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Earth Science Technology

World's Oldest Fossils Found In Greenland (washingtonpost.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the radiometric-dating dept.
schwit1 quotes a report from Washington Post: Scientists probing a newly exposed, formerly snow-covered outcropping in Greenland claim they have discovered the oldest fossils ever seen, the remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago. It's a stunning announcement in a scientific field that is always contentious. But if confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth's early history, and provide support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe. A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled "Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures," published Wednesday in Nature. The report adds: "Subsequent laboratory analysis established that the formation is 3.7 billion years old, and turned up additional chemical signatures consistent with a biological origin for the conical structures, Allen Nutman, a University of Wollongong geologist, said. These scientists determined the age of the rocks through radiometric dating, measuring the abundance of elements created by the steady decay of uranium."
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World's Oldest Fossils Found In Greenland

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  • Someone finally found... (Score:3)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Friday September 02, 2016 @01:55AM (#52813177) Journal
    ...Cowboy Neal.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • With a sample size of one, the conclusions we can draw about life across the universe are very limited.

      If this was all we had to go on, certainly. However, we do have a fairly good outline of ideas about how life arose from chemistry on this planet, and it doesn't look like there was anything very unusual about Earth; in fact, it looks a lot like life is something that is almost inevitable, when the conditions are not too hostile. Finding very early fossils fit into this - they don't prove that we are right, but it does seem that life on Earth arose as soon as the conditions had barely settled down. Of cours

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          Panspermia in general is just some side hypothesis without much science behind. Organic compounds are quite aboundant in space, and they form spontaneoulsly if conditions are right, so there is no need to hypotheze that the organic compounds on Earth had some extraterrestical origin. Some of them might actually come from somewhere else, but organic compounds tend to be quite fragile when it comes to the conditions around a meteorite impact, and the few molecules that survive tend to be drown into lakes and

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Maritz ( 1829006 )
          Panspermia looks less likely to be necessary as time goes on. It's a more convoluted explanation.

        • The biggest problem with panspermia, other than suggesting that life could survive thousands or millions of years in hard vacuum in the very hostile environment of a young solar system to seed another planet than the one it originated on is simply "Why do we need it as an explanation." Since the current abiogenesis theories mainly require some organic chemistry and lots of excess energy, is there some reason the early Earth, with all the bombardments and likely huge amounts amount of energy available via vo

    • The conclusions are limited, but the quicker life popped up, the more likely it is that it's somehow easier to get started. Of course it's possible you get your 20 heads in a row on the first 20 coin flips, but that's not likely. And, if you know the coin is biased then when you get your first 20 in a row tells you something about how biased the coin is.

      • Pushing back the evidence of life implies one of the following is true.
        1) Life (abiogenesis) is easy to get started and the Universe is full of life.
        2) It was an extremely rare event for life to start on Earth.
        3) Life started somewhere else and ended up on Earth.
        4) Life had outside help in getting started.
        I personally believe that life is extremely hard to get going and with the evidence of life showing up even earlier, it makes it more likely that there was some outside help, i.e. a supernatural event

        • Pushing back the evidence of life implies one of the following is true.

          1) Life (abiogenesis) is easy to get started and the Universe is full of life.

          Well, it shows that it is liklier easier than expected. If it took only a 300 million years to start here then the best guess at the mode is of course 300 million years, say down from 500 million.

          That of course implies that the window for life to evolve is likely shorter than we previously expected and naturally the number of places with a short window must be

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ranbot ( 2648297 )

            i.e. a supernatural event.

            Possibly, but the probability increases from something minute to something marginally less minute. We've never seen any evidence of anything supernatural existing that's held up to scrutiny, so the chance of supernatural things existing is very small at this point.

            I personally don't follow any particular religion, but I don't think the tiny little corner of the universe and short time span humans have observed is enough to rule out the supernatural. The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover we don't know, such that denying at least the possibility of the supernatural is as much of a leap of faith in science keeping faith in a conventional religion.

          • Pushing back the evidence of life implies one of the following is true.

            1) Life (abiogenesis) is easy to get started and the Universe is full of life.

            Well, it shows that it is liklier easier than expected. If it took only a 300 million years to start here then the best guess at the mode is of course 300 million years, say down from 500 million.

            That of course implies that the window for life to evolve is likely shorter than we previously expected and naturally the number of places with a short window must be greater than or equal to the number of places with a longer window (in any remotely statistically sane universe, greater).

            As the minimum window shortens, the number of opportunities for life to get started expands.

            I don't think that proves the universe is full of life.

            2) It was an extremely rare event for life to start on Earth.

            I don't see how it implies that. We don't know precisely how rare the event was but as the earliest point moves back, the event looks less rare than before.

            I see things differently. I believe you are saying that since the time period is shorter, the probability for life must be greater. (Correct me if I am wrong.) I start with a fixed (but unknown) small probability. Then by shortening the time period one makes it less likely life would form, because there are less cases where the needed ideal conditions exist for life to form.

            3) Life started somewhere else and ended up on Earth.

            Not really sure how it implies that. No matter what the distribution of life seeds arriving from outside, the narrower the window, the smaller chance life had to arrive from the outside. So it implies this option is less likely, but not by how much.

            4) Life had outside help in getting started.

            You've just deferred the problem, though to whatever gave rise to the outside helper.

            i.e. a supernatural event.

            Possibly, but the probability increases from something minute to something marginally less minute. We've never seen any evidence of anything supernatural existing that's held up to scrutiny, so the chance of supernatural things existing is very small at this point.

            Using that fixed probability and the shorten time period, I see the need to look for other opportunities, such as panspermia or a

        • Leaving aside the particular points (which others have already addressed), there's another implication:

          5) It takes a long time--longer than we thought--for complex (multicellular) life to arise from simple life. The Ediacaran period (just prior to the Cambrian) is near the beginning of complex life, and is dated to roughly 0.6 billion years ago. If the Greenland rocks are evidence of bacterial life 3.7 billion years ago, then it took about 3 billion years for life to make the transition from bacterial to

    • That's because this isn't the first time someone has claimed to find the oldest, only for it to turn out the structures were formed by the action of scalding water on mineral sediments. Nick Lane describes this in some detail in his book, Life Ascending [amazon.co.uk].

  • . . . .are found in the United States Senate. . . .

  • Why fundamentalists can’t accept deep time (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Friday September 02, 2016 @12:17PM (#52815599)

    Evolution implies death before sin. If there was death before sin, then “original sin” and Jesus’ atonment for that sin are meaningless. They’re not going to accept something that breaks their religion, because they have a deathly (no pun intended) fear of not having a life after death. They are also wrapped up in fear over some mythical “moral decline” that they believe is caused by moral relativism that they seem to think evolution implies.

    What’s interesting is to uncover the inconsistences in their beliefs. They claim to read the Bible literally or “at face value.” But when it comes to original sin, the Bible is only clear about HUMAN SPIRITUAL death as a result of original sin. They extend this to physical death of all animals. But when pressed, they cannot identify specific Bible verses that speak to this. Rather, they fall back on an assumption they make about the meaning of “very good” which they ASSUME (a tendency they say is a problem with evolutionists) means there could have been no animal death before human sin. They presume too much to know the mind of God and what God may have thought was “very good” beyond what their Bible claims while trying to convince us that the primary source of truth should be the Bible.

    They go on to create a subculture where evidence is something we can take or leave as we like as it fits or doesn’t fit our preconceptions. Then they turn around and call evolution a preconception. It was Christians who came up with the idea!

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