An exciting discovery in the Himalayas has given scientists a glimpse into our planet’s past.
In a nutshell, a team from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Niigata University in Japan has found 600 million-year-old ocean water trapped in rocks.
These drops of ancient water have been described as a “time capsule” that could help explain some significant events in Earth’s history.
Many millions of years ago, the Earth went through a big freeze, with sheets of ice covering the land. This was known as the Snowball Earth glaciation.
Following this icy period, there was a big increase in the oxygen in our atmosphere.
This is often called the Second Great Oxygenation Event, and it is linked to the emergence of more complex forms of life.
But scientists have struggled to understand how these two big events are connected.
This is where the newly discovered water in the Himalayas comes in. The researchers found that the rocks holding the water also contained deposits of calcium and magnesium, which could provide valuable clues.
For example, the rocks seem to show that there was a long period of time when the oceans were low in calcium, likely because rivers weren’t flowing into the sea and bringing calcium with them.
According to the team, this low-calcium period could have been a good time for a type of bacteria called cyanobacteria.
These slow-growing bacteria make their own food through photosynthesis and give off oxygen as a by-product. So, the theory is that these bacteria might have started producing more oxygen when the seas were low in calcium, thus boosting the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere.
This could explain the oxygenation event that followed the Snowball Earth glaciation.
The scientists made their discovery after exploring a large area of the western Himalayas.
They studied the deposits in detail and determined that they were formed by precipitation from ancient ocean water, not from other sources like volcanoes under the sea.
So why does all this matter? The Earth’s oceans have changed a lot over hundreds of millions of years, and we know very little about how they used to be.
By studying these ancient deposits, we can learn about things like the chemical makeup and temperature of the oceans, and how they’ve changed over time.
This can help us understand how our climate has changed and could even give us clues about how life has evolved. In other words, these drops of ancient water could help us piece together the story of our planet.
This research is a big step forward in understanding our planet’s past. It provides a unique opportunity to study what the ancient oceans were like, and it could ultimately help us predict how our climate might change in the future.
All in all, this exciting discovery offers a valuable window into our planet’s history and how it has evolved over hundreds of millions of years.
The study was published in Precambrian Research.
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Source: Indian Institute of Science.
