New method also detects molecular signs of photosynthesis almost 1 billion years earlier than previously documented; Combining chemistry and AI, pioneering method could revolutionize search for extraterrestrial life

Pairing cutting-edge chemistry with artificial intelligence, a multidisciplinary team of scientists today published fresh chemical evidence of Earth’s earliest life – concealed in 3.3-billion-year-old rocks – and molecular evidence that oxygen-producing photosynthesis was occurring over 800 million years earlier than previously documented.

In a groundbreaking study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science and several partner universities and institutions analyzed over 400 samples, including ancient sediments, fossils, modern plants and animals, and even meteorites, to see if life’s signature still exists in rocks long after the original biomolecules are gone.

Using high-tech chemical analysis to break down both organic and inorganic materials, Michael L. Wong, Anirudh Prabhu, and colleagues trained AI to recognize chemical ‘fingerprints’ left behind by life – signals that can still be detected even after billions of years of geological wear and tear.

The results prove the possibility of distinguishing materials of biological origin (like microbes, plants and animals) from materials of non-living origin (like meteoritic or synthetic carbon) with over 90% accuracy. 

Impressively, these methods teased out chemical patterns unique to biology in rocks as old as 3.3 billion years.  Previously, no such traces had been found in rocks older than about 1.7 billion years.  The results, therefore, roughly double the window of time in which organic molecules preserved in rocks can reveal useful information about the physiology and evolutionary relationships of their original organisms.

The work also provides molecular evidence that oxygen-producing photosynthesis (the process used by plants, algae and many microorganisms to harness sunlight) was at work at least 2.5 billion years ago. This finding extends the chemical record of photosynthesis preserved in carbon molecules by over 800 million years.

Besides helping find evidence of Earth’s earliest life, this work advances a potential way to identify traces of life beyond our planet.

Life’s evidence in ancient cells battered to near obliteration

Earth’s earliest life left behind little in the way of molecular traces. The few fragile remnants such as ancient cells and microbial mats were buried, crushed, heated, and fractured within Earth’s restless crust before being thrust back to the surface. These transformations all but obliterated biosignatures holding vital clues to the origins and early evolution of life.

Paleobiologists who search for signs of Earth’s most ancient life have long relied mainly on fossil organisms, including microscopic fossils of single cells and filaments, and the mineralized remains of cellular structures such as microbial mats and mound-like stromatolites, which provide convincing evidence of life as far back as 3.5 billion years ago. However, such remains are few and far between. 

A second line of evidence relies on the preservation of diagnostic biomolecules in ancient rocks. Life’s hardiest organic molecules – those derived from cell membranes or some metabolic processes – have been found in sediments as old as 1.7 billion years, while much older carbon-rich rocks preserve isotopic signatures that hint at a vibrant biosphere 3.5 billion years ago.

However, most ancient rocks preserve neither fossil cells nor any surviving biomolecules. The vast majority of ancient carbon-bearing sediments have been heated and altered in ways that break every diagnostic biomolecule into countless small fragments. Those fragments have proven too small and too generic to provide any clues about ancient life – until now.

The new work is based on the hypothesis that life’s molecules are rigorously selected for their biological functions (in keeping with a new law of nature proposed in 2023). Unlike the random distribution of molecules found in carbon-rich meteorites and other abiotic organic mixtures, life makes a few kinds of molecules in high abundance. Each chemical in a living cell has its own function. The new work suggests that the distribution of biomolecular fragments found in old rocks still preserves diagnostic information about the biosphere, even if no original biomolecules remain. 

Indeed, this new research shows that life left behind more than anyone ever realized — faint chemical “whispers” locked deep inside ancient rocks. 

The 406 measured samples came from seven major groups:

• Modern animals: vertebrates (e.g. fish) and invertebrates (e.g. insects).
• Modern plants: including both their photosynthetic parts (e.g. leaves) and non-photosynthetic parts (e.g. roots and sap).
• Fungi: including mushrooms and yeast.
• Fossil materials: e.g. coal, ancient wood, and shale rich in preserved algae.
• Meteorites: carbon-rich space rocks that could resemble prebiotic material.
• Synthetic organic materials: made in labs to simulate early-Earth chemistry.
• Ancient sediments: ranging from hundreds of millions to over 3 billion years old, with uncertain origins.

The team used pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS) to release trapped chemical fragments from each sample. They then used a specific type of machine learning model called “random forest,” which builds hundreds of decision trees to classify data and to extract latent ecological and taxonomic patterns. This is the first study to combine Py-GC-MS data with supervised machine learning to identify biosignatures in multi-billion-year old rocks.

Says team member Dr. Robert Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science: “Think of it like showing thousands of jigsaw puzzle pieces to a computer and asking whether the original scene was a flower or a meteorite.”

“Rather than focus on individual molecules, we looked for chemical patterns, and those patterns could be true elsewhere in the universe,” Dr. Hazen added. 

“Our results show that ancient life leaves behind more than fossils; it leaves chemical ‘echoes.’ Using machine learning, we can now reliably interpret these echoes for the first time.”

The paper concludes: “Information-rich attributes of ancient organic matter, even though highly degraded and with few if any surviving biomolecules, have much to reveal about the nature and evolution of life.”

A pioneering model

The model’s performance was tested in three main ways:

1. Modern living animals and plants vs non-life samples

Could the model distinguish life-based organic matter from non-living origins (like meteorites or synthetic chemistry)?

• Yes, with up to 98% accuracy on known samples.
• When applied to ancient rock samples, the model found strong evidence for life in multiple 3.3-billion-year-old formations.

2. Photosynthetic vs Non-photosynthetic

Could the model detect signs that an organism once used sunlight for energy?

• Yes, with 93% accuracy.
• The method identified photosynthetic signatures in rocks as old as 2.52 billion years.

3. Plant vs Animal

Could it distinguish plant-based life from animal-based life?

• Yes again, with 95% correct classification in modern samples.
• This type of classification is harder in ancient rocks due to the scarcity of animal fossils in the model’s training set. This is a point of improvement for future work.

Seeing through the fog of time

One key insight was that age makes detection harder. Younger samples from the last 500 million years retained strong biotic signals. For rocks 500 million to 2.5 billion years old, about two-thirds still showed life signatures. But in rocks older than 2.5 billion years, just 47% retained detectable evidence of life.

For each sample, the model didn’t just report “life” or “non-life,” it gave a probability score. If a sample scored above 60% for “biotic,” it was considered a strong hit.

This probability-based approach allows for nuance. For example, a coal sample that had been heated to over 400°C might have lost most of its biological markers and landed in the “uncertain” range. But well-preserved ancient samples—especially those that hadn’t been exposed to intense heat or pressure—still scored confidently in the “biotic” zone.

The authors were also careful not to claim a sample was biotic unless it truly stood apart from abiotic materials, reducing the risk of false positives.

Among the ancient samples that stood out as clear positives:

• Biotic material in 3.33-billion-year-old sediments from e.g. South Africa’s Josefsdal Chert
• Photosynthetic life in 2.52-billion-year-old rocks from e.g. South Africa’s Gamohaan Formation

Why this matters for science, and space exploration

The results suggest that machine learning applied to degraded organic matter can help resolve long-standing debates about the evolution of life on Earth in deep time.

This method could also assist in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.  If AI can detect biotic “fingerprints” on Earth that survived billions of years, the same technique might work on Martian rocks or even samples from Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

The authors are careful not to overstate their conclusions. They acknowledge:

• The need for larger, more balanced sample sets, especially more fossil animals and diverse abiotic materials
• Some samples still fall into a gray zone, with mid-range probability scores that don’t allow firm conclusions.
• The method is complementary, not a replacement, for traditional techniques like isotope analysis or fossil morphology.

The team plans to refine their models, explore different types of machine learning, and test their approach on rocks from Earth’s Mars-like deserts.

“This study represents a major leap forward in our ability to decode Earth’s oldest biological signatures,” says Dr. Hazen. “By pairing powerful chemical analysis with machine learning, we have a way to read molecular ‘ghosts’ left behind by early life that still whisper their secrets after billions of years. Earth’s oldest rocks have stories to tell and we’re just beginning to hear them.”

Adds Dr. Wong: “Understanding when photosynthesis emerged helps explain how Earth’s atmosphere became oxygen-rich, a key milestone that allowed complex life, including humans, to evolve.”

“This represents an inspiring example of how modern technology can shine a light on the planet’s most ancient stories and could reshape how we search for ancient life on Earth and other worlds. In future, we plan to test materials like anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria — possible analogs for extraterrestrial organisms. This is a powerful new tool for astrobiology.”

Says co-first author Dr. Anirudh Prabhu of Carnegie Science: “These samples and the spectral signatures they produce have been studied for decades, but AI offers a powerful new lens that allows us to extract critical information and better understand their nature. Even when degradation makes it difficult to spot signs of life, our machine learning models can still detect the subtle traces left behind by ancient biological processes.”

“What’s exciting is that this approach doesn’t rely on finding recognizable fossils or intact biomolecules. AI didn’t just help us analyze data faster, it allowed us to make sense of messy, degraded chemical data. It opens the door to exploring ancient and alien environments with a fresh lens, guided by patterns we might not even know to look for ourselves.”

********

Further comments

“For decades, we’ve searched ancient rocks for traces of life using a limited set of tools. What’s remarkable about this study is that it adds whole new dimensions – not just better instruments, but better questions. Machine learning helps us uncover biological signals that were effectively invisible before. It’s a leap forward in our ability to read the deep-time record of life on Earth.”

Co-author and paleobiologist Andrew H. Knoll, Harvard University

“For decades, organic geochemists have been examining the rock record looking for the diagnostic molecules that could tell us something about the nature of life at that time. These new techniques allow the data to speak for themselves in new ways, and for scientists to find new patterns faster than ever before.”

Co-author H. James Cleaves II, Howard University, Washington DC 

* * * * *

Fact box

• Technique used: Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (Py-GC-MS)
• Samples analyzed: Over 400 (modern, fossil, meteorite, and synthetic)
• Machine learning success rates:
  • 98% accuracy distinguishing modern life from non-life
  • 95% accuracy distinguishing plants from animals
  • 93% accuracy distinguishing photosynthetic organisms
     
• Oldest signs detected:
  • Life: 3.33 billion-year-old rocks (Josefsdal Chert, South Africa)
  • Photosynthesis: 2.5 billion-year-old rocks (Gamohaan Formation, South Africa)
     
• Potential future applications:
  • Searching for life on Mars, Europa, or other worlds
  • Improving understanding of early Earth ecosystems

********

The full dataset and code are publicly available through the Open Science Framework and github, inviting further research and exploration into ancient biosignatures. Open data repository: 10.17605/OSF.IO/G93CS; Github: https://github.com/PrabhuLab/PyGCMS-Biosign-ML 

News release in full: click here

Coverage highlights

Evolution of plants, animals: “A very special case within a far larger natural phenomenon.” Similar marvels occur with stars, planets, minerals, other complex systems; When a novel configuration works well and function improves, evolution occurs

A paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today describes “a missing law of nature,” recognizing for the first time an important norm within the natural world’s workings.  

In essence, the new law states that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity, and complexity. In other words, evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems, from planets and stars to atoms, minerals, and more.

Authored by a nine-member team — leading scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Cornell University, and philosophers from the University of Colorado — the work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

“Macroscopic” laws of nature describe and explain phenomena experienced daily in the natural world. Natural laws related to forces and motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and energy, for example, were described more than 150 years ago. 

The new work presents a modern addition — a macroscopic law recognizing evolution as a common feature of the natural world’s complex systems, which are characterised as follows:

• They are formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells, that can be arranged and rearranged repeatedly
• Are subject to natural processes that cause countless different arrangements to be formed
• Only a small fraction of all these configurations survive in a process called “selection for function.”   

Regardless of whether the system is living or nonliving, when a novel configuration works well and function improves, evolution occurs. 

The authors’ “Law of Increasing Functional Information” states that the system will evolve “if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.”

“An important component of this proposed natural law is the idea of ‘selection for function,’” says Carnegie astrobiologist Dr. Michael L. Wong, first author of the study.

In the case of biology, Darwin equated function primarily with survival—the ability to live long enough to produce fertile offspring. 

The new study expands that perspective, noting that at least three kinds of function occur in nature. 

The most basic function is stability – stable arrangements of atoms or molecules are selected to continue. Also chosen to persist are dynamic systems with ongoing supplies of energy. 

The third and most interesting function is “novelty”—the tendency of evolving systems to explore new configurations that sometimes lead to startling new behaviors or characteristics. 

Life’s evolutionary history is rich with novelties—photosynthesis evolved when single cells learned to harness light energy, multicellular life evolved when cells learned to cooperate, and species evolved thanks to advantageous new behaviors such as swimming, walking, flying, and thinking. 

The same sort of evolution happens in the mineral kingdom. The earliest minerals represent particularly stable arrangements of atoms. Those primordial minerals provided foundations for the next generations of minerals, which participated in life’s origins. The evolution of life and minerals are intertwined, as life uses minerals for shells, teeth, and bones.

Indeed, Earth’s minerals, which began with about 20 at the dawn of our Solar System, now number almost 6,000 known today thanks to ever more complex physical, chemical, and ultimately biological processes over 4.5 billion years. 

In the case of stars, the paper notes that just two major elements – hydrogen and helium – formed the first stars shortly after the big bang. Those earliest stars used hydrogen and helium to make about 20 heavier chemical elements. And the next generation of stars built on that diversity to produce almost 100 more elements.

“Charles Darwin eloquently articulated the way plants and animals evolve by natural selection, with many variations and traits of individuals and many different configurations,” says co-author Robert M. Hazen of Carnegie Science, a leader of the research.

“We contend that Darwinian theory is just a very special, very important case within a far larger natural phenomenon. The notion that selection for function drives evolution applies equally to stars, atoms, minerals, and many other conceptually equivalent situations where many configurations are subjected to selective pressure.”

The co-authors themselves represent a unique multi-disciplinary configuration: three philosophers of science, two astrobiologists, a data scientist, a mineralogist, and a theoretical physicist.

Says Dr. Wong: “In this new paper, we consider evolution in the broadest sense—change over time—which subsumes Darwinian evolution based upon the particulars of ‘descent with modification.’”  

“The universe generates novel combinations of atoms, molecules, cells, etc. Those combinations that are stable and can go on to engender even more novelty will continue to evolve. This is what makes life the most striking example of evolution, but evolution is everywhere.”

Among many implications, the paper offers: 

1. Understanding into how differing systems possess varying degrees to which they can continue to evolve. “Potential complexity” or “future complexity” have been proposed as metrics of how much more complex an evolving system might become
2. Insights into how the rate of evolution of some systems can be influenced artificially. The notion of functional information suggests that the rate of evolution in a system might be increased in at least three ways: (1) by increasing the number and/or diversity of interacting agents, (2) by increasing the number of different configurations of the system; and/or 3) by enhancing the selective pressure on the system (for example, in chemical systems by more frequent cycles of heating/cooling or wetting/drying).
3. A deeper understanding of generative forces behind the creation and existence of complex phenomena in the universe, and the role of information in describing them
4. An understanding of life in the context of other complex evolving systems. Life shares certain conceptual equivalencies with other complex evolving systems, but the authors point to a future research direction, asking if there is something distinct about how life processes information on functionality (see also https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2022.0810).
5. Aiding the search for life elsewhere: if there is a demarcation between life and non-life that has to do with selection for function, can we identify the “rules of life” that allow us to discriminate that biotic dividing line in astrobiological investigations? (See also https://conta.cc/3LwLRYS, “Did Life Exist on Mars? Other Planets? With AI’s Help, We May Know Soon”)
6. At a time when evolving AI systems are an increasing concern, a predictive law of information that characterizes how both natural and symbolic systems evolve is especially welcome

Laws of nature – motion, gravity, electromagnetism, thermodynamics – etc. codify the general behavior of various macroscopic natural systems across space and time. 

The “law of increasing functional information” published today complements the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy (disorder) of an isolated system increases over time (and heat always flows from hotter to colder objects).

* * * * *

Comments

“This is a superb, bold, broad, and transformational article.  …  The authors are approaching the fundamental issue of the increase in complexity of the evolving universe. The purpose is a search for a ‘missing law’ that is consistent with the known laws.

“At this stage of the development of these ideas, rather like the early concepts in the mid-19th century of coming to understand ‘energy’ and ‘entropy,’ open broad discussion is now essential.”

Stuart Kauffman, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle WA

“The study of Wong et al. is like a breeze of fresh air blowing over the difficult terrain at the trijunction of astrobiology, systems science and evolutionary theory. It follows in the steps of giants such as Erwin Schrödinger, Ilya Prigogine, Freeman Dyson and James Lovelock. In particular, it was Schrödinger who formulated the perennial puzzle: how can complexity increase — and drastically so! — in living systems, while they remain bound by the Second Law of thermodynamics? In the pile of attempts to resolve this conundrum in the course of the last 80 years, Wong et al. offer perhaps the best shot so far.”

“Their central idea, the formulation of the law of increasing functional information, is simple but subtle: a system will manifest an increase in functional information if its various configurations generated in time are selected for one or more functions. This, the authors claim, is the controversial ‘missing law’ of complexity, and they provide a bunch of excellent examples. From my admittedly quite subjective point of view, the most interesting ones pertain to life in radically different habitats like Titan or to evolutionary trajectories characterized by multiple exaptations of traits resulting in a dramatic increase in complexity. Does the correct answer to Schrödinger’s question lie in this direction? Only time will tell, but both my head and my gut are curiously positive on that one. Finally, another great merit of this study is worth pointing out: in this day and age of rabid Counter-Enlightenment on the loose, as well as relentless attacks on the freedom of thought and speech, we certainly need more unabashedly multidisciplinary and multicultural projects like this one.”

Milan Cirkovic, Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, Serbia; The Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University

The natural laws we recognize today cannot yet account for one astounding characteristic of our universe—the propensity of natural systems to “evolve.” As the authors of this study attest, the tendency to increase in complexity and function through time is not specific to biology, but is a fundamental property observed throughout the universe. Wong and colleagues have distilled a set of principles which provide a foundation for cross-disciplinary discourse on evolving systems. In so doing, their work will facilitate the study of self-organization and emergent complexity in the natural world.

Corday Selden, Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University

The paper “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems” provides an innovative, compelling, and sound theoretical framework for the evolution of complex systems, encompassing both living and non-living systems. Pivotal in this new law is functional information, which quantitatively captures the possibilities a system has to perform a function. As some functions are indeed crucial for the survival of a living organism, this theory addresses the core of evolution and is open to quantitative assessment. I believe this contribution has also the merit of speaking to different scientific communities that might find a common ground for open and fruitful discussions on complexity and evolution.

Andrea Roli, Assistant Professor, Università di Bologna.

* * * * * 

About Carnegie Science

https://carnegiescience.edu/about

Coverage highlights:

Science Alert via MSN.com, United States (129,050,236) Missing ‘Law of Nature’ Found That Describes The Way All Things Evolvehttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/missing-law-of-nature-found-that-describes-the-way-all-things-evolve/ar-AA1ijhsB

Reuters US, United States (44,230,271) Scientists propose sweeping new law of nature, expanding on evolution https://www.reuters.com/science/scientists-propose-sweeping-new-law-nature-expanding-evolution-2023-10-16/

Daily Express, United Kingdom (24,100,000) ‘Missing law of nature’ revealed by leading scientists and philosophers
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1824484/missing-law-nature-evolution-increasing-functional-information

Abril, Brazil (19,941,932) Cientistas identificam lei natural “perdida” na teoria evolutivaScientists identify natural law “lost” in evolutionary theoryhttps://veja.abril.com.br/ciencia/cientistas-identificam-lei-natural-perdida-na-teoria-evolutiva/

VICE, United States (12,900,379) Scientists Unveil ‘Missing Law’ of Nature That Explains How Everything In the Universe Evolved, Including Ushttps://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3bgw/scientists-unveil-missing-law-of-nature-that-explains-how-everything-in-the-universe-evolved-including-us

The Guardian, United Kingdom (3,254,937) ‘Survival of the fittest’ may also apply to the nonliving, report finds https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/oct/16/survival-of-the-fittest-may-also-apply-to-the-nonliving-report-finds

Full coverage summary, click here

News release in full, click here

‘Holy Grail of astrobiology’: Machine learning technique reveals a sample’s biological or non-biological origin with 90% accuracy

Scientists have discovered a simple and reliable test for signs of past or present life on other planets – “the holy grail of astrobiology.”

In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a seven-member team, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and led by Jim Cleaves and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science, reports that, with 90% accuracy, their artificial intelligence-based method distinguished modern and ancient biological samples from those of abiotic origin.

“This routine analytical method has the potential to revolutionize the search for extraterrestrial life and deepen our understanding of both the origin and chemistry of the earliest life on Earth,” says Dr. Hazen.  “It opens the way to using smart sensors on robotic spacecraft, landers and rovers to search for signs of life before the samples return to Earth.”

Most immediately, the new test could reveal the history of mysterious, ancient rocks on Earth, and possibly that of samples already collected by the Mars Curiosity rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. The latter tests could be conducted using an onboard analytical instrument nicknamed “SAM” (for Sample Analysis at Mars.  (NASA photos at https://bit.ly/3P8V8II).

“We’ll need to tweak our method to match SAM’s protocols, but it’s possible that we already have data in hand to determine if there are molecules on Mars from an organic Martian biosphere.”

“The search for extraterrestrial life remains one of the most tantalizing endeavors in modern science,” says lead author Jim Cleaves of the Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC.  

“The implications of this new research are many, but there are three big takeaways: First, at some deep level, biochemistry differs from abiotic organic chemistry; second, we can look at Mars and ancient Earth samples to tell if they were once alive; and third, it is likely this new method could distinguish alternative biospheres from those of Earth, with significant implications for future astrobiology missions.”

The innovative analytical method does not rely simply on identifying a specific molecule or group of compounds in a sample.

Instead, the researchers demonstrated that AI can differentiate biotic from abiotic samples by

detecting subtle differences within a sample’s molecular patterns as revealed by pyrolysis gas chromatography analysis (which separates and identifies a sample’s component parts), followed by mass spectrometry (which determines the molecular weights of those components).

Vast multidimensional data from the molecular analyses of 134 known abiotic or biotic carbon-rich samples were used to train AI to predict a new sample’s origin. With approximately 90% accuracy, AI successfully identified samples that had originated from:

• Living things, such as modern shells, teeth, bones, insects, leaves, rice, human hair, and cells preserved in fine-grained rock
• Remnants of ancient life altered by geological processing (e.g. coal, oil, amber, and carbon-rich fossils), or
• Samples with abiotic origins, such as pure laboratory chemicals (e.g., amino acids) and

carbon-rich meteorites.

The authors add that until now the origins of many ancient carbon-bearing samples have been difficult to determine because collections of organic molecules, whether biotic or abiotic, tend to degrade over time. 

Surprisingly, in spite of significant decay and alteration, the new analytical method detected signs of biology preserved in some instances over hundreds of millions of years. 

Says Dr. Hazen: “We began with the idea that the chemistry of life differs fundamentally from that of the inanimate world; that there are ‘chemical rules of life’ that influence the diversity and distribution of biomolecules. If we could deduce those rules, we can use them to guide our efforts to model life’s origins or to detect subtle signs of life on other worlds.”

“These results mean that we may be able to find a lifeform from another planet, another biosphere, even if it is very different from the life we know on Earth.  And, if we do find signs of life elsewhere, we can tell if life on Earth and other planets derived from a common or different origin.”

“Put another way, the method should be able to detect alien biochemistries, as well as Earth life. That is a big deal because it’s relatively easy to spot the molecular biomarkers of Earth life, but we cannot assume that alien life will use DNA, amino acids, etc. Our method looks for patterns in molecular distributions that arise from life’s demand for “functional” molecules.

“What really astonished us was that we trained our machine-learning model to predict only two sample types – biotic or abiotic – but the method discovered three distinct populations: abiotic, living biotic, and fossil biotic.  In other words, it could tell more recent biological samples from fossil samples – a newly plucked leaf or vegetable, say, versus something that died long ago. This surprising finding gives us optimism that other attributes such as photosynthetic life or eukaryotes (cells with a nucleus) might also be distinguished.”

To explain the role of AI, co-author Anirudh Prabhu of the Carnegie Institution for Science uses the idea of separating coins using different attributes – monetary value, metal, year, weight or radius, for example – then going further to find combinations of attributes that create more nuanced separations and groupings. “And when hundreds of such attributes are involved, AI algorithms are invaluable to collate the information and create highly nuanced insights.”

Adds Dr. Cleaves: “From a chemical standpoint, the differences between biotic and abiotic samples relate to things like water solubility, molecular weights, volatility and so on.”

“The simple way I would think about this is that a cell has a membrane and an interior, called the cytosol; the membrane is pretty water-insoluble, while the cell’s content is pretty water-soluble. That arrangement keeps the membrane assembled as it tries to minimize its components’ contacts with water and also keeps the ‘inside components’ from leaking across the membrane.”

“The inside components can also stay dissolved in water despite being extremely large molecules like chromosomes and proteins,” he says. 

“So, if one breaks a living cell or tissue into its components, one gets a mix of very water-soluble molecules and very water-insoluble molecules spread across a spectrum. Things like petroleum and coal have lost most of the water-soluble material over their long histories.”

“Abiological samples can have unique distributions across this spectrum relative to each other, but they are also distinct from the biological distributions.”

The technique may soon resolve a number of scientific mysteries on Earth, including the origin of 3.5 billion-year-old black sediments from Western Australia (photo at https://bit.ly/3YWbZ4Z) — hotly debated rocks that some researchers contend hold Earth’s oldest fossil microbes, while others claim they are devoid of life signs.

Other samples from ancient rocks in Northern Canada, South Africa, and China evoke similar debates. 

“We’re applying our methods right now to address these long-standing questions about the biogenicity of the organic material in these rocks,” Hazen says.

And new ideas have poured forth about the potential contributions of this new approach in other fields such as biology, paleontology and archaeology. 

“If AI can easily distinguish biotic from abiotic, as well as modern from ancient life, then what other insights might we gain? For example, could we tease out whether an ancient fossil cell had a nucleus, or was photosynthetic?” says Dr. Hazen.

“Could it analyze charred remains and discriminate different kinds of wood from an archeological site? It’s as if we are just dipping our toes in the water of a vast ocean of possibilities.” 

* * * * *

Comments

“Cleaves and colleagues’ innovative method of distinguishing biological from abiotic organic matter is a gift for astrobiologists and, quite possibly, for students of Earth’s early history as well.  There is much still to be learned, but one day a next-generation version of their system may well fly to Mars, evaluating the possibility of life on the red planet, while its Earth-bound sisters illuminate life’s antiquity on our own planet.”

Andrew H. Knoll, Fisher Research Professor of Natural History and Research Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Emeritus, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

“I think this new study is very exciting! It is a new avenue of research to explore as it appears to discriminate abiotic from biotic organic matter based on its molecular complexity and could potentially be a fantastic tool for astrobiology missions. It would also be very interesting to test this new method on some of the oldest putative and debated traces of Earth life as well as on modern and fossil organisms from the three domains of life! This might help to solve some hot debates in our community!” 

Emmanuelle J. Javaux, Head, Early Life Traces and Evolution-Astrobiology Lab, and Director, Astrobiology Research Unit, University of Liège, Belgium

“We are in great need of biosignatures for life that don’t depend on looking for a specific type of biomolecule that may be universal to all life on Earth, but not universal to all life outside of Earth. This paper identifies a path forward for using a relatively easily measured chemical signature and determining whether it is likely to be indicative of life or not, without presuming that life outside of Earth will use the same biomolecules as life on Earth. This same statistical approach might be applicable to other types of measurements too, expanding the range of measurements that can be used to identify agnostic biosignatures of life.”

Karen Lloyd, Professor, Department of Microbiology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

“This provides an important potential tool to identify life both on other planets and also in distant periods of Earth’s past. Importantly the technique can already be utilized on spacecraft that can travel to different parts of the solar system in our search for life elsewhere than Earth. 

Daniel Gregory, Assistant Professor,Department of Earth Sciences, University of Toronto

* * * * *

The paper: “A robust agnostic molecular biosignature based on machine learning”

Authors:

H. James Cleaves II

• Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC
• Department of Chemistry, Howard University, Washington, DC
• Blue Marble Space Institute for Science, Seattle, WA

Robert M. Hazen

Anirudh Prabhu

George D. Cody

• Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC

Michael L. Wong

• Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC
• NHFP Sagan Fellow, NASA Hubble Fellowship Program, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

Grethe Hystad

• Mathematics and Statistics, Purdue University Northwest, Hammond, IN

Sophia Economon

• Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

* * * * * 

Photos

A carbon-rich black chert from Western Australia

Photo: https://bit.ly/3YWbZ4Z

One of the most tantalizing applications of the new method is the resolution of a decades-old debate regarding the origins of organic molecules in the 3.5-billion-year-old Apex Chert from the wilds of Western Australia.  

This enigmatic black rock contains small quantities of carbon-rich residues–just enough to turn the chert a lustrous black. Some scientists have long argued that this formation holds the earliest record of cellular life in the form of tiny spheres and filaments – shapes that mimic modern microbes.  

Other researchers insist that the black residues formed from high-temperature processes that have nothing to do with life. Research now in progress will apply the new biosignature method to the Apex Chert, as well as many other similarly enigmatic ancient rocks from Greenland, South Africa, India, and China.

* * * * * 

Trilobites

Despite being 400-500 million years old, carbonized trilobite exoskeletons similar to these were sampled and clearly distinguished as biotic using this new analytical method:

1) Metacanthina sp. from Morocco, Devonian Period (~400 million years old), 7 cm maximum dimension

Photo: https://bit.ly/3P20Qfr 

2) Koneprussia sp. from Morocco, Devonian Period (~400 million years old), 3.5 cm across.

Photo: https://bit.ly/45zUUji 

3) Olenoides sp., Utah, Cambrian Period (~500 million years old), 8 cm maximum dimension.

Photo: https://bit.ly/3OyYyTq 

4) Apianurus rusti, New York, Ordovician Period (~450 million years old), 5 cm maximum dimension.

Photo: https://bit.ly/3OGWvwL

(photo credits: Hazen Collection, National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC) 

* * * * * 

About Carnegie Science https://carnegiescience.edu/about

* * * * * 

Coverage highlights

BBC, United Kingdom (154,922,793)
Aliens: Scientists use AI to search for extra-terrestrial life
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/66945738

Daily Mail, United Kingdom (92,595,767)Is this the key to finding life beyond Earth? Scientists develop an AI system that can detect aliens with 90% accuracyhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12557735/Is-key-finding-life-Earth-Scientists-develop-AI-detect-aliens-90-accuracy.html

Forbes, United States (76,850,849)New AI Could Help Find Life On Mars With 90% Accuracy, Say Scientists https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/09/25/new-ai-could-help-find-life-on-mars-with-90-accuracy-say-scientists/

The Independent, United Kingdom (56,584,707)Scientists develop simple test to help us find alien life https://www.independent.co.uk/space/alien-life-extraterrestrial-mars-ai-b2418321.html

Sunday Mirror, United Kingdom (44,468,983)Scientists find way to confirm life on other planets in extraordinary alien breakthrough https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/scientists-find-way-confirm-life-31026629

London Evening Standard, United Kingdom (17,674,624)Scientists develop method of identifying life on other planets https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/science/scientists-earth-dna-sam-mars-b1109368.html

The Guardian, United Kingdom (3,367,304)Scientists hail pioneering software in hunt for alien lifehttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/25/scientists-hail-pioneering-software-in-hunt-for-alien-life

Agencia EFE, via Vanguardia, Colombia (2,637,854)
La IA se convierte en la clave para detectar vida extraterrestre https://www.vanguardia.com/mundo/la-ia-se-convierte-en-la-clave-para-detectar-vida-extraterrestre-XN7618505

El Mundo, Spain (31,866,879)
La inteligencia artificial está aprendiendo a encontrar vida extraterrestrehttps://www.elmundo.es/ciencia-y-salud/ciencia/2023/09/25/65117c2afdddff02bb8b45b3.html

GEO, France (6,996,627)L’IA pourrait aider les scientifiques à détecter la vie sur Mars, et ailleurs dans l’univershttps://www.geo.fr/environnement/astrobiologie-ia-pourrait-aider-scientifiques-detecter-vie-mars-et-ailleurs-dans-univers-analyse-echantillons-curiosity-216800

The Messenger, United States (3,343,993)
Scientists Design AI To Detect Alien Life with 90% Accuracyhttps://themessenger.com/tech/scientists-design-ai-to-detect-alien-life-with-90-accuracy

Earth.com, United States (2,360,268)Is there really life beyond Earth? AI will soon solve this mystery https://www.earth.com/news/is-there-really-life-beyond-earth-ai-will-soon-solve-this-mystery/

El Especial, United States (3,521)La Inteligencia Artificial permitirá establecer si existe vida extraterrestre https://elespecial.com/la-inteligencia-artificial-permitira-establecer-si-existe-vida-extraterrestre

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El Independiente, Spain (4,696,708)El revolucionario método con IA para detectar vida en otros planetas: “Es el santo grial de la astrobiología”https://www.elindependiente.com/futuro/inteligencia-artificial/2023/09/25/el-revolucionario-metodo-con-ia-para-detectar-vida-en-otros-planetas-es-el-santo-grial-de-la-astrobiologia/

Asahi Shimbun via Yahoo!ニュース, Japan (89,937,333)90％で生命の痕跡を発見できるアルゴリズム開発–分子パターンの微細な違いを検出Algorithm development that allows 90 % to find traces of life -detection of fine differences in molecular patternshttps://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/8c02086c88e9d68b352a73008055a0ad3e9198fe

Infobae, Argentina (62,231,555)Este método basado en inteligencia artificial detecta vida en otros planetasThis method based on artificial intelligence detects life on other planets https://www.infobae.com/tecno/2023/09/28/este-metodo-basado-en-inteligencia-artificial-detecta-vida-en-otros-planetas/

The Week via Yahoo! News, United States (61,429,064)The week’s good news: Sept. 28, 2023https://news.yahoo.com/weeks-good-news-sept-28-190313752.html

The Indian Express, India (43,451,001)Scientists develop new artificial intelligence method to look for life on other planetshttps://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/artificial-intelligence-method-life-other-planets-8961690/

Detik, Indonesia (33,399,426)Ilmuwan Kembangkan AI untuk Deteksi Tanda Kehidupan di Luar Angkasa Scientists Develop AI for Detection of Signs of Life in Spacehttps://www.detik.com/edu/detikpedia/d-6955380/ilmuwan-kembangkan-ai-untuk-deteksi-tanda-kehidupan-di-luar-angkasa

O Estado de S. Paulo, Brazil (14,483,556)Inteligência artificial ajuda na busca por vida extraterrestreArtificial Intelligence helps in the search for extraterrestrial life https://www.estadao.com.br/ciencia/inteligencia-artificial-ajuda-na-busca-por-vida-extraterrestre/

Europa Press, Spain (10,659,065)
La IA ayudará a saber pronto si hubo vida en Marte(AI will help to know soon if there was life on Mars) https://www.europapress.es/ciencia/misiones-espaciales/noticia-ia-ayudara-saber-pronto-si-hubo-vida-marte-20230926113344.html

ANSA, via Tiscali, Italy (2,872,249)L’IA cerca nelle molecole tracce di vita aliena(The IA is looking for traces of alien life in the molecules)https://innovazione.tiscali.it/news/articoli/l-ia-cerca-nelle-molecole-tracce-vita-aliena/ … (ANSA) – ROMA, 26 SET – Analizzare qualsiasi tipo di molecola in cerca di tracce di vita alinea: riesce a farlo con una precisione del 90% …

Agenzia Giornalistica Italia, Italy (3,242,178)C’è vita nello spazio? L’AI potrebbe rispondere con una precisione del 90%(Is there life in space? AI could respond with a precision of 90%)https://www.agi.it/scienza/news/2023-09-27/vita-spazio-ai-potrebbe-rispondere-23194446/

IndoAsian News Service via Zee News, India (36,248,291) AI May Help Find Life On Mars, Other Planets With 90% Accuracyhttps://zeenews.india.com/technology/ai-may-help-find-life-on-mars-other-planets-with-90-accuracy-2667634.html

Der Tagesspiegel, Germany (9,704,421)Astrobiologie : KI soll die Suche nach Aliens revolutionierenAstrobiology: AI is supposed to revolutionize the search for alienshttps://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/astrobiologie-ki-soll-die-suche-nach-aliens-revolutionieren-10529587.html

Salon, via Yahoo! News, United States (61,429,064)A simple algorithm could reveal the ghosts of alien life in Mars dirt, study findshttps://news.yahoo.com/simple-algorithm-could-reveal-ghosts-160101168.html

Euronews, France (22,774,660)Is there alien life on Mars? Scientists believe AI test could help unlock the Red Planet’s secrets
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Space.com, United States (15,588,323)New AI algorithm can detect signs of life with 90% accuracy. Scientists want to send it to Mars https://www.space.com/new-ai-method-detect-life-rock-samples-90-percent-accuracy

Astronomy Magazine, United StatesCan AI find life in the universe? Sophisticated technologies are making inroads on the search for life in the cosmoshttps://www.astronomy.com/science/can-ai-find-life-in-the-universe/

Frankfurter Rundschau, Germany (10,348,052)
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UK Press Association, United Kingdom via The Independent (56,584,707), Scientists develop method of identifying life on other planets
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Live Science, United States (10,524,315)Scientists created AI that could detect alien life — and they’re not entirely sure how it works https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/scientists-created-ai-that-could-detect-alien-life-and-theyre-not-entirely-sure-how-it-works

La Razón, Spain (13,940,544) ¿Existió la vida en Marte? Una IA tiene la clave  https://www.larazon.es/ciencia/existio-vida-marte_202309256511d95398383a00019d055f.html

De Standaard, Belgium (6,772,483)Is er leven op Pluto? AI speurt mee  https://share.belga.press/news/0034163a-d673-4c30-8db0-147c72f72f53

Full coverage summary, click here

News release in full, click here

Water helped 80+% of mineral species to form

Biology had a direct or indirect role in ~50%

One-third formed exclusively through biological processes

Pyrite (“Fool’s Gold”) formed in 21 ways — the most of any mineral; Diamonds formed in nine ways – from outer space to deep Earth

* * * * *

A 15-year study led by the Carnegie Institution for Science details the origins and diversity of every known mineral on Earth, a landmark body of work that will help reconstruct the history of life on Earth, guide the search for new minerals and ore deposits, predict possible characteristics of future life, and aid the search for habitable planets and extraterrestrial life.

In twin papers published today by American Mineralogist and sponsored in part by NASA, Carnegie scientists Robert Hazen and Shaunna Morrison detail a novel approach to clustering (lumping) kindred species of minerals together or splitting off new species based on when and how they originated.

Once mineral genesis is factored in, the number of “mineral kinds” — a newly-coined term — totals more than 10,500, a number about 75% greater than the roughly 6,000 mineral species recognized by the International Mineralogical Association (IMA) on the basis of crystal structure and chemical composition alone.

“This work fundamentally changes our view of the diversity of minerals on the planet,” says Dr. Hazen, Staff Scientist with the Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC.

80% of Earth’s minerals were mediated by water

“For example, more than 80% of Earth’s minerals were mediated by water, which is, therefore, fundamentally important to mineral diversity on this planet. By extension, this explains one of the key reasons why the Moon and Mercury and even Mars have far fewer mineral species than Earth.”

“The work also tells us something very profound about the role of biology,” he adds. “One third of Earth’s minerals could not have formed without biology – shells and bones and teeth, or microbes, for example, or the vital indirect role of biology, such as by creating an oxygen-rich atmosphere that led to 2,000 minerals that wouldn’t have formed otherwise.” 

“Each mineral specimen has a history. Each tells a story. Each is a time capsule that reveals Earth’s past as nothing else can.”

40% of Earth’s mineral species formed in more than one way

According to the paper, nature created 40% of Earth’s mineral species in more than one way – for example, both abiotically and with a helping hand from cells – and in several cases used more than 15 different recipes to produce the same crystal structure and chemical composition. 

Of the 5,659 recognized mineral species surveyed by Hazen and colleagues, nine came into being via 15 or more different physical, chemical and/or biological processes — everything from near-instantaneous formation by lightning or meteor strikes, to changes caused by water-rock interactions or transformations at high pressures and temperature spanning hundreds of millions of years.  

And, as if to show she has a sense of humor, Nature has used 21 different ways over the last 4.5 billion years to create pyrite (aka Fool’s Gold) — the mineral world’s champion of diverse origins. Pyrite forms at high temperature and low, with and without water, with the help of microbes and in harsh environments where life plays no role whatsoever.

Composed of one part iron to two parts sulfide (FeS2), pyrite is derived and delivered via meteorites, volcanos, hydrothermal deposits, by pressure between layers of rock, near-surface rock weathering, microbially-precipitated deposits, several mining-associated processes including coal mine fires, and many other means.

To reach their conclusions, Hazen and Morrison built a database of every known process of formation of every known mineral. Relying on large, open-access mineral databases (mindat.org and rruff.ima/info), amplified by thousands of primary research articles on the geology of mineral localities around the world, they identified 10,556 different combinations of minerals and modes of formation, detailed in the paper, “On the paragenetic modes of minerals: A mineral evolution perspective.”

In all, minerals have come into being in one or more of 57 different ways, according to that paper and a sister paper published simultaneously by the same journal, “Lumping and splitting: toward a classification of mineral natural kinds,” co-authored by Drs. Hazen and Morrison in collaboration with mineralogists Sergey Krivovichev of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Robert Downs of the University of Arizona.

The goal of their efforts: “To understand how the diversity and distribution of minerals have changed through deep time and to propose a system of mineral classification that reflects mineral origins in the context of evolving terrestrial worlds.”

Distinguishing minerals based on how and when each kind appeared through Earth’s 4.5 billion+ year history

In earlier studies over more than a century, thousands of mineralogists worldwide have carefully documented almost 6,000 different “mineral species” based on their unique combinations of chemical composition and crystal structure. Dr. Hazen and colleagues took a different approach, emphasizing how and when each kind of mineral appeared through more than 4.5 billion years of Earth history.

“No one has undertaken this huge task before,” says Dr. Hazen, honoured by the IMA with its 2021 medal for his outstanding achievements in mineral crystal chemistry, particularly in the field of mineral evolution. 

“In these twin papers, we are putting forward our best effort to lay the groundwork for a new approach to recognizing different kinds of minerals. We welcome the insights, additions, and future versions of the mineralogical community.”

The papers’ new insights and conclusions include:  

• Water has played a dominant role in the mineral diversity of Earth, involved in the formation of more than 80% of mineral species.
• Life played a direct or indirect role in the formation of almost half of known mineral species while a third of known minerals — more than 1,900 species — formed exclusively as a consequence of biological activities.
• Rare elements play a disproportionate role in Earth’s mineral diversity. Just 41 elements — together constituting less than 5 parts per million of Earth’s crust — are essential constituents in some 2,400 (over 42%) of Earth’s minerals. The 41 elements include arsenic, cadmium, gold, mercury, silver, titanium, tin, uranium, and tungsten.
• Much of Earth’s mineral diversity was established within the planet’s first 250 million years
• Some 296 known minerals are thought to pre-date Earth itself, of which 97 are known only from meteorites (with the age of some individual mineral grains estimated at 7 billion years — billions of years before the origin of our solar system)
• The oldest known minerals are tiny, durable zircon crystals, almost 4.4 billion years old
• More than 600 minerals have derived from human activities, including over 500 minerals caused by mining, 234 of them formed by coal mine fires

According to the research, 3,349 (59%) of IMA-approved mineral species are known to occur from just one process (paragenetic mode), 1,372 species (24%) from two processes, 458 (8%) from three processes, and the rest, 480 (8%), from four or more processes.

Diamonds, for example, composed of carbon, have originated in at least nine ways, including condensation in the cooling atmospheres of old stars, during a meteorite impact, and under hot ultra-high-pressure deep within the Earth.

These processes led to distinct diamond variants — e.g. stellar, impact, mantle, and ultra-high-pressure — which the authors designate as different “natural kinds.”

The authors propose that, complementary to the IMA-approved mineral list, new categorizations and groupings be created on the basis of a mineral’s genesis (paragenetic mode). 

For example, science can group 400 minerals formed by condensation (whereby a substance transitions directly from gas to solid without passing through a liquid state) at volcanic fumaroles — openings in the Earth’s surface that emit steam and volcanic gasses.

The papers detail other considerations in the clustering and classification of minerals, such as the eon in which they formed. For example, Earth’s “Great Oxidation Event” about 2.3 billion years ago led new minerals to form at the planet’s near-surface. 

And about 4.45 billion years ago, when water first appeared, the earliest water-rock interactions may have produced as many as 350 minerals in near-surface marine and terrestrial environments.

It appears too that hundreds of different minerals may have formed on Earth prior to the giant impact that vaporized much of our planet’s crust and mantle and led to the Moon’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago. If so, those minerals were obliterated, only to reform as Earth cooled and solidified. 

“The sharp contrast between Earth’s large complement of minerals and the relative mineralogical parsimony of the Moon and Mercury, as well as the modest diversity found on Mars, stems from differing influences of water,” the authors say.

In addition to accidental mineral creations in mining fires, humanity has manufactured countless thousands of mineral-like compounds that don’t qualify for recognition by the IMA — building materials, semiconductors, laser crystals, specialty alloys, synthetic gemstones, plastic debris and the like. All, however, are “likely to persist for millions of years in the geologic record, thus providing a clear sedimentary horizon that marks the so-called ‘Anthropocene Epoch’.” 

Meanwhile, there are 77 “biominerals,” according to the paper, formed by a variety of metabolic processes — everything from corals, shells, and stinging nettles, to minerals in bones, teeth and kidney stones. 

Another 72 minerals derive directly or indirectly from the guano and urine of birds and bats. That list includes the rare mineral spheniscidite, which forms when the urine of penguins (order Sphenisciformes, hence the mineral name) reacts with clay minerals beneath a rookery on Elephant Island in the British Antarctic Territory.

Mineral evolution and the origins of life

The authors note that the formation of oceans, the extensive development of continental crust, and perhaps even the initiation of some early form of subduction (the process that drives plate tectonics today) in the early Hadean Eon 4.0 to 4.5 billion years ago, meant many important mineral-forming processes — and as many as 3,534 mineral species — occurred in Earth’s first 250 million years.

“If so, then most of the geochemical and mineralogical environments invoked in models of life’s origins would have been present 4.3 billion years ago,” they say.

If life is “a cosmic imperative that emerges on any mineral- and water-rich world,” the authors say, “then these findings support the hypothesis that life on Earth ​emerged rapidly, in concert with a vibrant, diverse Mineral Kingdom, in the earliest stages of planetary evolution.”

Extraterrestrial mineralogy

The work also points ways forward for future researchers and explorers:

“What mineral-forming environments occur on the Moon, Mars, and other terrestrial worlds? Enumerating paragenetic modes, and placing each mineral species into one or more of those categories, offers an opportunity to evaluate extraterrestrial mineralogy with a new perspective. If Mars had (or still has) a hydrological cycle, what mineralogical manifestations might we expect? For example, are there Martian hydrothermal sulfide deposits and, if so, were a variety of metals mobilized? On the other hand, if the Moon is truly dry, then what paragenetic processes are excluded? And do extraterrestrial bodies display paragenetic processes not seen on Earth, such as cryo-volcanism on Titan?”

The research was supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the NASA Astrobiology Institute ENIGMA team, and the Carnegie Institution for Science. 

* * * * * 

By the numbers

• 5,659: Mineral “species” recognized by the International Mineralogical Association at the time of this research. (That number has since risen to more than 5,800 species) 
• 10,556: Combinations of minerals species and means of origin (“mineral kinds”)
• 57: different physical, chemical or biological processes that created Earth’s minerals
• 40%: Proportion of mineral species that originated in more than one way
• 3,349 (59%): Minerals that occur in just one process (paragenetic mode)
• 1,372 (24%): Minerals that occur in two ways
• 458 (8%): Minerals that occur in three ways
• 480 (8%): Minerals that occur in four or more ways
• 9: Minerals that came into being via 15 or more ways
• 21: Ways in which pyrite (Fool’s Gold) has formed — the most of any mineral
• 9: Ways in which diamonds have formed in environments from outer space to deep Earth 
• 80%: Minerals that water played a dominant role in creating
• ~50%: Minerals in which biology played a direct or indirect role in creating
• 1,900 (about 1/3rd): Minerals formed exclusively by biological processes
• 41: Rare elements (constituting less than 5 parts per million of Earth’s crust) involved in forming 2,400 (over 42%) of minerals
• 296: Mineral thought to pre-date Earth itself
• 97: Minerals known only from meteorites
• 7 billion years (pre-dating our solar system by billions of years): The age of individual mineral grains discovered in meteorites
• Up to 350: Minerals created in near-surface marine and terrestrial environments when water first appeared on Earth ~4.45 billion years ago
• 4.4 billion years: Age of the oldest known mineral created on Earth: zircon crystals
• 3,534: minerals thought to have formed within Earth’s first 250 million years
• 600+: Minerals derived from human activities, including 500+ caused by mining, 234 from coal mine fires
• 77: Biominerals (formed by metabolic processes)
• 72: Minerals derived directly or indirectly from the guano and urine of birds and bats

* * * * * 

Comments

“The remarkable work of Hazen and Morrison provides a potential way to predictably discover possible minerals in nature. Minerals can be key to reconstructing the entire ‘past life’ and predicting the ‘future life’ of Earth,” and understanding mineral evolution “will offer a novel path for us to be able to explore deep space and search for extraterrestrial life and habitable planets in the future.”

• Anhuai Lu, President of the International Mineralogical Association, and Professor, School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China (from a commentary published by American Mineralogist, in full at https://bit.ly/3DC5ngI)

“When you think of truly groundbreaking scientists in mineralogy, you think of Robert M. Hazen and his pioneering ways of understanding how minerals evolve. Linking the concepts of minerals and evolution may seem counterintuitive but Hazen and Morrison have demonstrated once again that they are highly connected. Their two new papers demonstrate in a very elegant way the strong evidence that minerals are the most durable, information-rich objects we can study to understand the origin and evolution of planets. To paraphrase a famous Stephen Hawking quote: ‘Hazen and Morrison have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge of the mineral kingdom’.”

• Prof. Luca Bindi, Director, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence, Italy

“This has been proclaimed the “Year of Mineralogy” by the IMA, part of the UN’s International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development. 2022 was chosen to mark the bicentenary of the death of René Just Haüy, a founding father of crystallography and modern mineralogy. By linking the properties of crystals and their microscopic structure, Haüy brought mineralogy into the physical sciences. At the same time, Antoine Lavoiser published the first modern treatise on chemistry. The framework defined by these two pioneers has remained in force until today: minerals are essentially described, classified, presented by their chemical composition and their crystallographic characteristics.”

“Hazen and colleagues have changed this way of considering minerals. In addition to chemical composition and physical properties, Hazen emphasizes their conditions and contexts of formation, and a new way of seeing minerals appears. Minerals become witnesses, markers of the long history of matter that takes shape in supernova explosions, gathers in planetary systems in formation and even, on a planet like Earth, accompanies the emergence and development of life. Most scientists produce data, some are lucky enough to make discoveries, few are the ones who transform our view of the world. Hazen is one of them.”

• Prof. Patrick Cordier, Université de Lille / Institut Universitaire de France

* * * * * 

About 

The Carnegie Institution for Science: Carnegiescience.edu

Robert Hazen: carnegiescience.edu/scientist/robert-hazen

Shaunna Morrison: epl.carnegiescience.edu/people/shaunna-morrison

Sergey Krivovichev: roscongress.org/en/speakers/krivovichev-sergey/biography/

Robert Downs: geo.arizona.edu/person/robert-downs

International Mineralogical Association: ima-mineralogy.org/

American Mineralogist: minsocam.org/msa/ammin/toc

* * * * *

Media coverage highlights:

BBC-World Service Radio, Science In Action, United Kingdom: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct3695

BBC, United Kingdom, Making minerals: Crushed, zapped, boiled and baked: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62013806

Daily Mail, United Kingdom, Scientists decode the origins of Earth’s minerals to inform our understanding of other planets – including some that pre-date our planet by billions of years: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10980411/Scientists-decipher-unique-origins-Earths-minerals-landmark-study.html

New Scientist, United Kingdom: Reclassification of Earth’s minerals reveals 4000 more than we thought: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2326920-reclassification-of-earths-minerals-reveals-4000-more-than-we-thought/

Discover Magazine, United States, Minerals Reveal a New Understanding of Original Life on Earth: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/minerals-reveal-a-new-understanding-of-original-life-on-earth

Science News, United States, A new look at the ‘mineral kingdom’ may transform how we search for life: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-mineral-kingdom-classification-crystal-search-life

Forbes, United States, Study Details The Origins And Diversity Of Every Known Mineral On Earth: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2022/07/02/study-details-the-origins-and-diversity-of-every-known-mineral-on-earth/

IndoAsian News Service, India, 15-year study details origins, diversity of every known mineral: https://www.prokerala.com/news/articles/a1293987.html

Popular Science, Earth has more than 10,000 kinds of minerals. This massive new catalog describes them all: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/earth-has-more-than-10000-kinds-of-minerals-this-massive-new-catalog-describes-them-all/ar-AAZ4C7j

UK Press Association newswire, Scientists detail origins and diversity of every known mineral on Earth: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-10973527/Scientists-origins-diversity-known-mineral-Earth.html

Agencia EFE, Spain, Un catálogo de todos los minerales de la Tierra para buscar vida extraterrestre: https://www.elmundo.es/ciencia-y-salud/medio-ambiente/2022/07/01/62beaf07fc6c8360438b456d.html

Europa Press newswire, Spain: Descifran y catalogan los orígenes de los minerales de la Tierra  https://www.europapress.es/ciencia/habitat/noticia-descifran-catalogan-origenes-minerales-tierra-20220701180130.html

VICE, United States, An Unprecedented Number of Minerals Found on Earth Sheds Light on Alien Life: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn8bw/an-unprecedented-number-of-minerals-found-on-earth-sheds-light-on-alien-life

MDPI, Switzerland, Mineral Element Insiders and Outliers Play Crucial Roles in Biological Evolution: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/12/7/951/htm

ORF Online, Austria, „Rezepte“ der Mineralentstehung: https://science.orf.at/stories/3213886/

IFL Science, United States, Catalog Of Every Known Mineral On Earth Reveals The Roles Of Water And Life:
https://www.iflscience.com/catalog-of-every-known-mineral-on-earth-reveals-the-roles-of-water-and-life-64283

Jerusalem Post, Israel, Two studies unlock mysteries of Earth’s minerals: https://www.jpost.com/science/article-711034

Ten Cent (腾讯网), Mainland China, Scientific Research Circle Daily (a science news roundup): https://new.qq.com/omn/20220705/20220705A043FU00.html

Sohu 搜狐新闻-搜狐, Mainland China, 研究发现生命帮助制造了地球上几乎一半的矿物 Life helps make almost half of Earth’s minerals, study finds: https://www.sohu.com/a/564251689_120994893

Focus Online, Germany, Bildung irdischer Minerale entschlüsseltFormation of terrestrial minerals decoded:
https://www.focus.de/wissen/natur/bildung-irdischer-minerale-entschluesselt_id_110493316.html

Livemint, India, Can diversity of minerals aid the search for extraterrestrial life? https://lifestyle.livemint.com/smart-living/innovation/can-diversity-of-minerals-aid-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-111656898713511.html

Times Now, India, More than 80% of Earth’s 10,500 plus minerals were mediated by water, and that’s why other planets have fewer minerals: https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/more-than-80-of-earths-10500-plus-minerals-were-mediated-by-water-and-thats-why-other-planets-have-fewer-minerals-article-92646168

Báo Mới, Viet Nam, Cái nhìn mới về khoáng chất, có thể thay đổi cách chúng ta tìm kiếm sự sống (New look at minerals, could change the way we search for life):
https://baomoi.com/cai-nhin-moi-ve-khoang-chat-co-the-thay-doi-cach-chung-ta-tim-kiem-su-song/c/43082758.epi

GEO magazine, France, Plus de 10.000 types de minéraux sur Terre formés en 57 recettes, estiment des chercheurs (More than 10,000 types of minerals on Earth formed into 57 recipes, researchers estimate) https://www.geo.fr/environnement/plus-de-10000-types-de-mineraux-sur-terre-formes-en-seulement-57-recettes-estiment-des-chercheurs-210725

Asian News International newswire (ANI), India, Nature used 57 recipes to create Earth’s 10,500-plus ‘mineral kinds’: https://www.aninews.in/news/science/nature-used-57-recipes-to-create-earths-10500-plus-mineral-kinds20220704065458/

Full coverage summary, click here

News release in full, click here

Materials trapped inside diamonds offer clues to life’s origin; suggest oceans’ worth of water hidden in Deep Earth

Deep Carbon Observatory highlights 10 top discoveries to celebrate a 10-year global investigation of Earth’s largest, least-known ecosystem; 1,200 scientists from 55 nations, 1,400 peer-reviewed papers

Washington DC – Thousands of diamonds, formed hundreds of kilometers deep inside the planet, paved the road to some of the 10-year Deep Carbon Observatory program’s most historic accomplishments and discoveries, being celebrated Oct. 24-26 at the US National Academy of Sciences.

Unsightly black, red, green, and brown specks of minerals, and microscopic pockets of fluid and gas encapsulated by diamonds as they form in Deep Earth, record the elemental surroundings and reactions taking place within Earth at a specific depth and time, divulging some of the planet’s innermost secrets.

Hydrogen and oxygen, for example, trapped inside diamonds from a layer 410 to 660 kilometers below Earth’s surface, reveal the subterranean existence of oceans’ worth of H2O — far more in mass than all the water in every ocean in the surface world.

This massive amount of water may have been brought to Deep Earth from the surface by the movement of the great continental and oceanic plates which, as they separate and move, collide with one another and overlap. This subduction of slabs also buries carbon from the surface back into the depths, a process fundamental to Earth’s natural carbon balance, and therefore to life.

Knowledge of Deep Earth’s water content is critical to understanding the diversity and melting behaviors of materials at the planet’s different depths, the creation and flows of hydrocarbons (e.g. petroleum and natural gas) and other materials, as well as the planet’s deep subterranean electrical conductivity.

By dating the pristine fragments of material trapped inside other super-deep diamond “inclusions,” DCO researchers could put an approximate time stamp on the start of plate tectonics — “one of the planet’s greatest innovations,” in the words of DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science. It started roughly 3 billion years ago, when the Earth was a mere 1.5 billion years old.

Diamond research accelerated dramatically thanks to the creation of DCO’s global network of researchers and led to some of the program’s most intriguing discoveries and achievements.

Diamonds from the deepest depths, often small with poor clarity, are not generally used as gemstones by Tiffany’s but are amazingly complex, robust and priceless in research. Inclusions offered DCO scientists samples of minerals that exist only at extreme high subterranean pressure, and suggested three ways in which diamonds form.

While as many as 90% of analyzed diamonds were composed of carbon scientists expected in the mantle, some “relatively young” diamonds (up to a few hundred million years old) appear to include carbon from once-living sources; in other words, they are made of carbon returned to Deep Earth from the surface world.

Diamonds also revealed unambiguous evidence that some hydrocarbons form hundreds of miles down, well beyond the realm of living cells: abiotic energy.

Unravelling the mystery of deep abiotic methane and other energy sources helps explain how deep life in the form of microbes and bacteria is nourished, and fuels the proposition that life first originated and evolved far below (rather than migrating down from) the surface world.

Diamonds also enabled DCO scientists to simulate the extreme conditions of Earth’s interior.

DCO’s Extreme Physics and Chemistry community scientists used diamond anvil cells — a tool that can squeeze a sample tremendously between the tips of two diamonds, coupled with lasers that heat the compressed crystals — to simulate deep Earth’s almost unimaginable extreme temperatures and pressures.

Using a variety of advanced techniques, they analyzed the compressed samples, identified 100 new carbon-bearing crystal structures and documented their intriguing properties and behaviors.

The work provided insights into how carbon atoms in Deep Earth “find one another,” aggregate, and assemble to form diamonds and other material.

Development of new materials; potential carbon capture and storage strategies

DCO’s discoveries and research are important and applicable in many ways, including the development of new materials and potential carbon capture and storage strategies.

DCO scientists are studying, for example, how the natural timescale for sequestration of carbon might be shortened.

The weathering of and microbial life inside Oman’s Samail Ophiolite — an unusual, large slab pushed up from Earth’s upper mantle long ago — offers a tutorial in nature’s carbon sequestration techniques, knowledge that might help offset carbon emissions caused by humans.

In Iceland, another DCO natural sequestration project, CarbFix, involves injecting carbon-bearing fluids into basalt and observing their conversion to solids.

A Decade of Discovery

Hundreds of scientists from around the world meet in Washington DC Oct. 24 to 26 to share and celebrate results of the wide-ranging, decade-long Deep Carbon Observatory — one of the largest global research collaborations in Earth sciences ever undertaken (venue, program: Deep Carbon 2019: Launching the Next Decade of Deep Carbon Science, https://deepcarbon.net/deep-carbon-2019).

With its Secretariat at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, and $50 million in core support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, multiplied many times by additional investment worldwide, a multidisciplinary group of 1,200 researchers from 55 nations worked for 10 years in four interconnected scientic “communities” to explore Earth’s fundamental workings, including:

• How carbon moves between Earth’s interior, surface and atmosphere
• Where Earth’s deep carbon came from, how much exists and in what forms
• How life began, and the limits — such as temperature and pressure — to Earth’s deep microbial life

They met the challenge of investigating Earth’s interior in several ways, producing 1,400 peer-reviewed papers while pursuing 268 projects that involved, for example:

• Studying diamonds, volcanoes, and core samples obtained by drilling on land and at sea
• Conducting lab experiments to mimic the extreme temperatures and pressures of Earth’s interior, and through theoretical modeling of carbon’s evolution and movements over deep time, and
• Developing new high tech instruments

DCO scientists conducted field measurements in remote and inhospitable regions of the world: ocean floors, on top of active volcanoes, and in the deserts of the Middle East.

Where instrumentation and models were lacking, DCO scientists developed new tools and models to meet the challenge. Throughout these studies, DCO invested in the next generation of deep carbon researchers, students and early career scientists, who will carry on the tradition of exploration and discovery for decades to come.

Key discoveries during the 10-year Deep Carbon Observatory program

In addition to insights from its diamond research above, the program’s top discoveries include:

The deep biosphere is one of Earth’s largest ecosystems

Life in the deep subsurface totals 15,000 to 23,000 megatonnes (million metric tons) of carbon, about 250 to 400 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans. The immense Deep Earth biosphere occupies a space nearly twice as large as all the world’s oceans.

DCO scientists explored how microbes draw sustenance from “abiotic” methane and other energy sources — fuel that wasn’t derived from biotic life above.

If microbes can eek out a living using chemical energy from rocks in Earth’s deep subsurface, that may hold true on other planetary bodies.

This knowledge about the types of environments that can sustain life, particularly those where energy is limited, can guide the search for life on other planets. In the outer solar system, for example, energy from the sun is scarce, as it is in Earth’s subsurface environment.

DCO researchers also found the deepest, lowest-density, and longest-lived subseafloor microbial ecosystem ever recorded and changed our understanding of the limits of life at extremes of pressure, temperature, and depth.

Rocks and fluids in Earth’s crust provide clues to the origins of life on this planet, and where to look for life on others

DCO scientists found amino acids and complex organic molecules in rocks on the seafloor. These molecules, the building blocks of life, were formed by abiotic synthesis and had never before been observed in the geologic record.

They also found pockets of ancient salty fluids rich in hydrogen, methane, and helium many kilometers deep, providing evidence of early, protected environments capable of harboring life.

Abiotic methane forms in the crust and mantle of Earth

When water meets the ubiquitous mineral olivine under pressure, the rock reacts with oxygen atoms from the H2O and transforms into another mineral, serpentine — characterized by a scaly, green-brown, snake skin-like appearance.

This process of “serpentinization” leads to the formation of “abiotic” methane in many different environments on Earth. DCO scientists developed and used sophisticated analytical equipment to differentiate between biotic (derived from ancient plants and animals) and abiotic formation of methane.

DCO field and laboratory studies of rocks from the upper mantle document a new high-pressure serpentinization process that produces abiotic methane and other forms of hydrocarbons.

The formation of methane and hydrocarbons through these geologic, abiotic processes provides fuel and sustenance for microbial life.

Atmospheric CO₂ has been relatively stable over the eons but huge, occasional catastrophic carbon disturbances have taken place

DCO scientists have reconstructed Earth’s deep carbon cycle over eons to the present day. This new, more complete picture of the planetary ingassing and outgassing of carbon shows a remarkably stable system over hundreds of millions of years, with a few notable episodic exceptions.

Continental breakup and associated volcanic activity are the dominant causes of natural planetary outgassing. DCO scientists added to this picture by investigating rare episodes of massive volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts to learn how Earth and its climate responds to such catastrophic carbon disturbances.

Plate tectonics modeling using DCO’s new GPlates platform made it possible to reconstruct the Earth’s carbon cycle through geologic time.

(Watch a 32-second animation of Earth’s continental and oceanic plates in motion since the Jurassic period: http://bit.ly/32hrbLQ)

Much of the carbon outgassed from Deep Earth seeps from fractures and faults unassociated with eruptions

Volcanoes and volcanic regions outgas carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the ocean / atmosphere system at a rate of 280-360 megatonnes per year. This includes both emissions during volcanic eruptions and degassing of CO₂ out of diffuse fractures and faults in volcanic regions worldwide and the mid-ocean ridge system.

Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, are responsible for about 100 times more CO₂ emissions than all volcanic and tectonic region sources combined.

The changing ratio of CO₂ to SO2 emitted by volcanoes may help forecast eruptions

The volume of outgassed CO₂ relative to SO2 increases for some volcanoes days to weeks before an eruption, raising the possibility of improved forecasting and mitigating danger to humans.

DCO researchers measured volcanic outputs around the globe. Italy’s Mount Etna, for example, one of Earth’s most active volcanoes, typically spewed 5 to 8 times more CO₂ than usual about two weeks before a large eruption.

Fluids move and transform carbon deep within Earth

Experiments and new theoretical work led to a revolutionary new DCO model of water in deep Earth and the discovery that diamonds can easily form through water-rock interactions involving organic and inorganic carbon.

This model predicted the changing chemistry of water found in fluid inclusions in diamonds and yields new insights into the amounts of carbon and nitrogen available for return to Earth’s atmosphere over deep time.

DCO scientists also discovered that the solubility of carbon-bearing minerals, including carbonates, graphite, and diamond, is much higher than previously thought in water-rock systems in the mantle.

31 new carbon-bearing minerals found in four years

After cataloguing known carbon-bearing minerals at Earth’s surface, their composition and where they are found, DCO researchers discovered statistical relationships between mineral localities and the frequency of their occurrence. With that model they predicted 145 yet-to-be-discovered species and in 2015 challenged citizen scientists to help find them.

Of the 31 new-to-science minerals turned up during the Carbon Mineral Challenge, two had been predicted, including triazolite, discovered in Chile and thought to have derived in part from cormorant guano. Photo below.

Meanwhile, scientists led by DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen, established an entirely new mineral classification system.

Through experiment and observation, DCO scientists discovered new forms of carbon deep in Earth’s mantle, shedding new light on the carbon “storage capacity” of the deep mantle, and on the role of subduction in recycling surface carbon back to Earth’s interior.

Studies also cast new light on the record of major changes in our planet’s history such as the rise of oxygen and the waxing and waning of supercontinents.

Two-thirds of Earth’s carbon may be in the iron-rich core

DCO research suggests that two-thirds or more of Earth’s carbon may be sequestered in the core as a form of iron carbide. This “hidden carbon” brings the total carbon content of Earth closer to what is observed in the Sun and helps us to understand the origin of Earth’s carbon from celestial material.

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Comments:

“In 2009, I believed in the existence of lots of non-fossil methane and in the deep origin of life, and the Deep Carbon Observatory has produced important evidence for these hypotheses.”
Jesse Ausubel, The Rockefeller University; Science Advisor, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, USA

“DCO scientists invented new instruments to monitor and measure carbon from volcanoes, revealing promising new ways to forecast eruptions and new estimates for how much carbon is outgassed from volcanoes. The DCO program is a testament to what becomes possible when a group of creative international scientists come together to understand the mysteries of our planet.”
Marie Edmonds, University of Cambridge, UK

“It is only by admitting that one person cannot understand everything that we have made great strides in understanding the dynamics of the whole planets carbon cycle. Carbon is omnipresent and mobile throughout the Earth system, and the entire Cosmos. This makes it impossible for one scientist to understand carbon geochemistry, due to the enormity of the system in space, and through deep time. The DCO has encouraged and enabled people from all over the world to side-step the boundaries which commonly divide and define scientists within the rigid framework of classic disciplines. Only because of our individual admission of inherent ignorance have we been able to advance humanity’s collective understanding of one of the most crucial elements to life. We are now getting closer to seeing the depth of the biosphere, the deepest realms of Earth’s inaccessible interior, and we now know that Earth’s carbon is a cosmic cocktail sourced from across the entire Solar System.”
Sami Mikhail, University of St Andrews, UK

“The scientific secrets diamonds capture and deliver when they surface represent priceless ‘windows’ into the storage and transport of deep carbon over billions of years, yielding clues to their origins and to the workings of nature deep inside the Earth.”
Steven Shirey, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC

“The decadal research program of the Deep Carbon Observatory has put early career scientists front and centre, highlighting the long-term vision of building a vibrant and interdisciplinary community to tackle the big challenges of studying present-day and deep-time Earth processes.”
Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney, Australia

“The Deep Carbon Observatory has created unprecedented cross-disciplinary research opportunities within a global community of scientists eager to discover the secrets of the carbon hidden in the interior of the Earth. Working together across the classical boundaries has led to the discovery of a whole range of hydrocarbons forming at depth and that could feed the subsurface biosphere.”
Isabelle Daniel, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France

“The Deep Carbon Observatory is the seed from which decades of future discoveries in deep carbon science will grow.”
Catherine McCammon, Bayerisches Geoinstitut, Germany

Related DCO news releases

Life in Deep Earth Totals 15 to 23 Billion Tonnes of Carbon–Hundreds of Times More than Humans
http://bit.ly/DCO-DeepLife

Scientists quantify global volcanic CO₂ venting; estimate total carbon on Earth
http://bit.ly/DCO-RF

Rewriting the Textbook on Fossil Fuels
http://bit.ly/DCO-DeepEnergy

Big Data Points Humanity to New Minerals, New Deposits
http://bit.ly/DCO-Minerals

First-Ever Catalog of 208 Human-Caused Minerals Bolsters Argument to Declare ‘Anthropocene Epoch’
http://bit.ly/DCO-Anthropocene

All releases
http://bit.ly/DCO-AllReleases

Future of the Deep Carbon Observatory

The Deep Carbon Observatory launched in 2009 with an ambitious plan to understand how carbon inside Earth–deep carbon–contributes to and affects the global carbon cycle. Carbon is one of the most important elements of our planet: carbon-based fuels provide much of our energy; carbon is an essential element of life; and excess carbon in our atmosphere presents one of the greatest planetary challenges of our time. The amount of carbon in the easily accessible surface environment, however, is only a tiny fraction of the carbon in Earth. Before DCO, remarkably little was known about the physical, chemical, and biological properties of Earth’s deep carbon.

More than 1400 resulting peer-reviewed papers (available in a searchable database: http://bit.ly/2nAzmnk), five books, and seven special issue journals shed light on the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of deep carbon — openly available data that will keep future deep carbon scientists busy for the next decade and beyond.

In the wake of DCO a number of international projects related to deep carbon science have been established: https://deepcarbon.net/launching-next-decade-deep-carbon-science

The Institut du Physique de Globe du Paris will serve as a new headquarters for this global community of deep carbon scientists as they pursue existing and new investigations, with the support of ongoing grants from NASA, the US National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and other institutions.

Future deep carbon scientists will have many scientific questions to tackle, including the form in which carbon was first delivered to Earth, and when, and how different Earth might look today if the handful of past carbon catastrophes had not taken place, and many others.

DCO products

Members of the DCO community shared what they learned about the deep carbon cycle through articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, and special issues of journals. These include the following:

Books

Deep Carbon: Past to Present is an edited volume that conveys what this international community of deep carbon scientists has learned over the last decade. Edited by Beth N. Orcutt, Isabelle Daniel, and Rajdeep Dasgupta. Cambridge University Press, October 2019.

Symphony in C: and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything explores carbon’s multi-faceted characteristics in four movements – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Authored by Robert M. Hazen. W.W. Norton & Company, June 2019. Of interest: British composer David Earl wrote a symphony inspired by the concepts in Symphony in C. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is performing the symphony on 24 October, and a recording of its performance will be available later this year.

Carbon in Planetary Interiors is a special AGU Monograph providing a compilation of new findings by DCO’s Extreme Physics and Chemistry community about carbon in minerals, melts, and fluids at extreme conditions of planetary interiors and brings together emerging insights into carbon’s forms, transformations and movements. Edited by Craig Manning, Wendy Mao, and Jung-Fu Lin. American Geophysical Union, October 2019.

A History of Deep Carbon Science from Crust to Core is a forthcoming historical account of deep carbon science from the 1400s to the present. Authored by Simon Mitton. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in December 2019.

Carbon in Earth is the first compilation of new findings about the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of deep carbon within Earth’s interior. Edited by Robert Hazen, John A. Baross and Adrian Jones. Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry, 2013.

Special issue journals

A special Nature Collection of articles on deep carbon science, to be published on 21 October.

American Mineralogist – A special issue of American Mineralogist features the five most important carbon-related reactions on Earth, prompted by a DCO workshop in March 2018, where scientists from a variety of disciplines came together to discuss the question of which reactions are most critical to life on Earth. The resulting choices and their importance are reported in “Earth in Five Reactions: A Deep Carbon Perspective.” (cite as: Li J, Redfern SAT, Giovannelli D, eds. (2019) Earth in Five Reactions: A Deep Carbon Perspective. Special issue, American Mineralogist)

Elements – This special issue titled “Catastrophic Perturbations to Earth’s Carbon Cycle,” focuses on catastrophic events in Earth’s history and their impact on the carbon cycle. It, too, was prompted by a DCO workshop held in September 2018 to assure that catastrophic perturbations were accounted for in quantifying the deep carbon cycle. (cite as: Edmonds M, Jones A, Suarez C, eds. (2019) Catastrophic Perturbations to Earth’s Carbon Cycle. Special issue, Elements)

Engineering – This is a collection of papers on “Deep Matter and Energy,” which highlight the role of deep volatiles in mediating major Earth processes and spans a broad range of deep carbon science. It contains papers from a joint meeting of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and DCO, attended by 170 scientists from nine nations (cite as: Mao H-K, Sun C, eds. (2019) Deep Matter and Energy. Special issue, Engineering 5:3)

Frontiers Research Topic (x2) – A “Research Topic on Deep Carbon” in Frontiers shares new insights in deep carbon science from across the DCO Science Network. Forty-nine scientists contributed to the collection. (cite as: Daniel I, Zahirovic S, Bower DJ, Cardace D, Ionescu A, Mikhail S, Pistone M, eds. (2019) Research Topic on Deep Carbon. Special issue, Frontiers)

A second Frontiers Research topic focuses on contributions to deep carbon science made by DCO early career scientists, who represent the future of deep carbon science. This collection embodies their innovative ideas, non-traditional working schemes, and demonstrates the success of bringing a globally interconnected perspective to the scientific community. This issue also highlights work from DCO sponsored early career scientists workshops and DCO summer schools. (cite as Giovanelli D, Black BA, Cox AD, and Sheik CS, eds (2017) Research Topic on Deep Carbon in Earth: Early Career Scientist Contributions to the Deep Carbon Observatory. Special issue, Frontiers.)

G-Cubed – A special issue of Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed) focuses on advances in the field of deep carbon degassing, specifically on new understanding of carbon degassing through volcanoes and active tectonic regions. (cite as: Fischer T, Edmonds M, Aiuppa A, eds. (2019) Carbon Degassing Through Volcanoes and Active Tectonic Regions. Special issue, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems)

Journal of the Geological Society of London – This is a thematic set of articles on the “Carbon forms, paths, and processes in the Earth,” derived from lectures presented at the Lake Como School in Como, Italy in October 2017. (cite as: Frezzotti ML, Villa IM, eds. (2019) Carbon Forms, Paths, and Processes in the Earth. Special issue, Journal of the Geological Society of London 176)

Modeling and Visualization

DCO scientists created modeling and visualization approaches that enable scientists to see and manipulate data in new ways. Some specific examples include:

EarthByte: The EarthByte group at the University of Sydney, Australia, created a virtual plate tectonic deep carbon laboratory, which revolutionized the study of mantle-crust-atmosphere interactions over deep time. EarthByte DCO scientists have used this platform, a series of videos reconstructing plate tectonic activity over time, to reconstruct the CO₂ flux in different magmatic settings and simulated hydrogen flux produced by serpentinization of the seafloor over geologic time.

Virtual Reality: DCO helped scientists integrate virtual reality into their research so they can visualize data in new ways, which allows them to manipulate data in three dimensions and conduct virtual experiments. Three specific applications were developed making it possible for scientists to work virtually with mineral networks to see how minerals interact and co-locate with each other, visualize volcanic plumes, and construct and manipulate molecules to show the structure of melts, carbon degassing and other geologic processes.

MELTS/DEW Model DCO scientists developed the first integrated thermodynamic model of the magma-fluid system, making it possible to predict how carbon moves between solid, liquid, and fluid phases in response to temperature and pressure inside Earth.

E3- Earthquakes, Eruptions, and Emissions – DCO supported work to help create an app, developed by the Smithsonian Institution using its data and from the US Geological Survey, that provides open access to 50+ years of data on quakes, eruptions, and related emissions and shows the intimate ties between volcanoes and earthquakes.

Photos

Individual diamonds can have a long, complex, episodic growth history spanning billions of years. By studying tell-tale radioactive elements in their inclusions, some have been dated to 3 billion years and older. At right, shades and shapes record the episodes through which this stone, the Picasso diamond, grew. Download at http://bit.ly/DCOPicasso

Blue boron-bearing diamonds are the world’s most valuable and perhaps the most deeply-derived, estimated to originate around or below 660 km depth. Boron, seen as black spots in this 0.03 carat diamond, offer evidence of the subduction of slabs from the ocean floor into deep earth. Photo: Evan M. Smith/GIA. Download at http://bit.ly/2MgYMQa

Inclusions, material trapped inside diamonds as they form, such as the red garnet seen in this photo, provide windows into Earth’s inner workings. Photo credit: Stephen Richardson, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Download at http://bit.ly/DCODiamond

One of 31 new carbon-bearing minerals discovered during the DCO’s Carbon Mineral Challenge, triazolite was found in Chile. It thought to have derived in part from cormorant guano. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triazolite. Photo credit: Joy Desor, Mineralanalytik Analytical Services. Download at http://bit.ly/DCOTriazolite.

DCO scientists (at left, Lasse Ahonen, right, Riikka Kietäväinen, both of the Geological Survey of Finland) studied samples collected in challenging environments ranging from deep within Earth to below the ocean floor to the summit of active volcanoes. Here, scientists retrieve fluid samples from the Pyhäsalmi Mine in Finland. Credit: Arto Pullinen, GTK, Finland. Download at http://bit.ly/DCOFinland

Scott Nowicki, University of New Mexico, USA, member of an international team of DCO scientists, measured for the first time volcanic gases at Manam and Rabaul volcanoes in Papua New Guinea, using state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles. Credit: Tobias Fischer, University of New Mexico, USA Download at http://bit.ly/DCODrone

DCO field work spanned the globe, often involving collaborators from more than one of DCO’s scientific communities. Shown here is sampling in Costa Rica as part of DCO’s Biology Meets Subduction project, which involved early career scientists from all four communities. At left, Donato Giovannelli, University of Naples “Federico II,” Italy; at right Kayla Iacovino, NASA Johnson, USA). Credit: Katie Pratt/Deep Carbon Observatory. Download at http://bit.ly/DCOCostaRica

To address the technological difficulties in retrieving deep-sea samples, DCO supported the development of PUSH50, a device that maintains deep-sea samples at high pressure so they can be recovered under in situ deep-sea conditions and studied in the laboratory without decompression. Credit: Hervé Cardon, Science for Clean Energy, CNRS, Lyon, France. Download at http://bit.ly/DCOPush50

DCO developer Edward Young, centre, and colleagues created the Panorama mass spectrometer at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, to perform cutting-edge analysis of methane isotopologues that may be used to discriminate abiotic methane. Credit: Darlene Trew Crist/Deep Carbon Observatory

Download at http://bit.ly/DCOPanorama

DCO scientists Laura Crispini (left), University of Genoa and Peter Kelemen, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, USA, took park in the International Continental Drilling Program’s Oman Drilling Project to investigate natural CO₂ sequestration through weathering and the microbes living inside the Samail Ophiolite. Credit: Darlene Trew Crist/Deep Carbon Observatory. Download at http://bit.ly/2AXBOag

The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) helped many DCO scientists collect samples and measurements critical to investigating the deep, subseafloor microbiome. Shown here is a rock drill used for the first time in the history of the program during expedition 357 to the Atlantis Massif on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Credit: ECORD/IODP. Download at http://bit.ly/DCOFig31

DCO scientists measured carbon dioxide emissions from more than 30 of the world’s most prolific gas-emitting volcanoes and provided a new estimate of the total flux of carbon from volcanic outgassing. In photo: Tobias Fischer, University of New Mexico, USA. Credit: Carlos Ramirez Umana, Servicio Geologic Ambiental, Costa Rica. Download at http://bit.ly/DCOVolcano

Volcanic eruptions bring diamonds to the surface. These “super-deep” diamonds were found in the Juina area of Brazil and grew at depths of depths of 660 kilometers or more in the mantle. The diamonds contain a range of inclusions of rare mantle minerals, some never previously observed in their natural state. Credit: Graham Pearson, University of Alberta, Canada Download at http://bit.ly/DCOmanydiamonds

The GPlates software (http://www.gplates.org) has been adapted to reconstruct and explore the tectonic sources and sinks of carbon on Earth over geological timescales. This image shows a tectonic reconstruction at 55 million years ago, during the final closure of the gateway of the ancient equatorial Tethyan ocean. Colors highlight areas where carbon is exchanged between shallow and deep Earth reservoirs.

Credit: Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney, Australia Download at http://bit.ly/DCOPlates

The resilience of microbes is unmatched. DCO researchers found them surviving–sometimes thriving–in the most extreme environments. Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, the purplish-blue rod-shaped cells (just a few microns long), for example, lives 2.8 kilometers beneath Earth’s surface at Mponeng Gold Mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. It survives on hydrogen produced by water-rock interactions. Credit: Gaetan Borgonie, ELJ, Belgium. Download at http://bit.ly/DCODeepLife

Basalt eruptions, mammoth compared to this one in Iceland in 2014, have occurred at times through Earth’s history, causing large-scale perturbations to the deep carbon cycle and mass extinctions. Credit: Robert White, University of Cambridge, UK. Download at http://bit.ly/2p7kHAk

* * * * *

News release in full, click here

Coverage highlights:

Scientists update estimates of Earth’s immense interior carbon reservoirs, and how much carbon Deep Earth naturally swallows and exhales

• 10-year Deep Earth study advances knowledge, delineates limits;
• Do volcanoes send up chemical warnings days before they erupt?
• Carbon catastrophes: Earth has seen a few of them before; they don’t end well for life

Volcanoes, colliding and spreading continental and oceanic plates, and other phenomena re-studied with innovative high-tech tools, provide important fresh insights to Earth’s innermost workings, scientists say.

Preparing to summarize and celebrate the 10-year Deep Carbon Observatory program at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, Oct. 24-26, DCO’s 500-member Reservoirs and Fluxes team today outlined several key findings that span time from the present to billions of years past; from Earth’s core to its atmosphere, and in size from single volcanoes to the five continents.

Among many wide-ranging findings, outlined and summarized in a series of papers published in the journal Elements:

• Just two-tenths of 1% of Earth’s total carbon — about 43,500 gigatonnes (Gt) — is above surface in the oceans, on land, and in the atmosphere. The rest is subsurface, including the crust, mantle and core — an estimated 1.85 billion Gt in all
• CO2 out-gassed to the atmosphere and oceans today from volcanoes and other magmatically active regions is estimated at 280 to 360 million tonnes (0.28 to 0.36 Gt) per year, including that released into the oceans from mid-ocean ridges
• Humanity’s annual carbon emissions through the burning of fossil fuels and forests, etc., are 40 to 100 times greater than all volcanic emissions
• Earth’s deep carbon cycle through deep time reveals balanced, long-term stability of atmospheric CO2, punctuated by large disturbances, including immense, catastrophic releases of magma that occurred at least five times in the past 500 million years. During these events, huge volumes of carbon were outgassed, leading to a warmer atmosphere, acidified oceans. and mass extinctions
• Similarly, a giant meteor impact 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub bolide strike on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, released between 425 and 1,400 Gt of CO2, rapidly warmed the planet and coincided with the mass (>75%) extinction of plants and animals — including the dinosaurs. Over the past 100 years, emissions from anthropogenic activities such as burning fossil fuels have been 40 to 100 times greater than our planet’s geologic carbon emissions
• A shift in the composition of volcanic gases from smelly (akin to burnt matches) sulphur dioxide (SO2) to a gas richer in odorless, colorless CO2 can be sniffed out by monitoring stations or drones to forewarn of an eruption — sometimes hours, sometimes months in advance. Eruption early warning systems with real-time monitoring are moving ahead to exploit the CO2 to SO2 ratio discovery, first recognized with certainty in 2014

Says DCO scientist Marie Edmonds of the University of Cambridge, UK: “Carbon, the basis of all life and the energy source vital to humanity, moves through this planet from its mantle to the atmosphere. To secure a sustainable future, it is of utmost importance that we understand Earth’s entire carbon cycle.”

“Key to unraveling the planet’s natural carbon cycle is quantifying how much carbon there is and where, how much moves — the flux — and how quickly, from Deep Earth reservoirs to the surface and back again.”

Adds colleague Tobias Fischer of the University of New Mexico, USA: “The Deep Carbon Observatory has advanced understanding of the inner workings of Earth. Its collective body of more than 1500 publications has not only increased what is known but established limits to what is knowable, and perhaps unknowable.”

“While we celebrate progress, we underline that deep Earth remains a highly unpredictable scientific frontier; we have truly only started to dent current boundaries of our knowledge.”

How Much Carbon does Earth Contain?

Scientists have long known that carbon inside Earth exists as a diverse array of solids, fluids, and gases. Some of these materials involve combinations of carbon with oxygen (e.g. carbon dioxide), with iron (e.g., carbides), with hydrogen (e.g., kerogen, coal, petroleum, and methane), and other elements (e.g., silicon, sulfur, and nitrogen), in addition to elemental carbon (e.g., graphite and diamond).

Deep Carbon Observatory scientists underline that knowledge of total carbon in lower mantle and core is still speculative and the numbers are sure to evolve in accuracy as research continues. That said, experts (notably Lee et al., 2019) estimate reservoirs of carbon on Earth as follows:

By the numbers: Best current estimates, carbon on Earth 

1.85 billion gigatonnes (1.85 x 1 billion x 1 billion tonnes): Total carbon on Earth

Breakdown:

• 1,845,000,000 (1.845 billion) Gt: total carbon below surface
• 1,500,000,000 (1.5 billion) Gt: Carbon in the lower mantle:
• 315,000,000 (0.315 billion) Gt: Carbon in the continental and oceanic lithospheres
• 30,000,000 (0.03 billion) Gt: Carbon in the upper mantle

• 43,500 Gt: total carbon above surface — in the oceans, on land, and in the atmosphere (2/10ths of 1% of Earth’s total carbon)
• 37,000 Gt: Carbon in the deep ocean (85.1% of all above surface carbon)
• 3,000 Gt: Carbon in marine sediments (6.9%)
• 2,000 Gt: Carbon in the terrestrial biosphere (4.6%)
• 900 Gt Carbon in the surface ocean (2%)
• 590 Gt: Carbon in the atmosphere (1.4%)

Release of CO2 from volcanoes

Earth’s total annual out-gassing of CO2 via volcanoes and through other geological processes such as the heating of limestone in mountain belts is newly estimated by DCO experts at roughly 300 to 400 million metric tonnes (0.3 to 0.4 Gt).

Volcanoes and volcanic regions alone outgas an estimated 280-360 million tonnes (0.28 to 0.36 Gt) of CO2 per year. This includes the CO2 contribution from active volcanic vents, from the diffuse, widespread release of CO2 through soils, faults, and fractures in volcanic regions, volcanic lakes, and from the mid-ocean ridge system.

In many world regions, tectonic outgassing (emissions from mountain belts and other plate boundaries), particularly in cool night temperatures, can cause dangerous levels of CO2 close to the ground — enough to suffocate livestock.

According to DCO researchers, with rare exceptions over millions of years the quantity of carbon released from Earth’s mantle has been in relative balance with the quantity returned through the downward subduction of tectonic plates and other processes.

Carbon catastrophes

While the volume of carbon buried through subduction and what’s released from volcanoes and tectonic fractures are normally in steady state, about four times over the past 500 million years this balance has been upended by the emergence of large volcanic events — 1 million or more square kilometers (the area of Canada) of magma released within a timeframe of a few tens of thousands of years up to 1 million years.

These “large igneous provinces” degassed enormous volumes of carbon (estimated at up to 30,000 Gt — equal to about 70% of the estimated 43,500 Gt of carbon above surface today).

Carbon cycle imbalance can cause rapid global warming, changes to the silicate weathering rate, changes to the hydrologic cycle, and overall rapid habitat changes that can cause mass extinction as the Earth rebalances itself.

Similar carbon catastrophes have been caused by asteroids / meteors (bolides), such as the massive Chixculub impact in the Yucatan area of Central America 65 million years ago — an event to which extinction of the dinosaurs and most other plants and animals of the time has been attributed.

According to Australian researchers Balz Kamber and Joseph Petrus: “The Chicxulub event … greatly disrupted the budget of climate-active gases in the atmosphere, leading to short-term abrupt cooling and medium-term strong warming.”

“Thus, some large bolide impacts are comparable to those observed in the Anthropocene in terms of rapidly disrupting the C (carbon) cycle and potentially exceeding a critical size of perturbation.”

Wiring up volcanoes

DCO experts estimate that about 400 of the 1500 volcanoes active since the last Ice Age 11,700 years ago are venting CO2 today. Another 670 could be producing diffuse emissions, with 102 already documented. Of these, 22 ancient volcanoes that have not erupted since Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million years ago to the Ice Age) are outgassing. Thus all volcanoes, the young and very old, may be emitting CO2.

Today’s CO2, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide emissions rates are now quantified for many of the world’s most active volcanoes thanks in part to the development of miniature, durable, inexpensive instruments.

And several volcanoes have been wired up with permanent gas instrument monitoring stations to obtain real time data readings, improving monitoring by governments and universities in the USA, Italy, Costa Rica, and elsewhere. About 30 collaboratively operated gas-monitoring stations on volcanoes across five continents now exist, which continually monitor emissions.

Pioneered by scientists with DCO’s DECADE (Deep Earth Carbon DEgassing) subgroup, the technologies and installations have helped revolutionize data collection within inaccessible or dangerous volcanic places. The data obtained are combined with readings from long-established ground and satellite systems.

Recent research has revealed the number of volcanoes thought to be out-gassing measurable amounts of CO2 today. Estimated at 150 in 2013, DECADE researchers confirm that more than 200 volcanic systems emitted measurable volumes of CO2 between the years 2005 and 2017. Of these, several super-regions of diffuse degassing have been documented (e.g., Yellowstone, USA, the East African Rift, Africa, and the Technong volcanic province in China, to name a few). Diffuse degassing is now recognized as a CO2 source comparable to active volcanic vents.

Among the DCO’s legacies: a new database (http://www.magadb.net) to capture information on CO2 fluxes from volcanic and non-volcanic sources around the world.

Volcanic whispers: Changes in ratio of vented SO2 to CO2 can forewarn of eruptions

Research at a growing number of well-monitored volcanoes worldwide has provided important new insight about the timing of eruptions relative to the composition of volcanic outgassing.

Year-round monitoring at five volcanoes revealed that the level of carbon dioxide relative to sulfur dioxide in volcanic gases systematically changes in the hours to months before an eruption. Volcanoes where such patterns have been documented include Poas (Costa Rica), Etna and Stromboli (Italy), Villarica (Chile), and Masaya (Nicaragua). (See also http://bit.ly/2Ssk2UN).

Likewise the CO2 to SO2 ratio changed dramatically months to years prior to large eruptions at Kilauea (Hawaii) and Redoubt Volcano (Alaska), in the USA, suggesting that monitoring gas composition, often in invisible plumes, offers a new eruption forecasting tool that, in some cases, precedes increases in volcano seismicity or ground deformation.

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Comments

“Carbon, the sixth element, plays unique roles in our dynamic and evolving planet. It provides the chemical foundation for life, it serves as the primary source of our energy needs, it inspires a host of remarkable new materials, and it plays a disproportionate role in Earth’s uncertain, changeable climate and environment. These multi-faceted aspects of carbon have inspired decades of intensive research, most of which has focused on the near-surface carbon cycle–the oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere that display rapid changes and that are most influenced by human activities. Deep carbon research takes a longer-term, global view by considering the estimated 90 percent of Earth’s carbon that is hidden from view in the planet’s interior. We explore the forms, quantities, movements, and origins of carbon sequestered in Earth’s inaccessible core, cycling in the deep mantle, reacting in deep fluids, and lurking in a fascinating subsurface biosphere. We cannot understand carbon in Earth–we cannot place the changeable surface world in context–without the necessary baseline provided by deep carbon research.”
– Robert H. Hazen, Executive Director, Deep Carbon Observatory; Senior Staff Scientist, Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory; Author: Symphony in C, Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything

“For billions of years, Earth seems to have found a balance between carbon subducted deep into the interior and carbon emitted from volcanoes – processes that help to stabilize climate and environment. But how stable is that incessant cycling? No natural law requires that the amount of carbon going down … must exactly equal the carbon returned to the surface by volcanoes and other less violent means. No question is more central to the Deep Carbon Observatory than this balance between what goes down and what comes back up.”
– Cin-Ty Lee, Rice University, USA

“Earth is unique among the planets in our solar system in that it has liquid water at its surface, fosters life, and has active plate tectonics. Identifying all linkages between these phenomena serve as important steps in humanities enduring quest to understand the origins of Earth-like habitability. One absolute certainly, however, is that carbon plays a governing role. For example, Earth’s clement environment is related to atmospheric chemistry, which is warm enough to stabilize liquid water at its surface but cold enough to permit plate tectonics, and it is an incontrovertible fact that the carbon content of our atmosphere and oceans are directly linked with Earth’s climate”
– Sami Mikhail, University of St Andrews, U.K. 

” Important DCO outputs are steady-state models with powerful new data to evaluate the contemporary fluxes between carbon reservoirs in the deep Earth and their effects on everything from the evolution of life to the air we breathe. Armed with this understanding, we can better evaluate perturbations to, or non-linearities in, the Earth system through deep time.”
– Celina Suarez, University of Arkansas, USA

“We have achieved a much more complete picture of volcanic carbon dioxide degassing on Earth, reinforcing the importance of active volcanoes, but discovering that the subtle release over large hydrothermal provinces and areas of continental rifting are also dominant regions of planetary outgassing.”
– Cynthia Werner, Contractor, United States Geological Survey

Appendix:

Deep Carbon 2019: Launching the Next Decade of Deep Carbon Science
24-26 October, U.S. National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC

The Deep Carbon Observatory’s four communities:

Reservoirs and Fluxes

Decadal Goals

• Establish open access, continuous information streams on volcanic gas emission and related activity.
• Determine the chemical forms and distribution of carbon in Earth’s deepest interior.
• Determine seafloor carbon budget and global rates of carbon input into subduction zones.
• Estimate the net direction and magnitude of tectonic carbon fluxes from the mantle and crust to the atmosphere.
• Develop a robust overarching global carbon cycle model through deep time, including the earliest Earth, and coevolution of the geosphere and biosphere.
• Produce quantitative models of global carbon cycling at various scales, and the planetary scale (mantle convection), tectonic scale (subduction zone, orogeny, rift, volcano), and reservoir scale (core, mantle, crust, hydrosphere).

Guiding Questions

• How much carbon is contained in Earth?
• How much carbon is emitted from active volcanoes and active tectonic areas?
• How is carbon recycled between the atmosphere and Earth’s crust, mantle, and core?
• What are the chemical forms of carbon in deep Earth, and how are they distributed?
• What is the nature of the whole Earth carbon cycle and how has it changed over Earth’s history?

By the numbers

• 504 scientists
• 39 countries
• 102 projects
• 372 publications

Participating Research Institutions

• Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
• INGV, Italy
• National University of Costa Rica/Observatorio Vulcanológico y Sismológico de Costa Rica/Universidad de Costa Rica
• Rabaul Volcanological Observatory, Papua New Guinea
• University of Bayreuth, Germany
• University of Bristol, UK
• University of Cambridge, UK
• University of Heidelberg, Germany
• University of Mainz, Germany
• University of New Mexico, US
• University of Palermo, Italy
• University of Padua, Italy
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, USA
• University College London, UK
• University of Arkansas, USA
• University of Sydney, Australia
• University of Alberta, Canada
• Carnegie Institution for Science, USA
• Gemological Institute of America, USA
• US Geological Survey, USA

https://deepcarbon.net/community/reservoirs-and-fluxes

Deep Energy

Dedicated to developing a fundamental understanding of environments and processes that regulate the volume and rates of production of abiogenic hydrocarbons and other organic species in the crust and mantle through geological time.

Decadal goal, guiding questions:

https://deepcarbon.net/communities/deep-energy

Extreme Physics And Chemistry

Dedicated to improving our understanding of the physical and chemical behavior of carbon at extreme conditions, as found in the deep interiors of Earth and other planets.

Decadal goal, guiding questions:

https://deepcarbon.net/index.php/community/extreme-physics-and-chemistry

Deep Life

Dedicated to assessing the nature and extent of the deep microbial and viral biosphere.

Decadal goal, guiding questions:

https://deepcarbon.net/index.php/community/deep-life

Selected papers, DCO Reservoirs and Fluxes:

• Fischer et al (2019) Science Advances (in review)
• Tamburello G, Pondrelli S, Chiodini G, Rouwet D (2018) Global-scale control of extensional tectonics on CO2 earth degassing. Nature Communications doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-07087-z
• de Moor JM, Aiuppa A, Pacheco J, Avard G, Kern C, Liuzzo M, Martínez M, Giudice G, Fischer TP (2016) Short-period volcanic gas precursors to phreatic eruptions: Insights from Poás Volcano, Costa Rica. Earth and Planetary Science Letters doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2016.02.056
• McCormick Kilbride B, Edmonds M, Biggs J (2016) Observing eruptions of gas-rich, compressible magmas from space. Nature Communications doi:10.1038/ncomms13744
• Johansson L, Zahirovic S, Müller RD (2018) The interplay between the eruption and weathering of Large Igneous Provinces and the deep-time carbon cycle. Geophysical Research Letters doi: 10.1029/2017GL076691
• Kelemen PB, Manning CE (2015) Reevaluating carbon fluxes in subduction zones, what goes down, mostly comes up. PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1507889112
• Elements special issue on Catastrophic Perturbations of Earth’s Carbon Cycle. In press, due 1 October 2019. Papers can be previewed at http://bit.ly/2mzTR2s
• Werner C, Fischer TP, Aiuppa A, Edmonds M, Cardellini C, Carn S, Chiodini G, Cottrell E, Burton M, Shinohara H, Allard P (2019) Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Subaerial Volcanic Regions: Two Decades in Review. Deep Carbon: Past to Present. Cambridge University Press
• Hauri EH, Cottrell E, Kelley KA, Tucker JM, Shimizu K, Le Voyer M, Marske J, Saal AE (2019) Carbon in the Convecting Mantle. Deep Carbon: Past to Present. Cambridge University Press
• Lee C-T A, Jiang H, Dasgupta R, Torres M (2019) A Framework for Understanding Whole-Earth Carbon Cycling. Deep Carbon: Past to Present. Cambridge University Press

Coverage highlights

Not all methane originated in buried, decayed remains of ancient life; some deep hydrocarbons aren’t conventional ‘fossil fuels’ as popularly defined; Abiotic methane: catalyst and nourishment for the earliest life on this planet — and others?

Looking for methane results in more questions than answers – geology and biology work together to make energy

Experts say scientific understanding of deep hydrocarbons has been transformed, with new insights gained into the sources of energy that could have catalyzed and nurtured Earth’s earliest forms of life.

During the past hundred years scientists worked out in detail how hydrocarbons – “fossil fuels” drawn from reservoirs in Earth’s crust to heat and power homes, vehicles, and industry – have a biotic origin, derived from the buried plants, animals, and algae of eons past.

But for some hydrocarbons, especially methane – the colorless, odorless main ingredient in natural gas – nature has many recipes, some of which are “abiotic” – derived not from the decay of prehistoric life, but created inorganically by geological and chemical processes deep within the Earth.

Abiotic hydrocarbons have been a major focus of the Deep Energy community of the Deep Carbon Observatory program – a 10-year exploration of Earth’s innermost secrets, concluding in October.

DCO experts believe an abiotic origin of methane explains most of the unusual occurrences of the gas, including the flames of Chimaera in southwest Turkey.

Chimaera does not sit atop conventional deposits of oil and gas produced from the decayed organic residue of earlier epochs. And yet, dozens of small fires have burned at this mountaintop site for millennia.

Ancient explanations for the flames included the breath of a monster – part lion, part goat, part snake. The less colorful scientific reason: highly flammable abiotic methane and hydrogen rising to Earth’s surface from deep below.

Chimaera is among the most photogenic and famed of now hundreds of sites where abiotic sources of methane have been found in more than 20 countries and in several deep ocean regions so far.

DCO collaborator Giuseppe Etiope of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Rome has documented the Chimaera site and several other environments at which unusual occurrences of methane have been found, including:

• Ancient Precambrian shields – rock at the core of the continents formed as much as 3 billion years ago
• On the ocean floor (e.g., high-temperature vents on and near mid-ocean ridges and belching mud volcanoes)
• On continents (seeps and hyper-alkaline springs and aquifers).

While diverse rock types are present in all these environments, he notes, many discoveries have focused on places with specific, suitable types of “ultramafic” rocks such as peridotite (a coarse-grained igneous rock) included in massifs and ophiolites (ensembles of rocks formed from the submarine eruption of oceanic crustal and upper mantle material).

Earth’s abiotic methane is now thought mainly to derive chemically from the hydrogen created by the hydration of ultramafic rocks undergoing “serpentinization” — a reaction that occurs when water meets the mineral olivine.

Hydrogen also nourishes biological sources of methane. DCO researchers have documented a vast microbial ecosystem — a deep biosphere fed by hydrogen. Many of the deep microbes, called methanogens, metabolize hydrogen to produce methane.

The deep biosphere has therefore posed a chicken and egg scenario: which came first, abiotic methane or microbes? If abiotic methane came first, as seems obvious, did it give rise to Earth’s first microbes? And if microbes came first, how and why did they inhabit places almost devoid of sustenance?

A decadal goal: sort out the origins of methane on Earth

When the Deep Carbon Observatory project began in 2009, DCO’s Deep Energy community – now made up of more than 230 researchers from 35 nations, set the decadal goal of sorting out the origins of methane on Earth.

Some hypothesized that unusual methane reservoirs – i.e., those that could not be biotic in origin – must form through chemical reactions occurring in the surrounding rocks.

Others suggested that microbes contributed to methane production in some reservoirs, metabolizing hydrogen to create methane in an entirely different process.

Others hypothesized that methane might originate deeper in Earth, in the upper mantle, and diffuse up toward the surface. (At Moscow’s Gubkin University, researcher Vladimir Kutcherov is leading experiments to test the production of methane in lab-simulated high-pressure conditions of Earth’s upper mantle).

Early in its mandate the DCO made the decision to invest in new analytical instrumentation to overcome some of the limitations to deciphering the origin of methane.

With strategic investment in instrumentation and numerous field samples, DCO partners set out to pioneer new investigative tools to distinguish Earth’s biotic from abiotic methane.

In 2014, three new instruments came online with the potential to change the face of deep carbon science, and they have not disappointed, says Edward Young, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), co-leader of DCO’s Deep Energy Community with Isabelle Daniel of the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in Lyon, France.

Using complementary techniques of mass spectrometry and absorption spectroscopy, scientists at UCLA, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena CA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge MA, are analyzing natural methane samples to better understand how abiotic methane may be produced.

“A molecule of methane (CH4) appears remarkably simple, made up of only five atoms,” says Dr. Young. “Rare isotopes of both hydrogen and carbon are occasionally incorporated into methane molecules, however, and the frequency of these ‘heavy’ isotopes reveals the secret of how they formed and at what temperatures.”

Of particular diagnostic value are methane molecules that contain more than one “heavy” isotope (“clumped isotopes”). These molecules are extremely rare and can only be distinguished by instruments with extremely high mass resolution, sensitivity, and power.

DCO collaborators used samples of gases collected from Chimaera, the deep mines of Canada, the Oman ophiolite, hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, and additional sites, and were surprised by what they found.

Though interpreting the data is challenging, it appears microbes may be doing more than originally thought.

How much abiotic methane?

“We see curious biological fingerprints in samples that otherwise appear to have an abiotic signature,” says Dr. Daniel. “It seems microbes know how to use these abiotic compounds as fuel.”

“We have clear and growing evidence of abiotic methane on Earth. What is not clear is how much there is. These investigations have found incredible complexity in the way methane is produced, and these complexities connect inorganic and organic chemistry on Earth in fascinating ways.”

Adds Dr. Young: “We went into this project thinking we knew how abiotic methane formed. What we’re learning is that it is much more complicated, and the biggest key is hydrogen. With greater understanding of how rocks make the hydrogen from which methane derives, and how fast this reaction happens, we’ll be a lot closer to knowing how much methane there is on Earth.”

Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University in New York notes that the popular definition of “fossil fuel” doesn’t cover abiotic methane.

“Thousands of samples from many settings tested with super-sensitive instruments are producing a global picture of the abundances and fluxes of deep energy. Much of the very deep hydrocarbons is not conventional fossil fuel, as popularly defined.” *

(* Wikipedia: “Fossil fuel is a fuel formed by natural processes, such as anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, containing energy originating in ancient photosynthesis. The age of the organisms and their resulting fossil fuels is typically millions of years, and sometimes exceeds 650 million years.” http://bit.ly/2D2vAHK)

The behaviors of biotic and abiotic methane, it should be noted, in terms of energy output and emissions when burned, are indistinguishable.

Key findings to date:

• Thanks to new instruments, scientists have identified new isotope signatures in methane to help determine its provenance – an impossibility 10 years ago
• The serpentinization reaction is better understood and is one of several ways Earth’s rocks produce molecular hydrogen – a key source of geologic energy for the deep biosphere
• That hydrogen reacts with carbon dioxide to produce methane was long known. How this happens in Earth’s crust, however, is highly complex, and many other organic molecules are created as byproducts in the process. These molecules can be used by microbes as a food source. They also represent intriguing clues as to the origins of life on Earth, as these organic molecules may be precursors for the building blocks of life (e.g., amino acids)
• With similar conditions and reactions likely on other planets and moons (e.g., the subsurface of Mars or on the ocean floor of Enceladus), it strengthens the potential identification of where life may exist elsewhere in the universe
• Studies of serpentinizing systems have found other abiotic hydrocarbons in addition to methane.

Future implications:

These investigations into how abiotic methane forms on Earth are not the end of the story, but rather the beginning.

The last 10 years have seen transformational changes in our understanding of the origins of methane on Earth and its pivotal role in sustaining the deep biosphere, providing a glimpse into the geological processes that could have set the stage for life.

With these new discoveries, we are poised to answer numerous big questions, such as:

• How much abiotic methane is being produced in Earth?
• How much methane do the microbes of Earth’s deep biosphere produce?
• How much do the microbes consume?
• What are movements and fates of abiotic methane?
  and
• Where is abiotic methane stored and for how long?

The success of the project’s research has not only changed perceptions of energy generation in deep Earth, but also about how life may have found a foothold on our planet.

And if abiotic energy does occur on Earth, how likely is it that similar reactions and life have occurred elsewhere in the cosmos?

This Deep Energy research released today is a result of the Deep Carbon Observatory program, which will issue its final report in October 2019 after a decade of work by a global community of more than 1000 scientists to better understand the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of carbon inside Earth.

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Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the DCO sheds unprecedented light on Earth’s highly active subterranean environment, including the secrets of volcanoes and diamonds, sources of oil and gas, and the origins of life itself, contributing to new understanding of this and other planets.

Comments

“Methane is the most abundant and obvious abiotic organic compound detected so far on Earth, but we are far from having described the potentially large diversity of compounds that may form in the recesses of the rocks and the pathways that led to their formation.”
Bénédicte Menez, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris

“We have a good understanding of how methane forms on Earth, and we have made progress in identifying distinguishing features of methane molecules. What we do not know or fully understand is how much methane on Earth was produced abiotically.”
Taras Bryndzia, Shell geoscientist

“As we start to uncover the fingerprint patterns of methane isotopologues (molecules that differ only in their isotopic composition) formed through various pathways, much remains unclear. To better assess the quantity of abiotic methane on Earth requires efforts to expand the search for abiotic signatures in various geological settings as well as to identify the controls of abiotic and methanogenic / methanotrophic reactions on the unique fingerprints from the laboratory perspective. The integration of field and experimental observations would also place important constraints to investigate the early life on Earth and methane formation in other extraterrestrial bodies.”
Lihung Lin, National University Taiwan

“Space exploration has clearly shown that methane unrelated to biological processes is widespread. NASA’s probe to Titan confirmed lakes of methane (with some higher hydrocarbons) fed by methane rains. An exciting area on Earth for future abiotic methane research is the giant presalt petroleum reserves of the Santos Basin offshore Brazil, with its hyper-extended serpentinizing mantle lithosphere.”
Peter Szatmari, Geologist, Petróleo Brasileiro, Brazil

The Deep Carbon Observatory communities

Deep Energy

aims:

• Understand the origins of methane on Earth;
• Investigate the importance of geochemical reactions in generating life-sustaining deep energy
• Investigate how the conditions of deep Earth could give rise to organic and biologically relevant compounds
• Develop novel instruments to differentiate between different isotopologues of methane
• Define the unknown and unknowable, priorities for the next decade, such as quantification of reservoirs and fluxes of abiotic methane

Extreme Physics And Chemistry

Dedicated to improving our understanding of the physical and chemical behavior of carbon at extreme conditions, as found in the deep interiors of Earth and other planets.

Reservoirs And Fluxes

Dedicated to identifying deep carbon reservoirs, determining how carbon moves among these reservoirs, and assessing Earth’s total carbon budget.

Deep Life

Dedicated to assessing the nature and extent of the deep microbial and viral biosphere.

Selected papers

The contribution of the Precambrian continental lithosphere to global H2 production
Sherwood Lollar, B., Onstott, T.C., Lacrampe-Couloume, G., and Ballentine, C.J. (2014). Nature516 (7531): 379-382.

Formation temperatures of thermogenic and biogenic methane
Stolper DA, Lawson M, Davis CL, Ferreira AA, Santos Neto EV, Ellis GS, Lewan MD, Martini AM, Tang Y, Schoell M, Sessions AL, Eiler JM (2014). Science 344:1500-1503

Measurement of a doubly-substituted methane isotopologue, 13CH3D, by tunable infrared laser direct absorption spectroscopy
Ono S, Wang DT, Gruen DS, Sherwood Lollar B, Zahniser M, McManus BJ, Nelson DD (2014), Analytical Chemistry, 86:6487-6494

Panorama, a new gas source, electron impact, double-focusing, multi-collector mass spectrometer for the measurement of isotopologues in geochemistry
Young ED, Freedman P, Rumble D, Schauble E (2014), 7th International Symposium on Isotopomers (ISI2014), Tokyo, Japan

The relative abundances of resolved 12CH2D2 and 13CH3D and mechanisms controlling isotopic bond ordering in abiotic and biotic methane gases
Young E.D., Kohl I.E., Sherwood Lollar B., Etiope G., Rumble III D., Li S., Haghnegahdar M.A., Schauble E.A., McCain K.A., Foustoukos D.I., Sutclife C., Warr O., Ballentine C.J., Onstott T.C., Hosgormez H., Neubeck A., Marques J.M., Pérez-Rodríguez I., Rowe A.R., LaRowe D.E., Magnabosco C., Yeung L.Y., Ash J.L., Bryndzia L.T. (2017). Geoch. Cosmochim. Acta, 203, 235-264.

Natural gas seepage, the Earth’s Hydrocarbon Degassing
G. Etiope. (2015), Springer, Switzerland

Widespread abiotic methane in chromitites
Etiope G., Ifandi E., Nazzari M., Procesi M., Tsikouras B., Ventura G., Steele A., Tardini R., Szatmari P. (2018). Scientific Reports, 8, 8728, doi:10.1038/s41598-018-27082-0.

Massive production of abiotic methane during subduction evidenced in metamorphosed ophicarbonates from the Italian Alps
Vitale Brovarone A, Martinez I, Elmaleh A, Compagnoni R, Chaduteau C, Ferraris C, Esteve I (2017). Nature Communications 8:14134 doi: 10.1038/ncomms14134

Abiotic formation of condensed carbonaceous matter in the hydrating oceanic crust
Sforna MC, Brunelli D, Pisapia C, Pasini V, Malferrari D, Ménez B. (2018). Nature Communications doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-07385-6

Abiotic synthesis of amino acids in the recesses of the oceanic lithosphere
Ménez B, Pisapia C, Andreani M, Jamme F, Vanbellingen QP, Brunelle A, Richard L, Dumas P, Réfrégiers M. (2018). Nature doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0684-z

Abiotic methane on Earth
Etiope G, Sherwood Lollar B (2013). Reviews of Geophysics doi:10.1002/rog.20011

Formation of abiotic hydrocarbon from reduction of carbonate in subduction zones: Constraints from petrological observation and experimental simulation
Tao R, Zhang L, Tian M, Zhu J, Liu X, Liu J, Höfer HE, Stagno V, Fei Y (2018) Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 239:390 doi: 10.1016/j.gca.2018.08.008

Immiscible hydrocarbon fluids in the deep carbon cycle
Huang, F., Daniel I., Cardon H., Montagnac G., Sverjensky D. (2017) Nature Communications8:15798 doi: 10.1038/ncomms1579

Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper-mantle conditions
A. Kolesnikov, V.G. Kutcherov, A.F. Goncharov (2009) Nature Geoscience 2: 566-570

Synthesis of Complex Hydrocarbon Systems at Temperatures and Pressures Corresponding to the Earth’s Upper Mantle Conditions
V.G. Kutcherov, A. Kolesnikov, T.I. Dyugheva, L.F. Kulikova, N.N. Nikolaev, O.A. Sazanova, V.V. Braghkin (2010). Doklady Physical Chemistry 433:132-135

Secretariat: Carnegie Institution for Science
Washington, DC 20015-1305

Coverage highlights

New York Times, Gas That Makes a Mountain Breathe Fire Is Turning Up Around the World, click here

Agencia EFE, Spain El «fuego valyrio» existe: científicos explican por qué arden las «llamas eternas» del monte Quimera, click here

LiveScience, United States, Fire-Breathing Mountain Fueled by Mysterious Deep-Earth Methane Production, click here

Europa Press, Spain, Explicación geofísica al metano que produce las ‘llamas eternas’, click here

The Independent, UK, Gas that makes mountains breathe fire is appearing around the world, click here

Coverage summary, click here

News release in full, click here

Deep Carbon Observatory collaborators, exploring the ‘Galapagos of the deep,’ add to what’s known, unknown, and unknowable about Earth’s most pristine ecosystem

Barely living “zombie” bacteria and other forms of life constitute an immense amount of carbon deep within Earth’s subsurface – 245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface, according to scientists nearing the end of a 10-year international collaboration to reveal Earth’s innermost secrets.

On the eve of the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, scientists with the Deep Carbon Observatory today reported several transformational discoveries, including how much and what kinds of life exist in the deep subsurface under the greatest extremes of pressure, temperature, and low nutrient availability.

Drilling 2.5 kilometers into the seafloor, and sampling microbes from continental mines and boreholes more than 5 km deep, scientists have used the results to construct models of the ecosystem deep within the planet.

With insights from now hundreds of sites under the continents and seas, they have approximated the size of the deep biosphere – 2 to 2.3 billion cubic km (almost twice the volume of all oceans) – as well as the carbon mass of deep life: 15 to 23 billion tonnes (an average of at least 7.5 tonnes of carbon per cu km subsurface).

The work also helps determine types of extraterrestrial environments that could support life.

Among many key discoveries and insights:

• The deep biosphere constitutes a world that can be viewed as a sort of “subterranean Galapagos” and includes members of all three domains of life: bacteria and archaea (microbes with no membrane-bound nucleus), and eukarya (microbes or multicellular organisms with cells that contain a nucleus as well as membrane-bound organelles)
• Two types of microbes – bacteria and archaea – dominate Deep Earth. Among them are millions of distinct types, most yet to be discovered or characterized. This so-called microbial “dark matter” dramatically expands our perspective on the tree of life. Deep Life scientists say about 70% of Earth’s bacteria and archaea live in the subsurface
• Deep microbes are often very different from their surface cousins, with life cycles on near-geologic timescales, dining in some cases on nothing more than energy from rocks
• The genetic diversity of life below the surface is comparable to or exceeds that above the surface
• While subsurface microbial communities differ greatly between environments, certain genera and higher taxonomic groups are ubiquitous – they appear planet-wide
• Microbial community richness relates to the age of marine sediments where cells are found – suggesting that in older sediments, food energy has declined over time, reducing the microbial community
• The absolute limits of life on Earth in terms of temperature, pressure, and energy availability have yet to be found. The records continually get broken. A frontrunner for Earth’s hottest organism in the natural world is Geogemma barossii, a single-celled organism thriving in hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Its cells, tiny microscopic spheres, grow and replicate at 121 degrees Celsius (21 degrees hotter than the boiling point of water). Microbial life can survive up to 122°C, the record achieved in a lab culture (by comparison, the record-holding hottest place on Earth’s surface, in an uninhabited Iranian desert, is about 71°C – the temperature of well-done steak)
• The record depth at which life has been found in the continental subsurface is approximately 5 km; the record in marine waters is 10.5 km from the ocean surface, a depth of extreme pressure; at 4000 meters depth, for example, the pressure is approximately 400 times greater than at sea level
• Scientists have a better understanding of the impact on life in subsurface locations manipulated by humans (e.g., fracked shales, carbon capture and storage)

Ever-increasing accuracy and the declining cost of DNA sequencing, coupled with breakthroughs in deep ocean drilling technologies (pioneered on the Japanese scientific vessel Chikyu, designed to ultimately drill far beneath the seabed in some of the planet’s most seismically-active regions) made it possible for researchers to take their first detailed look at the composition of the deep biosphere.

There are comparable efforts to drill ever deeper beneath continental environments, using sampling devices that maintain pressure to preserve microbial life (none thought to pose any threat or benefit to human health).

To estimate the total mass of Earth’s subcontinental deep life, for example, scientists compiled data on cell concentration and microbial diversity from locations around the globe.

Led by Cara Magnabosco of the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Biology, New York, and an international team of researchers, subsurface scientists factored in a suite of considerations, including global heat flow, surface temperature, depth and lithology – the physical characteristics of rocks in each location – to estimate that the continental subsurface hosts 2 to 6 × 10^29 cells.

Combined with estimates of subsurface life under the oceans, total global Deep Earth biomass is approximately 15 to 23 petagrams (15 to 23 billion tonnes) of carbon.

Says Mitch Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole, USA, co-chair of DCO’s Deep Life community of more than 300 researchers in 34 countries: “Exploring the deep subsurface is akin to exploring the Amazon rainforest. There is life everywhere, and everywhere there’s an awe-inspiring abundance of unexpected and unusual organisms.

“Molecular studies raise the likelihood that microbial dark matter is much more diverse than what we currently know it to be, and the deepest branching lineages challenge the three-domain concept introduced by Carl Woese in 1977. Perhaps we are approaching a nexus where the earliest possible branching patterns might be accessible through deep life investigation.

“Ten years ago, we knew far less about the physiologies of the bacteria and microbes that dominate the subsurface biosphere,” says Karen Lloyd, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA. “Today, we know that, in many places, they invest most of their energy to simply maintaining their existence and little into growth, which is a fascinating way to live.

“Today too, we know that subsurface life is common. Ten years ago, we had sampled only a few sites – the kinds of places we’d expect to find life. Now, thanks to ultra-deep sampling, we know we can find them pretty much everywhere, albeit the sampling has obviously reached only an infinitesimally tiny part of the deep biosphere.”

“Our studies of deep biosphere microbes have produced much new knowledge, but also a realization and far greater appreciation of how much we have yet to learn about subsurface life,” says Rick Colwell, Oregon State University, USA. “For example, scientists do not yet know all the ways in which deep subsurface life affects surface life and vice versa. And, for now, we can only marvel at the nature of the metabolisms that allow life to survive under the extremely impoverished and forbidding conditions for life in deep Earth.”

Among the many remaining enigmas of deep life on Earth:

Movement: How does deep life spread – laterally through cracks in rocks? Up, down? How can deep life be so similar in South Africa and Seattle, Washington? Did they have similar origins and were separated by plate tectonics, for example? Or do the communities themselves move? What roles do big geological events (such as plate tectonics, earthquakes; creation of large igneous provinces; meteoritic bombardments) play in deep life movements?

Origins: Did life start deep in Earth (either within the crust, near hydrothermal vents, or in subduction zones) then migrate up, toward the sun? Or did life start in a warm little surface pond and migrate down? How do subsurface microbial zombies reproduce, or live without dividing for millions to tens of millions of years?

Energy: Is methane, hydrogen, or natural radiation (from uranium and other elements) the most important energy source for deep life? Which sources of deep energy are most important in different settings? How do the absence of nutrients, and extreme temperatures and pressure, impact microbial distribution and diversity in the subsurface?

Comments

“Discoveries regarding the nature and extent of the deep microbial biosphere are among the crowning achievements of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Deep life researchers have opened our eyes to remarkable vistas – emerging views of life that we never knew existed.”
– Robert Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist, Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, and DCO Executive Director

“They are not Christmas ornaments, but the tiny balls and tinsel of deep life look they could decorate a tree as well as Swarovski glass. Why would nature make deep life beautiful when there is no light, no mirrors?”
– Jesse Ausubel, The Rockefeller University, a founder of the DCO

“Deep life probably has an important impact on global biogeochemical cycles, and thus on the surface world. However, we are still far from quantifying this impact.”
– Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, MARUM University of Bremen, Germany

“Even in dark and energetically challenging conditions, intraterrestrial ecosystems have uniquely evolved and persisted over millions of years. Expanding our knowledge of deep life will inspire new insights into planetary habitability, leading us to understand why life emerged on our planet and whether life persists in the Martian subsurface and other celestial bodies.”
– Fumio Inagaki, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology

“While we are far from being able to quantify it, we believe Deep Life has an important impact on global biogeochemical cycles and chemical equilibria in habitable rocks. Deep Life plays a role in aquifer quality, for example, or carbon capture and storage (CCS). Unfortunately, the deep biosphere is very poorly considered in engineering operations carried out in the subsurface. We recently demonstrated the high reactivity of deep biota to CO2 injections (CCS), which ultimately led to the bioclogging of the injection well, and surrounding reservoir.”
– Benedicte Menez, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France

“A decade ago, we had no idea that the rocks beneath our feet could be so vastly inhabited. Experimental investigations told us that microbes could potentially survive to great depth; at that time, we had no evidence, and this has become real ten years later. This is simply fascinating and will surely foster enthusiasm to look for the biotic-abiotic fringe on Earth and elsewhere.”
– Isabelle Daniel, University of Lyon 1, France

###

This Deep Life research is part of the Deep Carbon Observatory program, which will issue its final report in October 2019 after a decade of work by a global community of more than 1000 scientists to better understand the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of carbon inside Earth.

Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the DCO sheds unprecedented light on Earth’s highly active subterranean environment, including the secrets of volcanoes and diamonds, sources of oil and gas, and the origins of life itself, contributing to new understanding of this and other planets.

DCO directly provided a major contribution to opportunities for collaboration between deep subsurface microbiologists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

Mysteries of deep carbon include:

Quantities:

How much carbon is stored inside Earth?
What are the reservoirs of that carbon?

Movements:

How does carbon move among reservoirs?
Where are the most significant carbon fluxes between Earth’s deep interior and the surface?

Origins:

How much rising carbon is primordial and how much is recycled from the surface?
Are there deep abiotic sources of methane and other hydrocarbons?

Forms:

What is the nature and extent of deep microbial life?
Did deep organic chemistry play a role in life’s origins?

The four scientific communities of the Deep Carbon Observatory:

Extreme Physics and Chemistry

Dedicated to improving our understanding of the physical and chemical behavior of carbon at extreme conditions, as found in the deep interiors of Earth and other planets.

Image description

Reservoirs and Fluxes

Dedicated to identifying deep carbon reservoirs, determining how carbon moves among these reservoirs, and assessing Earth’s total carbon budget.

Image description

Deep Energy

Dedicated to understanding the volume and rates of abiogenic hydrocarbons and other organic species in the crust and mantle through geological time.

Deep Life

Dedicated to assessing the nature and extent of the deep microbial and viral biosphere.

Deep Carbon Observatory Secretariat: Carnegie Institution for Science
Washington, DC

Coverage presentation, click here

Coverage hyperlinks:

New York Times, USA (333M) Deep Beneath Your Feet, They Live in the Octillions, click here

Agence France Presse

• Vast, zombie-like microbial life lurks beneath seabed, click here
• French: Les entrailles de la Terre grouillent de vie intraterrestre, click here
• Spanish: Las entrañas de la Tierra están repletas de vida “intraterrestre”, click here
• Portuguese: Entranhas da Terra estão repletas de vida ‘intraterrestre’, click here
• Japanese: 地下深部に広大な「生命体の森」 国際研究で発見, click here

Xinhua, China
Subsurface dark community hundreds of times more than humans: study, click here

The Canadian Press
Eat sulphur, breathe rust: Scientists find life deep underground, click here

Europa Press, Spain
La vida en la Tierra profunda constituye una asombora masa de carbono, click here

Agencia EFE, Spain
Biomasa de la vida subterránea es miles de millones de toneladas de carbono, click here

Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Germany
Tief im Boden leben Millionen verschiedener Mikroben, click here

搜狐新闻-搜狐, (China News Network) China (19,788,227)
地下深处微生物总重量首次测出 是人类总重量385倍_生物圈 (The total weight of microorganisms in the depth of the ground is measured for the first time, which is 385 times the total human weight), click here

RIA News, Russia (19,149,117)
Геологи подсчитали массу «зомби-бактерий» в недрах Земли (Geologists have calculated the mass of “zombie bacteria” in the depths of the Earth), click here

Fars, Iran
Deep Earth: Earth’s Most Pristine Ecosystem, click here

* * * * *

UK

BBC:

• Science in Action (7 minutes, starts just after the introduction), click here
• The scale of life beneath our feet (6 min interview with Bob Hazen, audio), click here
• Newsday (4 minute interview with Karen Lloyd, audio, starts at 43 minutes), click here
• BBC Online: Amount of deep life on Earth quantified, click here
• BBC Mundo: El increíble ecosistema oculto bajo la superficie de la Tierra, click here

Daily Telegraph (22 million)
Earth teeming with strange underground organisms which may be planet’s first inhabitants, click here

The Guardian (1,583,615)
Scientists identify vast underground ecosystem containing billions of micro-organisms, click here

Daily Mail (33,237,767)
Barely living ‘zombie’ bacteria in Deep Earth are made up of 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon – 385 times more than in every human on the planet put together, click here

Metro
Weird ‘alien’ lifeforms living underground could be the real rulers of Planet Earth, click here

Nature (7,844,115)
Daily briefing: Subterranean biosphere contains billions of tonnes of life, click here

The Independent (24,275,324)
Massive ‘deep life’ study reveals billions of tonnes of microbes living far beneath Earth’s surface, click here

The Times (15 million)
Earth’s subterranean ecosystem uncovered, click here

The Sun
BUGS BELOW Barely living ‘ZOMBIE’ bacteria lurking in Deep Earth outweigh humanity by nearly 400 to one, click here

CNET UK (60,946,380)
Scientists discover underworld ecosystem teeming with life, click here

* * * * *

USA

CNN International (14,806,025)
Scientists discover billions of tonnes of ‘zombie’ bacteria inhabits the ground beneath our feet, click here
en Español: Millones de bacterias zombis habitan el suelo bajo nuestros pies, descubren científicos, click here

Science Magazine
Scientists uncover massive, diverse ecosystem deep beneath Earth’s surface, click here

Gizmodo
Deep Earth Is Teeming with Mysterious Life, click here

Live Science (via NBC News)
Earth’s Mysterious ‘Deep Biosphere’ Is Home to Millions of Undiscovered Species, Scientists Say, click here

KQED (NPR, San Francisco)
Under Earth’s Surface, a Wild Menagerie of Strange Organisms, click here

The Epoch Times
Scientists Reveal Vast World of Creatures Living 3.5 Miles Underground, click here
Chinese: 研究：高溫高壓的地下深處有無數未知生命, click here

Forbes (36,657,058)
There Is A Colossal Cornucopia Of Exotic Life Hiding Within Earth’s Crust, click here
Russian (1,376,993): Под землей обнаружена неизвестная жизнь | Технологии, click here

* * * * *

RT, Russia (10,506,399)
«Подземный Галапагос»: геобиологи выяснили, что скрывает невидимая часть Земли, click here

Cosmos Magazine, Australia (255,985)
Deep life: exploring microbial dark matter, click here

Bild der Wissenschaft, Germany (116,852)
Reiches Leben in der Unterwelt, click here

Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil (12,615,692)
Ecossistema subterrâneo com bilhões de microorganismos é encontrado por cientistas, click here

National Geographic Polska, Poland (239,063)
Pod ziemią jest cały nowy świat. Dookoła są niesamowite i niespodziewanie niecodzienne organizmy, click here

National Geographic France​ (236,430​)

Le plus grand écosystème microbien du monde découvert sous la croûte terrestre​, click here

Sciences et Avenir, France (1,050,964)
70% des microbes terrestres se cachent dans les sous-sols, click here

Greenreport, Italy (46,005)
Scoperto un mondo sconosciuto: è la Terra. Nel sottosuolo c’è molta più vita di quanto credevamo, click here

El Mercurio, Chile (31,646)
Casi dos tercios de todos los microorganismos viven en el subsuelo profundo de la Tierra, click here

بلد نيوز Egypt (37,567)
حقائق مذهلة عن حياة الزومبي في أعماق الأرض!, click here

ABC, Spain (8,366,627)
Hay un mundo perdido a 5 kilómetros bajo la superficie de la Tierra, click here

* * * * *

News release in full, click here
Full coverage summary, click here

Coverage summary presentation, click here

Metrics (to 4 PM US ET Jan. 25): Languages: 31, Countries: 87, online news sites that published one or more stories: 950, total hits, online news sites: 1,181,aggregate circulation / potential reach (online only): 1.35 billion, Advertising value equivalency (online only): $12.5 million (per Meltwater — assumes 2.5% of visitors to a news site will view a particular article x $0.37 per viewer)

The private lives of minerals: Understanding how and where minerals hook up helps predict discovery; At least 1,500 minerals yet to be found

Applying big data analysis to mineralogy offers a way to predict minerals missing from those known to science, where to find them, and where to find new deposits of valuable minerals such as gold and copper, according to a groundbreaking study.

In a paper published by American Mineralogist, scientists report the first application to mineralogy of network theory (best known for analysis of e.g. the spread of disease, terrorist networks, or Facebook connections).

The results, they say, pioneer a way to reveal mineral diversity and distribution worldwide, mineral evolution through deep time, new trends, and new deposits.

Led by Shaunna Morrison of the Deep Carbon Observatory and DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen (both at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.), the paper’s 12 authors include DCO colleagues Peter Fox and Ahmed Eleish at the Keck Foundation sponsored Deep-Time Data Infrastructure Data Science Teams at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY.

“The quest for new mineral deposits is incessant, but until recently mineral discovery has been more a matter of luck than scientific prediction,” says Dr. Morrison. “All that may change thanks to big data.”

Humans have collected a vast amount of information on Earth’s more than 5,200 known mineral species (each of which has a unique combination of chemical composition and atomic structure).

Millions of mineral specimens from hundreds of thousands of localities around the world have been described and catalogued. Databases containing details of where each mineral was discovered, all of its known occurrences, and the ages of those deposits are large and growing by the week.

Databases also record essential information on chemical compositions and a host of physical properties, including hardness, color, atomic structure, and more.

Coupled with data on the surrounding geography, the geological setting, and coexisting minerals, Earth scientists now have access to “big data” resources ripe for analysis.

Until recently, scientists didn’t have the necessary modelling and visualization tools to capitalize on these giant stockpiles of information.

Network analysis offers new insight into minerals, just as complex data sets offer important understanding of social media connections, city traffic patterns, and metabolic pathways, to name a few examples.

“Big data is a big thing,” says Dr. Hazen. “You hear about it in all kinds of fields — medicine, commerce; even the US National Security Agency uses it to analyze phone records — but until recently no one had applied big data methods to mineralogy and petrology.”

“I think this is going to expand the rate of mineral discovery in ways that we can’t even imagine now.”

The network analysis technique enables Earth scientists to represent data from multiple variables on thousands of minerals sampled from hundreds of thousands of locations within a single graph.

These visualizations can reveal patterns of occurrence and distribution that might otherwise be hidden within a spreadsheet.

In other words, big data provides an intimate picture of which minerals coexist with each other, as well as what geological, physical, chemical, and (perhaps most surprising) biological characteristics are necessary for their appearance.

From those insights it’s a relatively simple step to predict what minerals are missing from scientific lists, as well as where to go to find new deposits.

Says Dr. Hazen: “Network analysis can provide visual clues to mineralogists regarding where to go and what to look for. This is a brand new idea in the paper and I think it will open up an entirely new direction in mineralogy.”

Already the technique has been used to predict 145 missing carbon-bearing minerals and where to find them, leading to creation of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Carbon Mineral Challenge. Ten have been found so far.

The estimate came from a statistical analysis of carbon-bearing minerals known today, then extrapolating how many scientists should be looking for.

Predicted before they were found

“We have used the same kinds of techniques to predict that at least 1,500 minerals of all kinds are ‘missing,’ to predict what some of them are, and where to find them,” Dr. Hazen says.

Says Dr. Morrison: “These new approaches to data-driven discovery allow us to predict both minerals unknown to science today and the location of new deposits.

Additionally, understanding how minerals have changed through geologic time, coupled with our knowledge of biology, is leading to new insights regarding the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere. ”

In a test case, the researchers explored minerals containing copper, which plays critical roles in modern society (e.g., pipes, wires), as well as essential roles in biological evolution. The element is extremely sensitive to oxygen, so the nature of copper in a mineral offers a clue to the level of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time the mineral formed.

The investigators also performed an analysis of common minerals in igneous rocks-those formed from a hot molten state. The mineral networks of igneous rocks revealed through big data recreated “Bowen’s reaction series” (based on Norman L. Bowen’s painstaking lab experiments in the early 1900s), which shows how a sequence of characteristic minerals appears as the magma cools.

The analysis showed the exact same sequence of minerals embedded in the mineral networks.

The researchers hope that these techniques will lead to an understanding and appreciation of previously unrecognized mineral relationships in varied mineral deposits.

Mineral networks will also serve as effective visual tools for learning about mineralogy and petrology – the branches of science concerned with the origin, composition, structure, properties, and classification of rocks and minerals.

Network analysis has numerous potential applications in geology, both for research and mineral exploration.

Mining companies could use the technology to predict the locations of unknown mineral deposits based on existing data.

Researchers could use these tools to explain how Earth’s minerals have changed over time and incorporate data from biomarker molecules to show how cells and minerals interact.

And ore geologists hope to use mineral network analysis to lead to valuable new deposits.

Dr. Morrison also hopes to use network analysis to reveal the geologic history of other planets. She is a member of the NASA Mars Curiosity Rover team identifying Martian minerals through X-ray diffraction data sent back to Earth. By applying these tools to analyze sedimentary environments on Earth, she believes scientists may also start answering similar questions about Mars.

“Minerals provide the basis for all our material wealth,” she notes, “not just precious gold and brilliant gemstones, but in the brick and steel of every home and office, in cars and planes, in bottles and cans, and in every high-tech gadget from laptops to iPhones.”

“Minerals form the soils in which we grow our crops, they provide the gravel with which we pave our roads, and they filter the water we drink.”

“This new tool for understanding minerals represents an important advance in a scientific field of vital interest.”

News release in full, click here

Example coverage:

Coverage summary: click here

Humans: The greatest contributor to diversity of minerals since oxygen; Officially recognized minerals, formed by nature: More than 5,000; Formed due to human activity: 208

Human industry and ingenuity has done more to diversify and distribute minerals on Earth than any development since the rise of oxygen over 2.2 billion years ago, experts say in a paper published today.

The work bolsters the scientific argument to officially designate a new geological time interval distinguished by the pervasive impact of human activities: the Anthropocene Epoch.

In the paper, published by American Mineralogist, a team led by Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science identifies for the first time a group of 208 mineral species that originated either principally or exclusively due to human activities. That’s almost 4% of the roughly 5,200 minerals officially recognized by the International Mineralogical Association (IMA).

Most of the recognized minerals attributed to human activities originated through mining — in ore dumps, through the weathering of slag, formed in tunnel walls, mine water or timbers, or through mine fires.

Six were found on the walls of smelters; three formed in a geothermal piping system.

Some minerals formed due to human actions can also occur naturally. Three in that category were discovered on corroded lead artifacts aboard a Tunisian shipwreck, two on bronze artifacts in Egypt, and two on tin artifacts in Canada. Four were discovered at prehistoric sacrificial burning sites in the Austrian mountains.

Unparalleled pace of diversification

According to the paper, the first great ‘punctuation event’ in the history of Earth’s mineral diversity occurred more than 2 billion years ago when the increase of oxygen in the atmosphere — ‘the Great Oxidation’ — gave rise to as many as two-thirds of the more than 5,200 mineral species officially recognized today.

Says Dr. Hazen, who co-wrote the paper with Edward Grew of the University of Maine, and Marcus Origlieri and Robert Downs of the University of Arizona: “Mineral evolution has continued throughout Earth’s history. It has taken 4.5 billion years for combinations of elements to meet naturally on Earth at a specific location, depth and temperature, and to form into the more than 5,200 minerals officially recognized today. The majority of these have arisen since the Great Oxidation event 2 billion years ago. ”

“Within that collection of 5,200 are 208 minerals produced directly or indirectly by human activities, mostly since the mid-1700s, and we believe that others continue to be formed at that same relatively blazing pace. To imagine 250 years relative to 2 billion years, that’s the difference between the blink of an eye (one third of a second) and one month.”

“Simply put, we live in an era of unparalleled inorganic compound diversification,” says Dr. Hazen. “Indeed, if the Great Oxidation eons ago was a ‘punctuation event’ in Earth’s history, the rapid and extensive geological impact of the Anthropocene is an exclamation mark.”

Anthropogenic minerals

A mineral species is defined as a naturally occurring crystalline compound that has a unique combination chemical composition and crystal structure. As of February, 2017, the IMA had approved 5,208 species (see rruff.info/ima for a complete list).

The authors of the recent paper argue that with so many minerals and mineral-like compounds owing their origin to human activities, “a more comprehensive understanding and analysis of the mineralogical nature of the Anthropocene Epoch is warranted.”

Humanity has had a major impact on diversity and distribution in the mineral world in three principal ways, according to the paper:

1 a) Manufacturing synthetic “mineral-like” compounds, and b) causing minerals to form as an unintentional byproduct of human activity

a) Directly creating synthetic mineral-like compounds such as YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) crystals used in lasers, silicon “chips” for semi-conductors, carbide grits for abrasives, and various specialty metals and alloys for magnets, machine parts, and tools. Other examples include bricks, earthenware, porcelain, glass and limestone-based Portland cement — the world’s most common form of cement, used in concrete, mortar, stucco and grout — a combination of calcium silicates, calcium sulfates, and other compounds

b) Indirectly contributing to the formation of new minerals through mining, with new compounds appearing on mine walls or in mine dumps, for example. Of special interest are minerals found associated with ancient lead-zinc mining localities, including some possibly dating from the Bronze Age, and others from as far back as 300 AD.?

2) Large scale movement of rocks, sediments, and minerals

In addition to creating new compounds, human activities such as mining and the transport of stone blocks, rocks, sediments, and minerals from their original location to help build roads, bridges, waterways, monuments, kitchen counters, and other human infrastructure, rivals in scale nature’s redistribution such as via glaciers.

Mining operations, meanwhile, have stripped the near-surface environment of ores and fossil fuels, leaving large open pits, tunnel complexes, and, in the case of strip mining, sheared off mountaintops.

Road cuts, tunnels, and embankments represent further distinctively human planetary modifications.

3) Global redistribution of highly valued natural minerals

Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and a host of semi-precious stones, accompanied by concentrations of gold, silver, and platinum, are found in shops and households in every corner of the globe.

Collections of fine mineral specimens juxtapose mineral species that would not occur naturally in combination. From modest beginner collector sets of more common minerals to the world’s greatest museums, these collections, if buried in the stratigraphic record and subsequently unearthed in the distant future, “would reveal unambiguously the passion of humans for the beauty and wonder of the mineral kingdom,” the paper says.

New compounds forming

Says Dr. Downs: “Given humanity’s pervasive influences on the environment, there must be hundreds of as yet unrecognized ‘minerals’ in old mines, smelters, abandoned buildings, and other sites. Meanwhile, new suites of compounds may now be forming in, for example, solid waste dumps where old batteries, electronics, appliances, and other high-tech discards are exposed to weathering and alteration.”

Adds Dr. Origlieri: “In the sediment layers left behind from our age, future mineralogists will find plentiful building materials such as bricks, cinder blocks, and cement, metal alloys such as steel, titanium, and aluminum, along with many lethal radioactive byproducts of the nuclear age. They might also marvel at some beautiful manufactured gemstones, like cubic zirconia, moissanite, synthetic rubies, and many others.”

Says Dr. Grew: “These minerals and mineral-like compounds will be preserved in the geological record as a distinctive, globally-distributed horizon of crystalline novelty–a persistent marker that marks our age as different from all that came before.”

Some anthropogenic minerals wouldn’t be officially recognized today

Calclacite, described by a Belgium-based scientist in 1959, and which originated in an old oak storage cabinet for mineral specimens at the Royal Museum of Natural History, Brussels, is an officially recognized mineral that wouldn’t qualify today; in 1998 the IMA decided to disallow any substance “made by Man.”

Other recognized anthropogenic minerals in this category include several slag-related minerals as well as a pair from Russia, niobocarbide and tantalcarbide, which some experts believe may have been a hoax — “a laboratory product … deliberately passed off as a natural material” in the early 1900s.

Though unlikely to pass scrutiny today, says Dr. Grew, previously recognized minerals such as these, rather than being invalidated, have been allowed to remain in the IMA catalog.

The IMA did agree to recognize a mineral in cases “in which human intervention in the creation of a substance is less direct.”

The origin of up to 29 forms of carbon: humanity

Of the 208 human-mediated minerals identified by the Deep Carbon Observatory researchers, 29 contain carbon.

Origins and forms, along with movements and quantities, are four themes of the DCO (deepcarbon.net). Dr. Hazen is the DCO’s Executive Director.

Now we know that as many as 29 carbon minerals originated with human activities, of which 14 have no recorded natural occurrences. It is fair, therefore, to consider the 14 as the youngest carbon mineral species. Among the 14, candidates for the very youngest include a dozen minerals related to uranium mines.

The mineral andersonite, for example, is found in the tunnels of certain abandoned uranium mines in the American Southwest. At places along the tunnel walls, sandstone becomes saturated with water that contains elements that form a beautiful crust of yellow, orange and green crystals. Prized for its bright green fluorescent glow under a black light, a good sample of andersonite will fetch up to $500 from a collector.

Another notable carbon-bearing mineral is tinnunculite, determined to be a product of hot gases reacting with the excrement of the Eurasian kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) at a burning coal mine in Kopeisk, Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was subsequently discovered also on Russia’s Mt. Rasvumchorr — an entirely natural occurrence.

Tinnunculite is one of eight new minerals identified as part of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Carbon Mineral Challenge, launched in 2015 to track down an estimated 145 carbon-bearing minerals yet to be formally recognized. The IMA recognized tinnunculite as a mineral in 2015.

###

29 anthropogenic carbon-related minerals

Map: http://bit.ly/2m9UsTY

Human-mediated phases with no confirmed natural occurrences
Recovered from ore dumps: wheatleyite, widgiemoolthalite
Associated with mine tunnel walls: albrechtschraufite, canavesite, je�ekite, línekite
Associated with mine dump fires, including coal mine dumps: acetamide, hoelite, kladnoite
Interaction with mine timbers or leaf litter: paceite, hoganite
Formed in storage cabinets in museums: calclacite
Allegedly from placers, possibly a hoax: niobocarbide, tantalcarbide

Inadvertently produced or human-mediated minerals, occurring or suspected to occur in nature
Recovered from dumps, including ore and serpentinite: hydromagnesite, lansfordite, nesquehonite
Alteration of mine tunnel walls: andersonite, bayleyite, swartzite, znucalite
Associated with mine fires (not coal mines): shannonite
Associated with coal mine and dump fires; Sublimation from gas escape from coal fires: dypingite, ravatite, tinnunculite
Other “post-mine” minerals or context undefined: rabbittite barstowite, phosgenite
Alteration of lead artifacts: barstowite, phosgenite
Alteration of bronze artifacts: chalconatronite

Endnotes

Although yet to be confirmed by the International Union of Geological Sciences, there is growing advocacy for formal recognition of the “Anthropocene Epoch,” the successor of the Holocene Epoch, which began some 11,500 years ago when the most recent ice age glaciers began to retreat. Epochs are normally separated by significant changes in the rock layers to which they correspond. A 35-member Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA) recommended formal designation of the epoch Anthropocene to the International Geological Congress on 29 August 2016. It may be several years before a final decision is reached.?

About the authors:

• Robert Hazen is Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, and Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory
• Edward Grew is a Research Professor, Earth and Climate Sciences, University of Maine
• Marcus Origlieri is a Research Associate, University of Arizona
• Robert Downs is a Professor of Geosciences specializing in mineralogy and crystallography, University of Arizona

Carnegie Science seeks to encourage discovery and the application of knowledge to the improvement of humankind. carnegiescience.edu

The Deep Carbon Observatory is an international network of nearly 1000 multi-disciplinary scientists committed to investigating the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of carbon in deep Earth. deepcarbon.net

Anthropogenic minerals, photos:

Metamunirite (NaV O3), Big GypsumValley, San Miguel County, Colorado, USA. Credit RRUFF. Download: http://bit.ly/2lcLOGA

Abhurite [Sn21O6(OH)14Cl16] from the wreck of the SS Cheerful, 14 miles NNW of St. Ives, Cornwall, England. Credit RRUFF. Download: http://bit.ly/2l4j3JJ

Simonkolleite [Zn5(OH)8Cl2·H2O] found on a copper mining artifact, Rowley mine, Maricopa County, Arizona. Credit RRUFF. Download: http://bit.ly/2l4pLiH

Fiedlerite [Pb3Cl4F(OH)·H2O] from a slag site, Greece. Credit RRUFF. Download: http://bit.ly/2kGpa5Y

Nealite [Pb4Fe(AsO3)2Cl4·2H2O] from slag site, Greece. Credit RRUFF. Download: http://bit.ly/2lg0RPd

Chalconatronite [Na2Cu(CO3)2·3H2O], Mont Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, Canada. Credit RRUFF. Download: http://bit.ly/2l4qMaL

Andersonite: Hillside Mine, Arizona. Credit: Trevor Boyd/Causeway Minerals. Download:http://bit.ly/2mfJtaC

* * * * *

Example coverage:

Washington Post, USA
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Los Angeles Times, USA
You are living in a unique time on planet Earth — mineralogically speaking, (click here)

Discover Magazine, USA
Human-Caused Minerals: Another Sure Sign of the Anthropocene?, (click here)

Forbes, USA
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Scientific American, USA
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Popular Science, USA
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Popular Mechanics, USA
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Newsy, USA (90 second report)
Humans Drastically Change The Environment — And We Always Have, (click here)

Nature World News, United States
Human Activity Ushers in the Planet’s Next Epoch Starting From a Spike in New Minerals, (click here)

Reuters, UK
New minerals back idea of man-made epoch for Earth – study, (click here)

BBC, UK
Humans help cook up mineral bounty, (click here)

BBC Mundo, UK
Vertederos, minas abandonadas y cajones de museos, los lugares donde los humanos hemos provocado que se creen nuevos minerales, (click here)

Daily Mail, UK
Human impact on the planet’s chemistry has created a catalogue of new minerals in ‘the blink of an eye’, say scientists, (click here)

The Guardian, UK
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New Scientist, UK
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Business Insider, UK
Earth entered a new epoch on July 16, 1945 — and humans have left behind more than 200 new minerals to prove it, (click here)

International Business Times, UK
Anthropocene: The 208 crystals that don’t exist anywhere else in the universe, (click here)

Chemistry World, UK
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Press Trust of India
208 new human-caused minerals point to ‘Anthropocene Epoch’, (click here)

东方网 (Oriental Network), China
人类活动“一夜间”致200多种新矿物产生,  (Human activities “one night” produced more than 200 kinds of new minerals)(click here)

RAI Novosti newswire, Russia
Люди меняют геологию Земли: 208 новых минералов имеют антропогенное происхождение (People change the geology of the Earth: 208 new minerals are of anthropogenic origin), (click here)

Spiegel, Germany
Geologie: Menschheit ließ 200 Mineralien neu entstehen (Humanity has newly created 200 minerals), (click here)

Berliner Morgenpost, Germany
Sind neue Mineralien ein Beweis für ein neues Erdzeitalter? (Are new minerals a proof of a new era?), (click here); 2nd story: 
Der Mensch lässt neue Mineralien entstehen  (Human beings create new minerals), (click here)

Die Presse, Austria
Mineralien des Menschenzeitalters (Minerals of the Human Age), (click here)

Science.ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation), Austria
Ein Argument mehr für das „Anthropozän“ (A further argument for the “Anthropocene”), (click here)

El País, Spain
Los humanos han creado ya 208 nuevos minerales (Humans have already created 208 new minerals), (click here)

Agencia EFE, Spain
Científicos catalogan 208 minerales creados por la actividad humana (Scientists catalog 208 minerals created by human activity), (click here)

Europa Press, Spain
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ABC, Spain
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La Vanguardia, Spain
Los humanos hemos creado 208 minerales que no existían en la Tierra, (click here)

Corriere Della Sera, Italy
Uomo ha segnato nuova era geologica, (click here)

La Scienze, Italy
I minerali prodotti dall’uomo raccontano l’Antropocene (The minerals produced by man tell the Anthropocene), (click here)

Huffington Post, Italy
Antropocene, gli scienziati trovano una nuova prova a sostegno della tesi: “Scoperti minerali che non esisterebbero senza l’uomo” (Anthropocene, scientists found new evidence in support of the thesis: “Uncovered minerals that would not exist without the man”), (click here)

Reporterre, France
Nous sommes entrés dans l’anthropocène, affirment des minéralogistes (We have entered the anthropocene, say mineralogists), (click here)

Hirado.hu, Hungary
Több száz új ásványt hoztunk létre, (click here)

Tekniikka&Talous, Finland
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Energia, Greece
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Nederlands Dagblad, Netherlands
Mens zorgde voor nieuwe mineralen (Man brought new minerals), (click here)

Volkskrant, Netherlands
Versteende vogelpoep is gepromoveerd tot mineraal (Fossilized bird droppings promoted to mineral), (click here)

CBC, Canada
We’ve created 208 new minerals: Time for a new, human-influenced Anthropocene epoch?, (click here)

Mining.com, Canada
Human activity creates 208 new mineral species, (click here)

ABC Radio, Australia
Human activity helps create hundreds of new minerals, (click here)

Cosmos Magazine, Australia
Humans have created at least 208 new types of mineral, (click here)

O Globo, Brazil
Atividade humana criou 208 novos minerais no planeta, (click here)

O Globo TV, Brazil (two minute report)
Ação do homem pode dar início a nova era geológica, revelam cientistas (Man’s action may usher in new geological era, scientists reveal), (click here)

El Mercurio, Chile
Al menos 208 minerales no fueron creados por la naturaleza, sino que por los humanos (At least 208 minerals were not created by nature, but by humans), (click here)

Al Maghrib Today, Morocco
أبحاثجديدةتكشفأنالإنسانأثرعلى  (New research reveals that the human impact on the chemistry of the planet), (click here)

Báo Mới, Viet Nam
Con người khiến Trái Đất bùng nổ đa dạng khoáng sản (Humans create boom of Earth’s mineral variety), (click here)

Fins.az, Azerbaijan
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