BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM

Could the origin of life have begun not with a bolt from the blue but with something far smaller? According to a new study from Stanford University, tiny electrical sparks known as “microlightning,” created by interactions between water droplets, may have played a pivotal role in creating the first organic molecules that led to life on Earth.

The research, led by Stanford’s Zare Lab, revisits the famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1952—a cornerstone in the scientific quest to understand how life began. That experiment used large glass bulbs filled with gases thought to represent Earth’s early atmosphere and simulated lightning strikes to create carbon-nitrogen bonds, the fundamental building blocks of DNA and RNA.

But as Richard Zare, the study’s senior author, told EcoWatch, the original model had its flaws. “One of them is that lightning is intermittent and unpredictable,” he said. “If lightning makes compounds in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is a big thing. They never get concentrated… we need to concentrate these building blocks because we’re making small building blocks.”

A quieter kind of spark

Instead of relying on large, rare lightning strikes, Zare and his team explored whether much smaller, more common bursts of electricity—microlightning—could achieve the same chemical magic. The experiment was led by Yifan Meng, who recreated the conditions of early Earth using a mixture of nitrogen, methane, and other relevant gases. But instead of a spark plug, the energy came from the collision of water droplets.

Using sound waves to suspend a droplet of water in mid-air, the team let it fall onto a plastic surface, breaking it into smaller droplets that then collided with each other, generating sparks of microlightning. Remarkably, these sparks interacted with the surrounding gases to form organic compounds with carbon-nitrogen bonds—the very type Miller and Urey produced using large-scale lightning.

“We have repeated what Miller and Urey did before, but they did it with big lightning, in a bulb. We’ve done it with water droplets,” said Zare. “And so we propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life.”

A common phenomenon with extraordinary potential

Zare believes that these kinds of interactions—water droplets producing tiny sparks—happen all around us, all the time. While modern occurrences are largely inconsequential, their impact 4.5 billion years ago may have been profound.

“I actually am very interested in possibly removing pollutants in our atmosphere with water droplets,” Zare added. “Such as, can we bubble air through water and remove things like carbon dioxide and methane and turn them into something else?”

That line of thinking opens up exciting possibilities for the future. Beyond understanding our origins, this research could help us address modern environmental challenges. If the microlightning process can be scaled, Zare envisions sustainable methods to scrub pollutants from the air—or even transform them.

Microscopic ammonia, massive change

One of the most promising applications of the team’s work is the potential for creating ammonia in a more sustainable way. Ammonia is vital for fertilizer production, yet the most common method of manufacturing it—the Haber-Bosch process—is notoriously harmful to the environment.

“The Haber-Bosch process takes nitrogen and hydrogen and combines it to make NH3. That’s ammonia,” Zare explained. “And where does the hydrogen come from? They get it from natural gas, from methane, by treating it with steam, with hot water vapor under high pressure, high temperature. And the result is the natural gas turns [in part] into CO2.”

That impact is not small. “Believe it or not, 2 percent or so of the CO2 that you and I now breathe comes from the Haber-Bosch process in the atmosphere. That’s how big this has been,” said Zare.

If microlightning could serve as an alternative pathway for ammonia production, the environmental benefits would be substantial. “If you could clean up the Haber-Bosch process, you would really make a difference in terms of climate change as we understand it.”

Life from a drop

While the origin of life remains one of the most fascinating scientific questions, this new research offers a fresh perspective grounded in everyday phenomena. Rather than relying on rare, dramatic events, life’s beginnings may have been sparked by something as subtle—and as common—as a splash of water.

Source study: Science Advances— Spraying of water microdroplets forms luminescence and causes chemical reactions in surrounding gas