Milley/Urey revisited

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Miller's well-known experiments first done in 1952 used water along with methane, ammonia and hydrogen, the kinds of gases then thought to have dominated the Earth's oxygen-free atmosphere more than two billion years ago.

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His sparks turned the mixture red, then yellow-brown, and made a number of amino acids, including glycine and alanine, commonly found in proteins.

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But soon after, Miller had revised those experiments by injecting hot steam into the gas mixture, so that conditions resembled those you might find in an erupting volcano.

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These experiments were the ones that intrigued Jeffrey Bada. Because not long after Miller's original experiments, it became clear the Earth's early atmosphere was nothing like the "reducing" mixture simulated in his apparatus.

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"We started sorting through these, and lo and behold, we found a whole collection, almost a complete collection, of the extract samples from the volcanic experiments. And so we just went at it, using the state-of-the-art techniques we have today and analysed these samples." [says Professor Bada]

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Miller, using the old methods, had found five amino acids; Jeffrey Bada and his teams tracked down 22. What is more, the overall chemical yields were often higher than in the first set of experiments - the mixture appeared to be more fertile.

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