It was only eight-thirty in the morning at Scripps. Knowing Professor Rudman usually didn’t get into his office until nine, I flipped open my laptop to check today’s Science Journal.

Life on Earth—Death on Mars: New Evidence

Scientists agree that life on Earth began approximately 3.8 billion years ago, but exactly how it began has long remained an unanswered question. Biologists theorize asteroids, which are space rocks containing water molecules that created the precipitation that filled the oceans, bombarded our still-evolving planet. But Dr. Sankar Chatterjee, a professor of geosciences at Texas Tech University, believes that in addition to bringing water, these asteroids contained the chemical constituents of life that ultimately gave rise to living cells.

“Earth was once a bizarre, hostile world that would seem like a vision of hell, reeking with the foul smells of hydrogen sulfide, methane, nitric oxide, and steam that provided life-sustaining energy,” Chatterjee says. “Meteorites punched giant craters into the planet’s surface and deposited organic materials in them. Then icy comets crashed into Earth and melted, filling these basins with water. Additional meteorite strikes created volcanically driven geothermal vents in the planet’s crust that heated and stirred the water. The resulting ‘primordial soup’ mixed the chemicals together, leading to the formation of molecules of ever-increasing complexity and, eventually, life.”

About the same time as Earth’s primordial soup was spawning life, death was occurring on Mars with the eruption of Olympus Mons. The largest volcano in the solar system, it towers sixteen miles above the surface of the Red Planet—three times higher than Mount Everest—and is roughly the size of the state of Arizona. Olympus Mons contains six collapsed craters known as calderas. These magma chambers are stacked atop one another to form a depression that is fifty-three miles wide at the summit. The worst of the lot are resurgent calderas—geological timebombs responsible for massive eruptions and extinction events.

There are three resurgent calderas in the United States that are less than 1.5 million years old—the Long Valley Caldera in California, the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The last caldera eruption on Earth occurred 74,000 years ago on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra. The Toba caldera generated nearly three thousand times more pyroclastic material than Mount St. Helens and unleashed an ash cloud that encompassed Earth’s atmosphere, which led to a decade of volcanic winter that wiped out nearly every hominid on the planet.

I set the laptop aside, my eyes gazing out of the bay windows at Loch Ness. It was hard to fathom that every drop of water on the planet could have been delivered by meteors, comets, and asteroids, each impact blasting moisture into the atmosphere until a seemingly endless rain had fallen to cool the molten-hot world and fill its lowlands.

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly two o’clock.