be as important to habitability as its distance from the sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis work reveals that the slow geological evolution of a planet\u2019s interior can meaningfully shape the surface environment in ways that may be critical for life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rise of Earth\u2019s continents may have tuned ancient oceans to just the right boron concentration for life&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,6484,66],"class_list":["post-652278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-media-release","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}