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Combined<sup>147,146</sup>Sm-<sup>143,142</sup>Nd constraints on the longevity and residence time of early terrestrial crust
Primordial silicate differentiation controlled the composition of Earth's oldest crust. Inherited 142Nd anomalies in Archean rocks are vestiges of the mantle-crust differentiation before ca. 4300 Ma. Here we report new whole-rock 147,146Sm-143,142Nd data for the Acasta Gneiss Complex (AGC; Northwest Territories, Canada). Our 147Sm-143Nd data combined with literature data define an age of 3371â±â141 Ma (2 SD) and yield an initial Δ143Nd of â5.6â±â2.1. These results are at odds with the Acasta zircon U-Pb record, which comprises emplacement ages of 3920â3960 Ma. Ten of our thirteen samples show 142Nd deficits of â9.6â±â4.8 ppm (2 SD) relative to the modern Earth. The discrepancy between 142Nd anomalies and a mid-Archean 147Sm-143Nd age can be reconciled with Nd isotope reequilibration of the AGC during metamorphic perturbations at ca. 3400 Ma. A model age of ca. 4310 Ma is derived for the early enrichment of the Acasta source. Two compositional end-members can be identified: a felsic component with 142Nd/144Nd identical to the modern Earth and a mafic component with 142Nd/144Nd as low as â14.1 ppm. The ca. 4310 Ma AGC source is âŒ200 Myr younger than those estimated for Nuvvuagittuq (northern QuĂ©bec) and Isua (Itsaq Gneiss Complex, West Greenland). The AGC does not have the same decoupled Nd-Hf isotope systematics as these other two terranes, which have been attributed to the crystallization of an early magma ocean. The Acasta signature rather is ascribed to the formation of Hadean crust that was preserved for several hundred Myr. Its longevity can be linked to 142Nd evolution in the mantle and does not require slow mantle stirring times nor modification of its convective mode.This project was funded by an ETH internal grant to BB. We thank Colin Maden for maintenance of the mass spectrometer. SJM acknowledges support from the NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program (Investigating the Hadean Earth) and the NASA Lunar Science Institute (Center for Lunar Origin and Evolution, CLOE). Additional support to SJM came from the Laboratoire de GĂ©ologie de Lyon, UniversitĂ© Claude Bernard Lyon 1, and a Distinguished Professorship awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. JBT received support from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Grant ANR-10-BLAN-0603 M&Ms â Mantle Melting â Measurements, Models, Mechanisms).This is the version of record, which can also be found on the publisher's website at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GC005313/abstract © 2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved
Chiral Polymerization in Open Systems From Chiral-Selective Reaction Rates
We investigate the possibility that prebiotic homochirality can be achieved
exclusively through chiral-selective reaction rate parameters without any other
explicit mechanism for chiral bias. Specifically, we examine an open network of
polymerization reactions, where the reaction rates can have chiral-selective
values. The reactions are neither autocatalytic nor do they contain explicit
enantiomeric cross-inhibition terms. We are thus investigating how rare a set
of chiral-selective reaction rates needs to be in order to generate a
reasonable amount of chiral bias. We quantify our results adopting a
statistical approach: varying both the mean value and the rms dispersion of the
relevant reaction rates, we show that moderate to high levels of chiral excess
can be achieved with fairly small chiral bias, below 10%. Considering the
various unknowns related to prebiotic chemical networks in early Earth and the
dependence of reaction rates to environmental properties such as temperature
and pressure variations, we argue that homochirality could have been achieved
from moderate amounts of chiral selectivity in the reaction rates.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Origins of Life and
Evolution of Biosphere
Ancient hydrothermal seafloor deposits in Eridania basin on Mars
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the articleâs Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the articleâs Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. The file attached is the Published/publisherâs pdf version of the article
The Detectability of Earth's Biosignatures Across Time
Over the past two decades, enormous advances in the detection of exoplanets
have taken place. Currently, we have discovered hundreds of earth-sized
planets, several of them within the habitable zone of their star. In the coming
years, the efforts will concentrate in the characterization of these planets
and their atmospheres to try to detect the presence of biosignatures. However,
even if we discovered a second Earth, it is very unlikely that it would present
a stage of evolution similar to the present-day Earth. Our planet has been far
from static since its formation about 4.5 Ga ago; on the contrary, during this
time, it has undergone multiple changes in it's atmospheric composition, it's
temperature structure, it's continental distribution, and even changes in the
forms of life that inhabit it. All these changes have affected the global
properties of Earth as seen from an astronomical distance. Thus, it is of
interest not only to characterize the observables of the Earth as it is today,
but also at different epochs. Here we review the detectability of the Earth's
globally-averaged properties over time. This includes atmospheric composition
and biosignatures, and surface properties that can be interpreted as sings of
habitability (bioclues). The resulting picture is that truly unambiguous
biosignatures are only detectable for about 1/4 of the Earth's history. The
rest of the time we rely on detectable bioclues that can only establish an
statistical likelihood for the presence of life on a given planet.Comment: To appear in "Handbook of Exoplanets", eds. Deeg, H.J. & Belmonte,
J.A, Springer (2018). arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:astro-ph/0609398 by other author
Evidence for early life in Earthâs oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates
Although it is not known when or where life on Earth began, some of the earliest habitable environments may have been submarine-hydrothermal vents. Here we describe putative fossilized microorganisms that are at least 3,770 million and possibly 4,280 million years old in ferruginous sedimentary rocks, interpreted as seafloor-hydrothermal vent-related precipitates, from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada. These structures occur as micrometre-scale haematite tubes and filaments with morphologies and mineral assemblages similar to those of filamentous microorganisms from modern hydrothermal vent precipitates and analogous microfossils in younger rocks. The Nuvvuagittuq rocks contain isotopically light carbon in carbonate and carbonaceous material, which occurs as graphitic inclusions in diagenetic carbonate rosettes, apatite blades intergrown among carbonate rosettes and magnetiteâhaematite granules, and is associated with carbonate in direct contact with the putative microfossils. Collectively, these observations are consistent with an oxidized biomass and provide evidence for biological activity in submarine-hydrothermal environments more than 3,770 million years ago
Oxygen isotope heterogeneity of the mantle beneath the Canary Islands : insights from olivine phenocrysts
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 162 (2011): 349-363, doi:10.1007/s00410-010-0600-5.A relatively narrow range of oxygen isotopic ratios (ÎŽ18O = 5.05.4â°) is preserved in olivine of mantle xenoliths, mid-ocean ridge (MORB) and most ocean island basalts (OIB). The values in excess of this range are generally attributed either to the presence of a recycled component in the Earthâs mantle or to shallow level contamination processes. A viable way forward to trace source heterogeneity is to find a link between chemical (elemental and isotopic) composition of the earlier crystallized mineral phases (olivine) and the composition of their parental magmas, then using them to reconstruct the composition of source region. The Canary hotspot is one of a few that contains ~1-2 Ga old recycled ocean crust that can be traced to the core-mantle boundary using seismic tomography and whose origin is attributed to the mixing of at least three main isotopically distinct mantle components i.e., HIMU, DMM and EM. This work reports ion microprobe and single crystal laser fluorination oxygen isotope data of 148 olivine grains also analyzed for major and minor elements in the same spot. The olivines are from 20 samples resembling the most primitive shield stage picrite through alkali basalt to basanite series erupted on Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro, Canary Islands, for which shallow level contamination processes were not recognized. A broad range of ÎŽ18Oolivine values from 4.6 to 6.1â° was obtained and explained by stable, long-term oxygen isotope heterogeneity of crystal cumulates present under different volcanoes. These cumulates are thought to have crystallized from mantle derived magmas uncontaminated at crustal depth, representing oxygen isotope heterogeneity of source region. A relationship between NiĂFeO/MgO and ÎŽ18Oolivine values found in one basanitic lava erupted on El Hierro, the westernmost island of the Canary Archipelago, was used to estimate oxygen isotope compositions of partial melts presumably originated from peridotite (HIMU-type component inherited its radiogenic isotope composition from ancient, ~12 Ga, recycled ocean crust) and pyroxenite (young, <1 Ga, recycled oceanic crust preserved as eclogite with depleted MORB-type isotopic signature) components of the Canary plume. The model calculations yield 5.2 and 5.9±0.3â° for peridotite and pyroxenite derived melts, respectively, which appeared to correspond closely to the worldwide HIMU-type OIB and upper limit N-MORB ÎŽ18O values. This difference together with the broad range of ÎŽ18O variations found in the Canarian olivines cannot be explained by thermodynamic effects of oxygen isotopic fractionation and are believed to represent true variations in the mantle, due to oceanic crust and continental lithosphere recycling.This work was supported by the CNRS âposte rougeâ grant to AG, the NSF EAR-CAREER-0844772 grant to IB and the CRPG-CNRS and at its initial stage by the DFG (grant SCHM 250/64) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Wolfgang Paul Award to A.V. Sobolev who provided access to the electron microprobe at the Max Planck Institute, Mainz, Germany)
Inherent bacterial DNA contamination of extraction and sequencing reagents may affect interpretation of microbiota in low bacterial biomass samples
Azospirillum Genomes Reveal Transition of Bacteria from Aquatic to Terrestrial Environments
Fossil records indicate that life appeared in marine environments âŒ3.5 billion years ago (Gyr) and transitioned to terrestrial ecosystems nearly 2.5 Gyr. Sequence analysis suggests that âhydrobacteriaâ and âterrabacteriaâ might have diverged as early as 3 Gyr. Bacteria of the genus Azospirillum are associated with roots of terrestrial plants; however, virtually all their close relatives are aquatic. We obtained genome sequences of two Azospirillum species and analyzed their gene origins. While most Azospirillum house-keeping genes have orthologs in its close aquatic relatives, this lineage has obtained nearly half of its genome from terrestrial organisms. The majority of genes encoding functions critical for association with plants are among horizontally transferred genes. Our results show that transition of some aquatic bacteria to terrestrial habitats occurred much later than the suggested initial divergence of hydro- and terrabacterial clades. The birth of the genus Azospirillum approximately coincided with the emergence of vascular plants on land
Earth: Atmospheric Evolution of a Habitable Planet
Our present-day atmosphere is often used as an analog for potentially
habitable exoplanets, but Earth's atmosphere has changed dramatically
throughout its 4.5 billion year history. For example, molecular oxygen is
abundant in the atmosphere today but was absent on the early Earth. Meanwhile,
the physical and chemical evolution of Earth's atmosphere has also resulted in
major swings in surface temperature, at times resulting in extreme glaciation
or warm greenhouse climates. Despite this dynamic and occasionally dramatic
history, the Earth has been persistently habitable--and, in fact,
inhabited--for roughly 4 billion years. Understanding Earth's momentous changes
and its enduring habitability is essential as a guide to the diversity of
habitable planetary environments that may exist beyond our solar system and for
ultimately recognizing spectroscopic fingerprints of life elsewhere in the
Universe. Here, we review long-term trends in the composition of Earth's
atmosphere as it relates to both planetary habitability and inhabitation. We
focus on gases that may serve as habitability markers (CO2, N2) or
biosignatures (CH4, O2), especially as related to the redox evolution of the
atmosphere and the coupled evolution of Earth's climate system. We emphasize
that in the search for Earth-like planets we must be mindful that the example
provided by the modern atmosphere merely represents a single snapshot of
Earth's long-term evolution. In exploring the many former states of our own
planet, we emphasize Earth's atmospheric evolution during the Archean,
Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic eons, but we conclude with a brief discussion of
potential atmospheric trajectories into the distant future, many millions to
billions of years from now. All of these 'Alternative Earth' scenarios provide
insight to the potential diversity of Earth-like, habitable, and inhabited
worlds.Comment: 34 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Review chapter to appear in Handbook
of Exoplanet
Lunar samples record an impact 4.2 billion years ago that may have formed the Serenitatis Basin
Impact cratering on the Moon and the derived size-frequency distribution functions of lunar impact craters are used to determine the ages of unsampled planetary surfaces across the Solar System. Radiometric dating of lunar samples provides an absolute age baseline, however, crater-chronology functions for the Moon remain poorly constrained for ages beyond 3.9 billion years. Here we present UâPb geochronology of phosphate minerals within shocked lunar norites of a boulder from the Apollo 17 Station 8. These minerals record an older impact event around 4.2 billion years ago, and a younger disturbance at around 0.5 billion years ago. Based on nanoscale observations using atom probe tomography, lunar cratering records, and impact simulations, we ascribe the older event to the formation of the large Serenitatis Basin and the younger possibly to that of the Dawes crater. This suggests the Serenitatis Basin formed unrelated to or in the early stages of a protracted Late Heavy Bombardment
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