Scientists are ready to open an 830-million-year-old rock salt crystal, which they believe will contain ancient life.
The crystal was discovered earlier this month, and the Geological Society of America then used a selection of imaging techniques to analyse their treasure. Inside, researchers found remnants of prokaryotic and algal life that had been preserved by microscopic pockets of liquid.
Known as fluid inclusions, the minuscule pockets of liquid could serve as microhabitats for tiny communities of life. Naturally, scientists want to crack it open to see if the life inside is still active. It's almost like they've never watched a Sci-Fi film.
Kathy Benison, a geologist from the West Virginia University and author of the study, told NPR how her team are proceeding with their research.
"There are little cubes of the original liquid from which that salt grew," she explained. "And the surprise for us is that we also saw shapes that are consistent with what we would expect from microorganisms. And they could be still surviving within that 830-million-year-old preserved microhabitat."
Benison is not unaware of how her research sounds to everyday people but has emphasised that the experiments will be carried out safely.
"It does sound like a really bad B-movie, but there is a lot of detailed work that's been going on for years to try to figure out how to do that in the safest possible way," she said.
Should the research continue as expected, the implications could be immense. For one, it would be proof that life can survive for millennia if preserved appropriately. Across the stars, salt deposits on planets like Mars could also point to life being hidden beneath the ground.
Sure, it's a little less cinematic than an alien bursting from the rock, but still, it's pretty damn cool.
"When we're thinking about Mars, we're talking about billions of years, probably, since microbial life could have been flourishing in the waters on that planet," said Bonnie Baxter, a biologist at Westminster College in Salt Lake City who was not involved in the study. "And so we really need longer experiments in rocks that have been around longer on our planet in order to understand what could happen on Mars," she said."
That doesn’t sound good A supercomputer has predicted when humans will become extinct. Though climate change is always in the news and becoming a priority for governments to tackle, its long term impacts could be devastating not just on the environment but on our species as well. With this in mind, a supercomputer has analysed […]
Bashing the bishop is a scientifically proven way of staying healthy Regular ejaculation is something of a cheat code when it comes to shielding yourself from cancer. In a study published by European Urology, which followed 32,000 men for 18 years, scientists discovered the magic number of 21 times per month will reduce the chances […]
Your family might be a bit bigger than you realised All blue-eyed people descend from a single human who lived around 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, scientists believe. While 70-79 per cent of the world’s population have brown eyes – the most common colour – just 8 to 10 per cent have the second most common […]
