Add your Article
- E Learning Jamaica
- Results of GSAT are in schools this week
- 2014 GSAT Results for Jamaican Kids
- E Learning in Jamaica WIN PRIZES and try our Fun Animated Games
- Finding the Past
- Stone Tablet May Solve Maya Mystery
- Digging Up Stone Age Art
- Big Woman of the Distant Past
- GSAT Exam Preparation Jamaica
- March 21-22, 2013: Over 43,000 students will take the GSAT Exam
- GSAT Exam Preparation
- How are students placed after passing the GSAT exam
- GSAT Exams Jamaica Scholarships
- 42,000 students will sit for the GSAT Exam in two weeks
- GSAT stars reap scholarship glory
- GSAT Scholarship
- Parents
- Children and Media
- Raise a Lifelong Reader by Reading Aloud
- What Not to Say to Emerging Readers
Hints of Life in Ancient Lava
Published: 07/02/2010
When you hear the word "lava," your first thought might be of volcanoes violently spewing molten rock. Lava is full of surprises, though. Scientists now say they have found old lava that contains some of the earliest traces of life on Earth. Researchers from Norway and Canada dug lava samples out of rocks in South Africa. The samples are between 3.48 and 3.22 billion years old. Back then, oceans covered the areas where the samples were obtained. The lava probably oozed out onto the ocean floor when two plates of Earth's crust moved apart. When that happens, water quickly cools and hardens the ooze into rounded formations called pillow lava. Marine microorganisms soon settle in, feeding off of chemical energy in the lava. One sign that tiny critters may have lived in the South African samples showed up under the microscope. In the outermost centimeter of lava, the researchers saw tiny tubular structures amazingly similar to those formed by microbes today. X-ray analysis of different types of carbon atoms inside the tubes also suggested the long-ago presence of life. It's exciting to find that signs of microbe life on the ocean floor could have survived for billions of years, scientists say. Incredibly, ancient life may have left trails for us to track.—E. Sohn
Hints of Life in Ancient Lava
