Does Yellowstone hold the secrets to life's origins?
Reporting back from a geologist's bucket-list trip, plus other cool geology from the month!
Hello from Austin! If this is your first time reading Unearthed, welcome! Here I write about geological topics and other things of personal interest; if you are looking for oil and gas analytics content head to novilabs.com!
Last week, I had the chance to go on a snowmobiling trip through Yellowstone, a dream trip for any geologist. The lack of crowds gives you space to take in the park’s ethereal winter beauty. In the snow-covered quiet, the dormant supervolcano makes its presence known with heat piercing through ice, steaming geysers, and bubbling mud pools. Geologists treasure it as one of Earth’s most geologically active areas, showcasing changes on a scale perceptible within a human lifetime.1
Why then, in such a geologically youthful setting, do scientists seek clues to life’s most ancient puzzles? The park’s thermal springs and geysers are not just spectacles of heat and steam but sanctuaries for life forms that defy our standard measures of viability. Here thrive the Archaea, a single-celled domain of life whose “extremophile” members flourish in extremes of temperature, acidity, and toxicity—conditions that mirror the early Earth's hostile climes.2
The early earth was one of extremes, hotter than it was today, bombarded by asteroids, and sometimes shrouded in ice sheets. In these environments, archaea persisted over billions of years. Recently, a picture has emerged that the Eukaryotes—including animals—have more in common with archaea than bacteria. These archaea may have been our ancestors, or they share an unknown ancestor, or potentially contributed material through lateral transfer.
Studying the archaea has the potential to illuminate not just the origins of life on this planet but potentially beyond it. Yellowstone’s natural laboratories have been studied by scientists as earthly analogs of iron-rich Mars, or Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Very cool!!
The world’s largest landslide
Heart Mountain looms over Cody, the most common point of entry from the eastern side of Yellowstone. The mountain is the relic of the world’s largest landslide, when a 400 square mile slab of limestone slid down a gentle slope from the west. This article from geology.com has a nice summary of the event, and provided this nice diagram:
If you do go to Cody, please make time to visit the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a great museum featuring a high-quality natural history section, stunning western art, and more.
Satellite image of the week
Frozen Lake Baikal, from the always-excellent Planet Labs newsletter.
Assorted geoengineering news
Stopping global warming by blocking the sun with moon dust? A recent study looks at launching moon dust into a Lagrange point.
Refreezing arctic ice? A British startup is proposing just that, as a way to mitigate climate change.
To me, the obvious cost-benefit answer to climate change is using aerosols for SRM (at least to start), but ideas like refreezing ice may be cracking open the Overton Window a bit for other, more direct solutions.
Is multicellular life older than we thought?
Fascinating new study from rocks in China finding multi-cellular life all the way back 1.6 billion years ago. For context, that is 600 million years older than previously had been thought. Unfortunately we do not have much of a rock record from before that point, thanks to tectonic activity and snowball earth removing a huge portion of the rock record.
In part, this lack of evidence of Earth’s ancient history is why we need to look at modern analogs like Yellowstone. Don’t mistake absence of evidence with evidence of absence!
Seemingly every stop has some version of “this feature emerged after such and such earthquake” or “this Super Gigantic Geyser was named back in the 1800s, when it erupted with 30x the volume that it does today”.
Note that not all Archaea are extremophiles. Amongst the list of extremophile “environments” include extreme cold, heavy metal-poisoned areas, anaerobic or dry environments, even radioactive.