Tag: Stromatolite

Signs of life in some of the oldest rocks

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Vic McGregor (left) and Allen Nutman examine metasedimentary strata at Isua, West Greenland
For decades the record of tangible signs of life extended back to around 3.4 billion years ago, in the form of undulose, banded biofilms of calcite known as stromatolites preserved at North Pole in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. There have been attempts to use carbon-isotope data and those of other elements from older, unfossiliferous rocks to seek chemical signs of living processes that extracted carbon from the early seas. Repeatedly, claims have been made for such signatures being extracted from the 3.7 to 3.8 Ga Isua metasediments in West Greenland. But because this famous locality shows evidence of repeated metamorphism abiogenic formation of the chemical patterns cannot be ruled out. Isua has been literally crawled over since Vic McGregor of the Greenland Geological Survey became convinced in the 1960s that the metasediments could be the oldest rocks in the world, a view confirmed eventually by Stephen Moorbath and Noel Gale of Oxford University using Rb-Sr isotopic dating. There are slightly older rocks in Canada, which just break the 4 Ga barrier, but they were metamorphose at higher pressures and temperatures and are highly deformed. The Isua suprcrustals, despite deformation and metamorphism show far more diversity that geochemically can be linked to many kinds of sedimentary and volcanic rock types.

 

Two of the Isua addicts are Allen Nutman of the University of Wollongong, Australia and Clark Friend formerly of Oxford Brookes University, UK, who have worked together on many aspects of the Isua rocks for decades. Finally, thanks to melt-back of old snow pack, they and colleagues have found stromatolites that push the origin of life as far back as it seems possible for geoscientists to reach (Nutman, A.P. et al. 2016. Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures. Nature, v. 537, published online 31 August 2016, doi:10.1038/nature). The trace fossils occur in a marble, formerly a limestone that retains intricate sedimentary structures, which show it to have been deposited in shallow water. The carbon and oxygen isotopes have probably been disturbed by metamorphism, and no signs of cell material remain for the same reason, but the shape is sufficiently distinct from those produced by purely sedimentary processes to suspect that they resulted from biofilm build-up. The fact that they are made of carbonates suggests that they may have been produced by cyanobacteria as modern stromatolites are.

isua strom
Stromatolite-like structures from a metasediment in the Isua area of West Greenland (credit Allen Nutman, University of Wollongong, Australia)

The age of the structures, about 3.7 Ga, is close to the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment (4. 1to 3.8 Ga) of the Solar System by errant asteroids and comets. So, if the physical evidence is what it seems to be, life emerged either very quickly after such an energetic episode or conditions at the end of the Hadean were not inimical to living processes or the prebiotic chemistry that led to them.

 You can find more on early life here

Related articles

Allwood, A.C. 2016. Evidence of life in Earth’s oldest rocks. Nature, v. 537, published online 31 August 2016, doi:10.1038/nature19429

Breathing spaces or toxic traps in the Archaean ocean

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The relationship between Earth’s complement of free oxygen and life seems to have begun in the Archaean, but it presented a series of paradoxes: produced by photosynthetic organisms oxygen would have been toxic to most other Archaean life forms; its presence drew an important micronutrient, dissolved iron-2, from sea water by precipitation of iron-3 oxides; though produced in seawater there is no evidence until about 2.4 Ga for its presence in the air. It has long been thought that the paradoxes may have been resolved by oxygen being produced in isolated patches, or ‘oases’ on the Archaean sea floor, where early blue-green bacteria evolved and thrived.

 

A stratigraphic clue to the former presence of such oxygen factories is itself quite convoluted. The precipitation of calcium carbonates and therefore the presence of limestones in sedimentary sequences are suppressed by dissolved iron-2: the presence of Fe2+ ions would favour the removal of bicarbonate ions from seawater by formation of ferrous carbonate that is less soluble than calcium carbonate. Canadian and US geochemists studied one of the thickest Archaean limestone sequences, dated at around 2.8 Ga, in the wonderfully named Wabigoon Subprovince of the Canadian Shield which is full of stromatolites, bulbous laminated masses probably formed from bacterial biofilms in shallow water (Riding, R. et al. 2014. Identification of an Archean marine oxygen oasis. Precambrian Research, v. 251, p. 232-237).

English: Stromatolites in the Hoyt Limestone (...
Limestone formed from blue-green bacteria biofilms or stromatolites (credit: Wikipedia)

Limestones from the sequence that stable isotope analyses show to remain unaltered all have abnormally low cerium concentrations relative to the other rare-earth elements. Unaltered limestones from stromatolite-free, deep water limestones show no such negative Ce anomaly. Cerium is the only rare-earth element that has a possible 4+ valence state as well one with lower positive charge. So in the presence of oxygen cerium can form an insoluble oxide and thus be removed from solution. So cerium independently shows that the shallow water limestones formed in seawater that contained free oxygen. Nor was it an ephemeral condition, for the anomalies persist through half a kilometer of limestone.

 

The study shows that anomalous oxygenated patches existed on the Archaean sea floor, probably shallow-water basins or shelves isolated by the build up of stromatolite reef barriers. For most prokaryote cells they would have harboured toxic conditions, presenting them with severe chemical stress. Possibly these were the first places where oxygen defence measures evolved, that eventually led to more complex eukaryote cells that not only survive oxygen stress but thrive on its presence. That conjecture is unlikely to be fully proved, since the first undoubted fossils of eukaryote cells, known as acritarchs, occur in rocks that are more than 800 Ma years younger.

 

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