Astrobiologist journeys to 'Early Earth'

Ariel Anbar (right) and graduate student Gail Arnold (file photo)

n what seems a cross between Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, University researchers are burrowing deep underground into the most ancient regions of the globe to find the lost world where life began. The endeavor, called "The Mission to Early Earth," is part of the NASA astrobiology program.

"If we're going to look for evidence of life on Mars or beyond, then we have to know what we're looking for," says Ariel Anbar, professor of earth and environmental science. "There is so much we don't know about the origin and early evolution of life. If you want to understand the probability of life being elsewhere, what that life might be like, and what the course of evolution might be, then you should be studying the only planet known to harbor life and the history of that planet."

A member of one of NASA's astrobiology teams and a geoscientist, Anbar says the greatest hurdle in trying to form a picture of what the world was like when life first formed is the scarcity of study samples. "We don't have a time machine, so we're stuck with old rocks. But there aren't very many places you can find rocks billions of years old that haven't been ruined by exposure, so we're going to go subsurface."

To do so, Anbar and his team traveled to Australia on an exploratory mission to scout sites in parts of the Earth's crust that date to nearly 2.5 billion years old--more than halfway back to the Earth's birth--a time when the only life on the planet was bacteria. Such ancient specimens can speak volumes about the organisms that produced them and should shed light on the course that evolution took in life's infancy.

"The odds are that we'll come across some surprises," says Anbar. "Maybe we'll learn that life was almost inevitable, a kind of by-product of our Earth's formation. Or maybe we'll learn that we're more rare and special than we ever imagined."

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