Science is Fun Fridays!

 


The Singhbhum Craton in India is one of Earth's oldest surviving blocks of continental crust.

Researchers came across a carbonaceous layer sandwiched in ancient chert - the mineral form of silicon dioxide - and there they found fossilized remnants of microbial mats.

Some of these traces of life have been dated to 3.5 billion years ago.

The silica entombed the dead microbes, preserving them as thin layers of carbon that can survive even as the surrounding rock is transformed by heat and pressure.

First they had to establish that the carbon was indigenous to the rock, and not introduced by some later geological event, and then they had to prove a biological origin.

They used Raman spectroscopy to determine its structure, which in turn reveals formation and alteration history.


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