Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Home On the southwestern coast of Greenland rest the oldest greenstone rocks
known, which not only contain clues to conditions on the callow Earth, they
Sci-Tech have already yielded compelling evidence that life existed over 3.8 billion
Medical
years ago. Douglas Page profiles this prime deposit - which until recently
had attracted surprisingly little research.
Features
by Douglas Page © 2000
Profiles
Marriage Peril In the late 1960s an airborne geophysical investigation of an area in west
central Greenland conducted by a mining company detected a major magnetic
Bio anomaly. Subsequent investigation revealed a large iron ore deposit, which
later proved to be part of the oldest supracrustal rocks (sediments and
volcanics deposited at the surface) on Earth.
This rare outcrop of ancient rock, called the Isua Greenstone Belt (IGB),
which somehow survived almost unscathed for as long as 3.8 billion years,
offers a tantalizing view of conditions on Earth merely 750 million years
after its formation.
There are older rocks elsewhere, but these older rocks were formed deep in
the Earth's crust and cannot give any information as to the surface
conditions of the early Earth. The Isua rocks, however, were formed at the
surface of the earliest Earth and may thus provide a wealth of information
on the surface of the Earth and the environment where life might have
started.
The IGB was mapped in some detail by members of the GEUS during the 1970s
and early 1980s, culminating in production of a geological map in 1986 by
Allen Nutman (Bull. Grønlands geol. Unders. No. 154).
During these years, various small groups financed by GEUS and an assortment
The Isua Rocks
"Of great relevance to all this was Vic McGregor's discovery in the early
1970s of locally abundant, small (meter-sized) enclaves of supracrustal
lithologies in the Amîtsoq gneisses of the Nuuk region," Appel says. "He
called these the 'Akilia suite', published a description in 1977, and
suggested that they were broadly equivalent in age to the IGB some 150 km
to the Northeast."
Research Void
Still, very little systematic field work has been done within the IGB to
delineate localized regions of relatively low strain (i.e. deformation) and/
or relatively low metamorphic temperatures in an attempt to look back in
more detail at the original nature of the rocks, which is especially
relevant in the search for biogenic (fossil) remnants, Appel says.
The IMRP, which began in March, 1998, will end early in 2001. Each summer,
between mid-June to mid-August, Appel and co-organizer Stephen Moorbath of
Oxford University assemble their team from 21 research institutions at base
camp near the gnarled nest of Archaean rocks, to be dispatched inland by
helicopter and along the coast by boat to coax their clues from the ancient
gneiss terranes.
Earth as Incubator
"We know very little about the earliest surface of Earth, or the
environments in which life may have arisen," says Christopher M. Fedo,
assistant professor of geology at George Washington University, whose work
focuses on Isua's sedimentary layers.
both planets.
Indeed, the age of the Isua rocks seems to coincide generally with a cosmic
volley of the inner solar system called the Late Heavy Bombardment. Such
timing is critical for discussions dealing with the origins of life, no
matter where life may have first formed.
"Recent age estimates for the termination of late major impact bombardment
of the lunar surface - based on returned lunar sample age data - cluster
around 3.80-3.83 Ga," says Appel. On the widely accepted assumption that
the terrestrial surface shared this pelting, it appears that the deposition
of the IGB post-dated the termination of the impact event by only some 30-
60 Ma, although no unambiguous evidence for impact has been found in the
IGB. Since the depositional age is not well known, there is even the
possibility the Isua rocks overlapped the Late Heavy Bombardment.
Very large impactors would have the capacity to boil off the oceans and
sterilize life, Fedo says, leading some scientists to believe that life may
have had more than one origination, because even if life appeared much
earlier, it may not have survived the assault.
Isotropic Clues
Significantly, the rocks at Isua and at the nearby Akilia Island contain
isotopic evidence implying that life not only existed by the time the rocks
were deposited, it had already evolved the capacity to photosynthesize.
Evidence for life at this time comes from carbon-isotope data taken from
tiny grains of carbon found in minute graphite inclusions in a rock
formation discovered on Akilia Island, It may be as old as 3.85 Ga, as
reported in a Nature cover story (Mojzsis et al, Nature 384, 1996).
The carbon inclusions in the rock were analyzed at UCLA using a unique high-
resolution ion microprobe, an instrument that enables scientists to
discover the exact composition of samples. No other instrument is sensitive
enough to reveal precisely the isotopic composition of these carbon
inclusions. The microprobe shoots a beam of ions (charged atoms) at a
specific area of the sample, releasing ions from the sample that are then
analyzed by a mass spectrometer.
The carbon aggregates in the rock have a ratio of about 100 to one of 12C
(the most common isotope form of carbon, containing six protons and six
neutrons) to 13C (a rarer isotopic form of carbon, containing six protons
and seven neutrons). Since living organisms preferentially use the lighter
carbon-12, rather than the heavier carbon-13, a lump of carbon that has
been processed by a living organism has more carbon-12 atoms than one found
elsewhere in nature.
"It's very difficult to find any other process that efficiently sorts these
two isotopes of carbon that way," says Marcia Bjornerud, chair of the
Lawrence University geology department. "People have done all kinds of
geochemical modeling trying to figure out whether it would be possible
simply through metamorphism, ground water flow, or other processes to end
up with 12C-13C ratios that are as high as those seen in these graphite
grains. So far, no one has been able to come up with anything other than
the process of photosynthesis as the sorting mechanism for these carbon
isotopes."
It had been thought that the Earth was uninhabitable for perhaps a billion
years, but it now seems safe to assume that the Earth spawned life almost
as soon as the Earth itself was born.
Much work in the form of biogenic remnant searches by field geologists and
microscopists is needed to support these interpretations.
Geology of Isua
In his years scrambling over the desolate shields of Earth's old bones,
Appel and especially IMRP member John Myers, professor at Memorial
University St Johns Newfoundland, have found the IGB comprises a large
number of different rock types, mainly of volcanic, volcaniclastic, and
chemical origin.
McGregor and Moorbath visited the area together in 1971 and immediately
realized from field evidence that the supracrustal belt was older than the
The Isua Rocks
surrounding granitoid gneisses, and that both units were cut by a major
metadolerite dyke swarm, Appel says. They postulated that the gneisses
might be equivalent in age to the so-called Amîtsoq gneisses near Nuuk 150
km to the southwest, which had already been mapped by McGregor in the late
1960's.
They also postulated that the metadolerite dyke swarm might be equivalent
to the Ameralik dyke swarm in the Nuuk region. At that time (1971),
preliminary age measurements (Moorbath et al. 1971: Earth Planet. Sci.
Lett. 12, 245-249) had begun to show that the Amîtsoq gneisses in the Nuuk
region were around 3600-3700 Ma, the oldest known rocks on Earth at that
time. If the gneisses in the Nuuk and Isua regions were indeed equivalent
in age, then the IGB would not only be older, but represent the oldest
known supracrustal rocks on Earth.
Specifically, he has been working on a rock unit that has variously been
interpreted as either a boulder-rich sedimentary rock or a rock made by
deformational forces.
"I have concluded that the unit is in fact a sedimentary rock, in spite of
its deformational history," he says. "The fact this turns out to be such a
coarse-grained sedimentary rock has specific implications, such as
exposure, erosion, and transport. These features demand that liquid water
be present."
While Isua includes mainly volcanic rocks, such as pillow basalts, and some
sedimentary rocks, it also contains banded iron formations. As the name
suggests, these are iron-rich rocks, consisting of magnetite and hematite.
"They no longer form on the Earth today," says Bjornerud. "They are
believed to have precipitated out of seawater at a time when there was a
lot of iron dissolved in the oceans."
"The fact that in these ancient Isua rocks there are chemically
The Isua Rocks
precipitated iron sediments means that the atmosphere must have been
basically reducing, so that iron could be in solution in the water,"
Bjornerud says. "That is one of the clues to the atmospheric story, that
these rocks were deposited at a time when Earth's atmosphere had very low
oxygen content."
SUGGESTED READING
Mojzsis, S.J. and Harrison, T. M., "Vestiges of the beginning: Clues to the
emergent biosphere recorded in the oldest known sedimentary rocks", GSA
Today (newsletter of the Geological Society of America), 10, 1-6 (2000).
-end-