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Structures at Isua are reported as 3.7 Ga stromatolites

2016 · Outcome not established · culture

The record names something that was due, and its outcome was not established. Watch will not call that a change. The word the source used for it is uncertain.

Nutman and colleagues described centimetre-scale conical laminated structures in 3,700 million-year-old dolomitic rocks at Isua, exposed by unusually extensive snow-melt, and interpreted them as stromatolites — which would make them by a wide margin the oldest morphological evidence of life. The claim attracted immediate attention precisely because it was morphological: unlike the isotope evidence from the same belt it offered something visible. It also carried an obvious hazard, since the Isua rocks have been metamorphosed and deformed, and deformation can generate structures that mimic layering.

Source

Nature · Nutman, A. P., Bennett, V. C., Friend, C. R. L., Van Kranendonk, M. J. and Chivas, A. R., Nature, vol. 537 (2016), pp. 535–538

Standing

This record: partially verified · publisher: partially verified

How it arrived

Editorial — A dated record from the Richseen Atlas editorial corpus, written and cited by a curator. Not captured from anywhere, and not live.

Where

At a canonical Atlas object, placed and checked by a curator.

Subject

Isua supracrustal belt, southwest Greenland · PHENOMENON_STROMATOLITE