Talk by Rajdeep Dasgupta at AGU Fall Meeting

In San Francisco.

Abstract:

Life-essential volatile elements such as carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and nitrogen (N) are all quite depleted in the inner Solar System rocky bodies such as Earth. Yet these ingredients are sufficiently abundant on the Earth’s surface that life could be sustained for billions of years in our planet. Is there anything unique about of Earth’s formation and early differentiation that led to acquisition of the life-essential volatile elements? The budgets of these major volatile elements are poorly known for other rocky planets; however, do we expect the absolute and relative abundances of these ingredients for life to be similar across all Solar System planets? Here we will discuss some of the processes of planet formation and differentiation such as core formation, magma ocean-atmosphere interaction that can fractionate the life-essential volatiles differently depending on the styles and timescales of planetary accretion and differentiation. We will emphasize how understanding the formation of habitable worlds would require bringing together constraints from many disciplines such as observational astronomy, astrophysics, geo- and cosmochemistry, Earth history, and geophysics.