.com In that great ice island Greenland is now located between the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, were the traces of ancient life on Earth. There, scientists at the University of Wollongong, Australia, excavated, and thaws, gained access to fossils that lived 3.700 million years ago, at a time when the Earth was quite similar to Mars.
So far, the oldest fossils were 220 million years ago. Nutman Allen and his team of Australian geologists went even further with his discovery of “stromatolites” which were formed by associations of microorganisms deposited in a shallow marine environment. The they identified 4 years ago in Greenland, actually, but it took time for in-depth analysis and present hard evidence. Are between 1 and 4 centimeters.
Exactly, the fossils were found in rocks Isua Greenstone Belt in southwest Greenland. Other researchers have postulated that there was a chemical composition that could indicate signs of life. But others say the mixture of chemicals could have been given by natural processes. A whole debate.
The Earth would have formed 4,550 million years ago and the fossils found and lived 3.700 million years ago (not even lived at that time popular dinosaurs that evolved about 231 million years ago). To Nutman, the discovery leads to the assumption that life would have developed even before the date of fossils. Their finding is published in the journal Nature this week, accompanied by an article by Abigail Allwood, the California Institute of Technology and NASA, which also investigates the origin of life on Earth.
Allwood scientific wrote: “If really these are the figurative graves of our earliest ancestors, the implications are staggering.” He added that “if these microorganisms could live in that environment and leave traces found, life is not so improbable and rare thing. Give him half a chance and will go forward “.
The discovery in Greenland brings more hope for finding life beyond Earth. According Allwoodk, “our understanding of the nature of life in the universe is shaped by how it developed on Earth to establish the planetary conditions for life. Suddenly, Mars may seem even more promising than before as a potential abode of life in the past. ” The unmanned space missions have been sent to the red planet have shown that at the moment the site rocks Greenland were forming, Mars was not very different from Earth from the perspective of habitability, with water bodies the surface.
in Argentina, in 2009 the biologist Conicet, Maria Eugenia Farias discovered living stromatolites (like associations with algae bacteria that seemed rocks), more than 4,000 meters high. Like the planet Mars, the Puna has a low level of oxygen, cold, strong winds and dryness. “If life exists today in the salt mines of Argentina Puna, they could also do it on Mars. They are microorganisms that survive the high ultraviolet radiation and methane, in a desert environment, “commented Farias had Clarin at the time of disclosure of their work.
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