IIT-Kharagpur digs up signs of life in India from 2.5bn years ago
A team of researchers from IIT Kharagpur has found evidence of life in India dating back at least 2.5 billion years — to the beginning of a time known to scientists as the Great Oxidation Event, which marked the entry of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.
The first signs of life have been found in the form of microbial cells in the Deccan. It took the team four years of arduous work before the microbes were found at a depth of three kilometres. The findings have been published in the December edition of “Scientific Reports: Nature”, an online, open-access journal from the publishers of the prestigious scientific journal “Nature”.
The news has stunned the ministry of earth sciences, which had asked the IIT team — led by Pinaki Sar of the faculty of biotechnology — to probe the beginning of life in India. An official announcement is expected shortly. Sar said these microorganisms, mostly bacteria, date back to a time when Earth’s crust was still unstable and earthquakes, punctuated with volcanic eruptions, were routine. Between 2.5 billion years and 65 million years ago, the crust would intermittently cool.
These cool interludes were the time when the first life forms, in the form of microbes, started making their appearances. The Deccan Traps, where the country’s oldest rocks (granites and basalt), are located, were home to these first life forms.
The search started in 2014, when the ministry asked the IIT biotechnologists to join a team of geologists at Koyna in Maharashtra, where a devastating earthquake had occurred in 1964. Sar said the next phase will focus on whether the organisms are alive. “We cannot immediately confirm that,” he said, calling the microbes “extremophiles” as they survived extreme conditions.
 |
| IIT researchers test rocks for signs of microbes |
A team of researchers from IIT Kharagpur has found evidence of life in India dating back at least 2.5 billion years — to the beginning of a time known to scientists as the Great Oxidation Event, which marked the entry of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.
The first signs of life have been found in the form of microbial cells in the Deccan. It took the team four years of arduous work before the microbes were found at a depth of three kilometres. The findings have been published in the December edition of “Scientific Reports: Nature”, an online, open-access journal from the publishers of the prestigious scientific journal “Nature”.
The news has stunned the ministry of earth sciences, which had asked the IIT team — led by Pinaki Sar of the faculty of biotechnology — to probe the beginning of life in India. An official announcement is expected shortly. Sar said these microorganisms, mostly bacteria, date back to a time when Earth’s crust was still unstable and earthquakes, punctuated with volcanic eruptions, were routine. Between 2.5 billion years and 65 million years ago, the crust would intermittently cool.
These cool interludes were the time when the first life forms, in the form of microbes, started making their appearances. The Deccan Traps, where the country’s oldest rocks (granites and basalt), are located, were home to these first life forms.
The search started in 2014, when the ministry asked the IIT biotechnologists to join a team of geologists at Koyna in Maharashtra, where a devastating earthquake had occurred in 1964. Sar said the next phase will focus on whether the organisms are alive. “We cannot immediately confirm that,” he said, calling the microbes “extremophiles” as they survived extreme conditions.
No comments:
Post a Comment