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Creag
The Boar's Rock
- Joined
- May 19, 2009
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Scientists have found the oldest evidence yet for microbial life on Earth, in 3.48-billion-year-old hot spring deposits in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. They believe the region might once have been a volcanic crater on a small island, dotted with hot springs and ponds that teemed with life. The evidence comes in the form of fossils that push back by 580 million years the earliest known existence of microbial life on land. To these scientists, the discovery also suggests something startling about life’s origins. Tara Djokic, the University of New South Wales PhD candidate who led the research, said in a statement:
"Our exciting findings … may have implications for an origin of life in freshwater hot springs on land, rather than the more widely discussed idea that life developed in the ocean and adapted to land later."
The work was published May 9, 2017 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.
Although the idea of life beginning in Earth’s oceans – in deep-sea hydrothermal vents – has entered popular culture, scientists still discuss another possibility. That is, life might have begun on land in a version of what the English naturalist, geologist and biologist Charles Darwin described as “warm little ponds.”
Djokic and her colleagues believe the rocks containing the fossils were formed on land, not in the ocean, because they identified the presence of geyserite – a mineral deposit formed from near boiling-temperature, silica-rich, fluids found only in a terrestrial hot spring environment.
/snip...
The rest of article at source: Earthsky.org
"Our exciting findings … may have implications for an origin of life in freshwater hot springs on land, rather than the more widely discussed idea that life developed in the ocean and adapted to land later."
The work was published May 9, 2017 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.
Although the idea of life beginning in Earth’s oceans – in deep-sea hydrothermal vents – has entered popular culture, scientists still discuss another possibility. That is, life might have begun on land in a version of what the English naturalist, geologist and biologist Charles Darwin described as “warm little ponds.”
Djokic and her colleagues believe the rocks containing the fossils were formed on land, not in the ocean, because they identified the presence of geyserite – a mineral deposit formed from near boiling-temperature, silica-rich, fluids found only in a terrestrial hot spring environment.
/snip...
The rest of article at source: Earthsky.org
