Soda lake phosphorus fluxes controlled by biological uptake imply abundant phosphate in plausible origin-of-life environments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phosphate is crucial for the origin of life but typical environmental concentrations are too low for prebiotic synthesis of essential biomolecules like nucleic acids. However, evaporative, sodium-carbonate rich “soda” lakes can accumulate extreme phosphate levels sufficient for prebiotic synthesis. In modern soda lakes, this presumably requires small biological and inorganic (apatite mineral formation) sinks, but the relative importance of these sinks is unclear because studies on phosphorus fluxes in soda lakes are lacking. Here, we quantified phosphorus source and sink fluxes in the extremely phosphate-rich Last Chance Lake (LCL), Canada, and neighboring, moderately phosphate-rich, Goodenough Lake (GL). Within the total phosphorus (0.1 wt%) in LCL sediments, sequential extraction showed 61 % detrital apatite, ∼19 % dissolved phosphate, ∼11 % organic-bound phosphorus (P org ), 6 % carbonate-bound P, and ∼2 % authigenic apatite. Combining these measurements with hydrological fluxes, we demonstrate that evapo-concentration of dilute inflow sufficed to accumulate tens of millimolar phosphate on a millennial timescale due to small sinks. Low apatite formation rates directly confirmed a previously hypothesized mechanism allowing extreme phosphate solubility at high carbonate concentrations. Yet, it is its 18 × lower P org formation rates that mainly distinguish LCL from the less phosphate-rich, more biologically active GL. Because low productivity is key, evaporative soda lakes on prebiotic Earth should have commonly attained millimolar phosphate levels. Consequently, we identify soda lakes as the only known natural environments with sufficiently high phosphate levels for critical phosphorylation and catalysis in prebiotic synthesis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".