Geologists plan to open an 830 million-year-old rock salt crystal, which they believe contains ancient microorganisms that may still be alive.
Researchers at the Geological Society of America first announced the discovery of small remnants of prokaryotic life and algae inside an ancient halite crystal earlier this month.
These organisms were found inside microscopic bubbles of liquid in the crystal, known as fluid inclusions, which could serve as microhabitats for tiny colonies to thrive.
Now researchers want to open the glass to find out if this ancient life is still really alive or not.
While returning to the modern world 830 million-year-old life forms may not seem like the most sensible idea, researchers insist it will be carried out with the utmost caution.
“It sounds like a really bad B movie, but we’ve been working on it in great detail for years to try to figure out how to do it as safely as possible,” said study author Kathy Benison, a geologist at West Virginia University. , he told NPR.
Researchers have discovered small remnants of prokaryotic and algae life inside an 830-million-year-old Browne Formation Halite crystal in central Australia. In the photo: fluid inclusions in halite with microorganisms
The organisms were found within fluid crystal inclusions, which could serve as microhabitats for tiny colonies to thrive. In the photo: fluid inclusions in halite
The extraordinary discovery was first reported in the journal Geology on May 11th.
The researchers used a selection of imaging techniques to study fluid inclusions in an 830-million-year-old piece of halite from the Browne Formation in central Australia.
They discovered organic solids and liquids that were consistent in size, shape, and fluorescent response in prokaryotic and algae cells.
The discovery shows that microorganisms can remain well preserved in halite for hundreds of millions of years.
This has implications for the search for extraterrestrial life, according to researchers.
It is possible that similar biosignatures could be detected in chemical sediments from Mars, where large salt deposits have been identified as evidence of ancient liquid water deposits.
Images of 830 million-year-old Browne Formation bed halite core slabs, where the crystal containing the microorganisms was found
Map of Australia with the approximate location of the Empress 1A core (black star), where the halite crystal was extracted.
Microorganisms in individual primary fluid inclusions in halite from the Browne Formation, Central Australia
While it may seem unlikely that the microorganisms inside the crystal may still be alive, living prokaryotes have previously been extracted from halite dating back 250 million years, so it is not impossible that they could survive 830 million. of years.
“The possible survival of microorganisms on a geological time scale is not fully understood,” the researchers wrote in their study.
“It has been suggested that radiation would destroy organic matter over long periods of time, but Nicastro et al. (2002) found that 250 million-year-old buried halite was only exposed to negligible amounts of radiation.
“In addition, microorganisms can survive in fluid inclusions due to metabolic changes, such as starvation survival and cyst stages, and coexistence with organic compounds or dead cells that could serve as sources of nutrients.”
Commenting on scientists’ plans to open the glass, Bonnie Baxter, a biologist at Westminster College in Salt Lake City who did not participate in the study, said the risk of triggering an apocalyptic pandemic was relatively low.
“An environmental organism that has never seen a human will not have the mechanism to get inside us and cause disease,” he told NPR.
“So personally, from a scientific perspective, I’m not afraid of that.”
The first life on Earth appeared at least 300 million years earlier than previously thought
The first life on Earth appeared at least 3.75 billion years ago, about 300 million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study.
The revelation is based on the analysis of a fist-sized rock in Quebec, Canada, which is estimated to be between 3,750 and 4,280 million years old.
Researchers had previously found small filaments, knobs and tubes in the rock, which appeared to have been caused by bacteria. However, not all scientists agreed that these structures were of biological origin.
Now, after extensive analysis, the team at University College London has discovered a much larger and more complex structure within the rock: a stem with parallel branches on one side almost an inch long.
They also found hundreds of distorted spheres, or “ellipsoids,” next to the tubes and filaments.
Researchers say that while some of the structures may have been created by accidental chemical reactions, the “tree-like” stem with parallel branches was probably of biological origin.
This is because no structure created by chemistry alone has been found.
To date, the first known evidence of life on Earth was a 3.46 billion-year-old rock in Western Australia that contained worm-like microscopic fossils.