PhD defence: The Interaction of Carbonaceous Chondrites with Prebiotic Environments: Implications for Amino Acid Leaching and Meteorite Alteration

Understanding the origin of life on Earth requires reconstructing how organic molecules emerged, accumulated, and persisted under the physical and chemical conditions of early planetary environments. While numerous pathways for prebiotic chemistry have been proposed, increasing attention has turned to the contribution of extraterrastrial materials as the source for life's precursors. Among these materials, carbonaceous chondrites (CCs) offer unique insights because they contain some of the earliest solids to form in the Solar System.

Recent advances in analytical chemistry have revealed that CCs are not passive carriers of organics, but active geochemical systems capable of hosting aqueuous alteration, redox cycling, and catalytic mineral-organic interactions that may have mirrored or even preceded early terrestrial chemistry. Moreover, the capacity of CCs to preserve molecular diversity across billions of years, despite varying degrees of thermal and aqueous processing, raises fundamental questions about the conditions that control organic synthesis and degradation in astromaterials.

This thesis aims to investigate how aqueous alteration on CCs parent bodies influenced amino acid formation and preservation, how these organics could have been released into early Earth environments, and whether they could have survived under the harsh surface conditions of the Hadean Earth. Through a combination of organic analysis, laboratory leaching experiments, mineralogical characterization, and ultraviolet irradiation studies, this work seeks to reconstruct the pathways by which CCs may have seeded the early Earth with the building blocks of life.