Anbar on quest for ancient, remote life

Anbar

A riel Anbar, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, has been awarded a total of more than $800,000 over five years from NASA and the National Science Foundation to search for evidence of life in far-off places. Anbar will be developing new techniques to analyze rocks and see what they reveal about life and the environment on ancient and remote spots on Earth as well as other parts of the solar system.

"I've always been interested in using the tools of science to address the big questions, like what is the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe? It's only in the last 30 years or so that technology and our understanding have become sophisticated enough that we can approach this question from many scientific angles," Anbar stated.

Anbar is currently involved in two five-year NASA projects, one run by colleagues at Harvard University and the other managed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He's also part of a three-year study managed by NSF's Life in Extreme Environments program. Anbar will use the funds to support graduate students and run experiments in his laboratory, which is designed to ferret out the tiniest amounts of select substances.

As part of the projects, Anbar and colleagues will examine ancient and remote rocks for traces of past life. They're developing new ways to look at metals like iron, copper, and molybdenum, analyzing what the ratios of the different chemical forms of these elements reveal about life deep under the sea or elsewhere in the solar system. Anbar notes that this is the first study of the possibility that metals in rocks might also hold clues about ancient biological processes.

The research will rely on scientists' ability to sort out atoms whose masses differ by the scant weight of a few subatomic particles. They'll use Anbar's new mass spectrometer facility, which includes an MC-ICP-MS (multiple collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer), a device that can detect a single metal atom hidden among more than a million atoms of other substances. It's one of only five such machines at American universities.