30
September 2004
Life in the Archaean
Little is known about conditions on the early Earth or about the metabolisms used by the earliest organisms. Recent re-interpretations of some of the Earth's oldest sediments have even cast doubt on the existence of life in the early Archaean, suggesting that hydrothermal processes were responsible for many early carbonaceous and cherty deposits. But now comes new evidence from sediments in the Buck Reef Chert, South Africa that there were microorganisms living as microbial mats in ocean sediments under shallow water 3,416 million years ago. Their restriction to shallow environments suggests that they were photosynthetic, growing only where light penetrated the water column.
Photosynthetic microbial mats in the 3,416-Myr-old
ocean
MICHAEL M. TICE & DONALD R. LOWE
Nature 431, 549–552 (2004); doi:10.1038/nature02888
| First
Paragraph | Full
Text (HTML / PDF) |
Biogeochemistry: Early options in photosynthesis
Nature 431, 522-523 (2004); doi:10.1038/431522b
| Full Text
(HTML / PDF) |
