Australian researchers Allen Nutman and Vickie Bennett hold a 3.7-billion-year-old fossilized stromatolite from Isua, Greenland. (Yuri Amelin)
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 first life on Earth may have appeared around deep-sea hydrothermal vents]
They made their find in July 2012 while doing field research in Isua, a region of Greenland so remote that they had to travel there by helicopter. The site is known for having some of the oldest rocks on Earth, in what is known as the Isua supracrustal belt. Allen Nutman, a University of Wollongong geologist who has studied the rocks there since 1980, said one day he and his colleagues were working at the site when they spied some outcroppings they'd never seen before. The formations had been exposed where the snow pack had melted — the result, Nutman said, of the global warming that is so pronounced in Greenland or of low levels of snowfall the previous winter.
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