The earliest incontrovertible signs of life on Earth are in the 3.48 billion-year-old Dresser Formation in the Pilbara craton of Western Australia, which take the form of carbon-coated, bubble-like structures in fine-grained silica sediments ascribed to a terrestrial hot-spring environment. In the same Formation are stromatolites that are knobbly, finely banded structures made of carbonates. By analogy with similar structures being produced today by bacterial mats in a variety of chemically stressed environments that are inhospitable for multicelled organisms that might know them away, stromatolites are taken to signify thriving, carbonate secreting bacteria. There are also streaks of carbon associated with wave ripples that may have been other types of biofilm. A less certain record of the presence of life are stromatolite-like features in metasediments from the Isua supracrustal belt of West Greenland, dated at around 3.8 Ga, which also contain graphite with carbon-isotopic signs that it formed from biogenic carbon. Purely geochemical evidence that carbonaceous compounds may have formed in living systems are ambiguous since quite complex hydrocarbons can be synthesised abiogenically by Fischer-Tropsch reactions between carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

At present there is little chance of extending life’s record further back in time than four billion years because the Hadean is mainly represented by pre 4 Ga ages of zircon grains found in much younger sedimentary rocks – resistant relics of Hadean crustal erosion. The eastern shore of Hudson Bay does preserve a tiny (20 km²) patch of metamorphosed basaltic igneous rocks, known as the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt. Dated at 3.77 Ga by one method but 4.28 Ga by another, this could be Hadean. Like the Isua sequence that in Quebec also contains metasediments, including banded ironstones with associated iron-rich hydrothermal deposits. Silica from the vent system shows dramatically lifelike tubules. Yet the ambiguity in dating upsets any claims to genuine Hadean life. There has also been a physical stumbling block to the notion that life may have originated and thrived during the Hadean: the bombardment record.

While oxygen-isotope data from 4.4 Ga zircons hints strongly at subsurface and perhaps surface water on Earth at that time, continued accretion of large planetesimals would have created the hellish conditions associated with the name of the first Eon in Earth’s history. Liquid water is essential for life to have formed, on top of a supply of the essential biological elements C, H, O, N, P and S. The sheer amount of interstellar dust that accompanied the Hadean impact record would have ensured fertile chemical conditions, but would the surface and near-surface of the early Earth have remained continually wet? Judging by the lunar surface and that of other bodies in the solar system, after the cataclysmic events that formed the Moon, many Hadean impacts on Earth were in the range of 100 to 1000 km across, with a Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB)that not only increased the intensity of projectile delivery but witnessed the most energetic single events such as those that created the lunar maria and probably far larger structures on Earth. The thermal energy, accompanied, by incandescent silicate vapour ejected from craters, may have evaporated oceans and even subsurface water with calamitous consequences for early life or prebiotic chemistry. Until 2017 no researchers had been able to model the energetic of the Hadean convincingly.

After assessing the projectile flux up to and through the LHB, and the consequent impact heating Bob Grimm and Simone Marchi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado modelled the likely thermal evolution of the outer Earth through the Hadean. This allowed them to calculate the likely thermal gradients in the near-surface, the volumes of rock each event would have affected and the times taken for cooling after impacts (Grimm, R.E. & Marchi, S. 2018. Direct thermal effects of the Hadean bombardment did not limit early subsurface habitability. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 485, p. 1-9; doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2017.12.043). They found that subsurface ‘habitability’ would have grown continuously throughout the Hadean, even during the worst events of the LHB. Sterilizing Earth and thus destroying and interrupting any life processes could only have been achieved by ten times more projectiles arriving ten times more frequently over the 600 Ma history of the Hadean and LHB. Although surface water may have been evaporated by impact-flash heating and vaporized silicate ejecta, the subsurface would have been wet at least somewhere on the early Earth. Provided it either originated in or colonised surface sedimentary cover it would have been feasible for life to have survived the Hadean. However, nobody knows how long it would have taken for the necessary accumulation of prebiotic chemicals and to achieve the complex sequence of processes that lead to nucleic acids encapsulated in cells and thus self-replication and life itself.