Soda lake phosphorus fluxes controlled by biological uptake imply abundant phosphate in plausible origin-of-life environments

Environmental concentrations of the macronutrient phosphorus are generally low. This limits biological productivity and the environments in which life could have originated on early Earth. High-carbonate, alkaline "soda" lakes are the only known environments where phosphate can accumulate to levels high enough for the abiotic formation of crucial biomolecules like ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA. In the publication associated with this dataset, we quantify phosphorus fluxes in two neighboring soda lakes that are moderately and extremely phosphate-rich, respectively. Our flux modeling (python code) is informed by empirical measurements of different phosphorus pools in water and sediments of the lakes, which were obtained by sequential phosphorus extraction, among other methodologies.Contained files: Data S1: data from sequential phosphorus extraction (SEDEX) from soda lake sediments. Model.py: python code for the soda lake phosphorus budgets described in the associated publication. Table 1: Percentages of P fractions in bulk LCL and GL sediments as well as the GL microbial mat layer.Table 2: Modeled P and hydrological budgets of Last Chance and Goodenough Lake where phosphate loss to groundwater seepage is included (see section 3.3 in associated publication).<br>