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Inside rocks, implications for finding life on Mars

"I have wanted to do this for 40 years, but there wasn't any way to do so before," said Schopf, the first scientist to use confocal microscopy to study fossils embedded in such ancient rocks. He is director of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life.

Raman spectroscopy, a technique used primarily by chemists, allows you to see the molecular and chemical structure of ancient microorganisms in three dimensions, revealing what the fossils are made of without destroying the samples. Raman spectroscopy can help prove whether fossils are biological, Schopf said. This technique involves a laser from a microscope focused on a sample; most of the laser light is scattered, but a small part gets absorbed by the fossil.

Schopf is the first scientist to use this technique to analyze ancient microscopic fossils. He discovered that the composition of the fossils changed; nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur were removed, leaving carbon and hydrogen.

Confocal microscopy uses a focused laser beam to make the organic walls of the fossils fluoresce, allowing them to be viewed in three dimensions. The technique, first used by biologists to study the inner workings of living cells, is new to geology.

The ancient microorganisms are "pond scum," among the earliest life, much too small to be seen with the naked eye.

Schopf's UCLA co-authors include geology graduate students Abhishek Tripathi and Andrew Czaja, and senior scientist Anatoliy Kudryavtsev. The research is funded by NASA.

Schopf is editor of "Earth's Earliest Biosphere" and "The Proterozoic Biosphere: A Multidisciplinary Study," companion books that provide the most comprehensive knowledge of more than 4 billion years of the earth's history, from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago to events half a billion years ago.


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Source:University of California - Los Angeles


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