Looking for life in rocks

BY WENDY BIRD

Scientists and students who were hand-selected from learning institutions around the world took part in a workshop in Sudbury last week to talk about the possibility of finding life on other planets. The workshop was titled Biosignatures in Ancient Rocks and was held at the Willet Green Miller Centre, on the Laurentian University campus.

The workshop was sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Agouron Institute, the Ontario Geological Survey, Laurentian University and the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation.

“The idea is to promote research aimed at understanding the evolution of life on early earth,” said Professor Hirochi Ohmoto, director of the Pennsylvania State Astrobiology Research Centre at Penn State University.

“Most of the previous work has been done in Australia and South Africa on rocks ranging in age from about 2.5 billion to 3.5 billion years old. (The Greater Sudbury area) is very suitable for research because the mining activities produce deep drill cores which are very useful in research.”

About 55 participants from around the world, including Japan, Australia, England, Denmark, as well as the USA and Canada, took part in the workshop. Among the attendees were 16 leading astrobiology scientists.

Participants shared significant amounts of research concerning the study of ancient rocks in Ontario, including how such studies are relevant to NASA’s search for life in the universe. They also went on field trips throughout the Greater Sudbury area.

“They looked at the Sudbury structures with an interest in what niches for life might have existed after the (meteor) impact. The reason for that is, the much older surface (four billion years ago) would have looked very much like what Sudbury would have looked just after the impact,” said Dr. Balz Kamber, Canada Research chair in Precambrian Geology at Laurentian University and one of the leading lecturers at the workshop.

“The participants will be going on an almost 10-day field trip to Temagami, Timmins, Wawa, all along the north shore of Lake Superior and then up beyond Thunder Bay, looking at all the ancient surface rocks that are exposed in Ontario and that provide opportunities to understand how life evolved and developed on earth.”

NASA has organized comparable workshops in Greenland, South Africa and Australia.

The rocks in Northern Ontario differ from the rocks in those other areas because they were possibly deposited in deeper water.

“So the key interest here is in the deep water rocks that are suspected to exist in Ontario,” Kamber said.

He added that the field trips would not be possible without the Ontario Geological Survey and its resident geologists who led them.

“All of this starts really in the field with collecting the best possible samples.”

Another goal of the workshop was to encourage dialog and information sharing between two very different generations of astrobiologists.

“This field is made up of younger people and older people, with very few people in the middle. Astrobiology is a young field that is filled with young students and ‘convert geologists,’ those who were already well into their careers and they converted into this field,” said Kamber.

Ohmoto said that education of young scientists is an important part of the workshop, especially for young active researchers and graduate students.

One of the workshop’s “old-timers,” Hans Hofmann, an adjunct professor from Montreal’s McGill University, recalled that close to 50 years ago there were “very few people in the field.” He noted that astrobiology is a more modern term for pre-cambrian paleontology.

Scientists work with very different tools to study the rocks, such as chemistry, morphology, sophisticated imaging techniques, laboratory experiments, computer simulations, and biochemistry.