Ancient ores offer clues about life that existed 2.7 bn years ago

A team of Canadian and US scientists are analysing ancient metal-ore deposits to better understand the chemistry of the ancient oceans – and the early evolution of life.

Washington: A team of Canadian and US scientists are analysing ancient metal-ore deposits to better understand the chemistry of the ancient oceans – and the early evolution of life.

An analysis of sulfide ore deposits from one of the world’s richest base-metal mines confirmed that oxygen levels were extremely low on Earth 2.7 billion years ago, but also showed that microbes were actively feeding on sulfate in the ocean and influencing seawater chemistry during that geological time period.

Sulfate is the second most abundant dissolved ion in the oceans today. It comes from the “rusting” of rocks by atmospheric oxygen, which creates sulfate through chemical reactions with pyrite, the iron sulfide material known as “fool’s gold.”

The researchers, led by PhD student John Jamieson of the University of Ottawa and Prof. Boswell Wing of McGill, measured the “weight” of sulfur in samples of massive sulfide ore from the Kidd Creek copper-zinc mine in Timmins, Ontario, using a highly sensitive instrument known as a mass spectrometer.

The weight is determined by the different amounts of isotopes of sulfur in a sample, and the abundance of different isotopes indicates how much seawater sulfate was incorporated into the massive sulfide ore that formed at the bottom of ancient oceans. That ancient ore is now found on the Earth’s surface, and is particularly common in the Canadian shield.

The scientists found that much less sulfate was incorporated into the 2.7 billion-year-old ore at Kidd Creek than is incorporated into similar ore forming at the bottom of oceans today. From these measurements, the researchers were able to model how much sulfate must have been present in the ancient seawater.

Their conclusion: sulfate levels were about 350 times lower than in today’s ocean. Though they were extremely low, sulfate levels in the ancient ocean still supported an active global population of microbes that use sulfate to gain energy from organic carbon.

“The sulfide ore deposits that we looked at are widespread on Earth, with Canada and Quebec holding the majority of them,” said Wing, an associate professor in McGill’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science.

“We now have a tool for probing when and where these microbes actually came into global prominence,” he asserted.

The team reported their finding in Nature Geoscience.

ANI

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