The shapes in the salt crystal are consistent with what would be expected from microorganisms.
kathy benison
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kathy benison
From lemon to pork, salt is a useful preservative. But researchers studying some ancient salt crystals discovered that they preserve something else: evidence of life.
“There are little cubes of the original liquid that the salt grew from,” said Kathy Benison, a geologist at West Virginia University. “The surprise for us is that we also saw shapes that corresponded to what we would expect from microorganisms.” “And they might survive in these preserved microorganisms that are 830 million years old.”
The salt crystals (also known as halite) that Benison and his team studied were found in central Australia. Benison was part of the team that published these findings in the journal geology.
This video of a different salt crystal shows what the liquid looks like when it moves inside.
Although the idea that these microorganisms might survive is a mind-boggling idea, Bennison said the science backs it up.
“We know from studying life in modern extreme environments that there are organisms that can go through a survival mode, almost like hibernation. They are still alive, but they slow down all their biological activities,” he said. .
Benison suspects that if there were microorganisms on the glass, it might be surviving in a state of hibernation. The halite must be broken open to ensure that it is organic material and that it is still alive.
While hacking that crystal might seem like a bold move (we’re currently battling a global pandemic caused by microscopic viruses, following all), Benison plans to do it. But she said there was no need to worry.
“It looks like a really bad B-grade movie,” he said, “but there’s a lot of detailed work that’s been done over the years trying to figure out how to do it as safely as possible.”
Bonnie Baxter, a biologist at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, was not involved in the study but still offers some reassuring words.
“An ecological organism that has never seen a human before would not have a mechanism to get into us and cause disease,” he said. “So personally, from a scientific perspective, I’m not afraid of that.”
These findings were not only an important step in studying the origins of life on Earth, Baxter said, but also opened the door to finding life on other planets.
“And when we think of Mars, we’re talking regarding billions of years, probably, where microbial life would have thrived in the waters of that planet. So we really need longer experiments on rocks that have been around longer on our planet to understand our planet,” Baxter said. What might happen on Mars?
And maybe, just maybe, they can bring us one step closer to finding evidence of aliens.
The radio version of this piece was reported by Sacha Pfeiffer and Alyssa Chang. Produced by Michael Levitt and edited by Sarah Handel, and modified for the web by Manuela Lopez Restrepo.
