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Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, Nunavik

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A greenstone belt on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec that carries the oldest and most contested claim in the whole record of life. In 2017 a group reported micrometre-scale haematite filaments and tubes in jasper interpreted as chemical precipitates from a seafloor hydrothermal vent, and argued they are the mineralised remains of iron-oxidising bacteria. The belt is at least about 3.77 billion years old on the conservative reading, and possibly as old as roughly 4.28 billion years on a disputed samarium–neodymium interpretation — which would make these the oldest traces of life by a very large margin. Two separate disputes therefore run at once, and they are independent of each other: whether the filaments are biological rather than abiotic mineral growths, and how old the host rocks actually are. The double uncertainty is a good illustration of why the origin of life is bracketed rather than dated.

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Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 14 related

  1. Story
  2. A greenstone belt on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec that carries the oldest and most contested claim in the whole record of life. In 2017 a group reported micrometre-scale haematite filaments and tubes in jasper interpreted as chemical precipitates from a seafloor hydrothermal vent, and argued they are the mineralised remains of iron-oxidising bacteria. The belt is at least about 3.77 billion years old on the conservative reading, and possibly as old as roughly 4.28 billion years on a disputed samarium–neodymium interpretation — which would make these the oldest traces of life by a very large margin. Two separate disputes therefore run at once, and they are independent of each other: whether the filaments are biological rather than abiotic mineral growths, and how old the host rocks actually are. The double uncertainty is a good illustration of why the origin of life is bracketed rather than dated.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, Nunavik
  5. The origin of life
  6. Connections
  7. The origin of life
  8. The origin of life
  9. Haematite filaments are reported from Nuvvuagittuq vent precipitates
  10. Isua supracrustal belt, southwest Greenland
  11. Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, Nunavik
  12. Dresser Formation, North Pole Dome, Pilbara
  13. The Great Oxidation Event
  14. Dresser Formation, North Pole Dome, Pilbara
  15. Isua supracrustal belt, southwest Greenland
  16. Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, Nunavik
  17. LUCA — the last universal common ancestor
  18. Stromatolites
  19. Evidence
  20. Supports the report of haematite filaments in Nuvvuagittuq jasper and the at-least-3.77 Ga and possibly 4.28 Ga age range of the host rocks. Both the biogenicity and the age are disputed in the subsequent literature, which is not cited here. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked. Volume and page range are quoted from standing knowledge and were not re-checked.
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