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In this activity, students explored a virtual field site located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. As the first definitive signs of life on earth, the fossils from Australia's Pilbara region are monuments to the history of all living things, as well as all living things, to date. This scene from fossilization is one of the few tiny outcrops of land in Australia's Pilbara region to contain the oldest compelling evidence for life on earth. The Pilbara region of Australia contains multiple ages and types of stromatolites and other fossils that are too tiny to be seen without a microscope.
The Pilbara of Western Australia is already famous for stromatolite fossils, but the region was thought until recently to be a shallow sea environment. The remote region of Pilbara, northwestern Western Australia, is one of Earth's oldest chunks of continent-like crust, and now we think we have an idea of how it formed, explained in a study published today in Nature Geoscience. The Pilbara region in northwest Australia reveals some of the oldest rocks on the planet, more than 3.6 billion years old. Geologically, one of the coldest places on Earth in the Pilbara -- a vast area of North-Western Australia.
The Pilbara region began forming over 3.6 billion years ago, and our studies confirm the notion that its rocks were formed outside of the tectonic process that we observe operating today. In our study, we describe in detail how those rocks formed, detailing several gravitational overturning events which affected that ancient crust in the eastern Pilbara long before the onset of plate tectonics about 3.2 billion years ago.
Ancient red rocks in Western Australias Pilbara region contain evidence of a thermal spring that hosted the first known life on the planet, around 3.5 billion years ago. Fossils discovered by scientists at UNSW at 3.48-billion-year-old thermal spring deposits in the Pilbara Region in Western Australia push back 580 million years from the first known presence of microbial life on earth. Spherical bubbles are preserved in the 3.48 billion-year-old rocks in the Dresser Formation of the Pilbara craton, in western Australia. The Pilbara Craton, in western Australia, provides evidence that early life lived in ancient hot springs on land.
Previously, another group of researchers at the University of New South Wales found evidence for microbes dating back to 3.48 billion years ago in deposits from a hot spring in the Pilbara. Within the Pilbara hot spring deposits, researchers have also found stromatolites -- multi-layered rock structures created by communities of ancient microbes.
Evidence for hot springs and stromatolites found in Dresser Formation, Pilbara The findings from the Dresser Formation, Pilbara, suggest that the region is the oldest known land-based Hotspring deposit on the planet, pushing the dating back to 130 million years ago when land first appeared. In an ancient fossilized rock formation called a stromatolite found at a fossil site in the Dresser formation of Western Australias Pilbara region, researchers finally found evidence for organic material and described their findings in a new study. In September 2016, Professor Martin Van Kranendonk was part of an international team that found perhaps the oldest evidence for life on earth, fossil stromatolites dating back to as early as 3.7 billion years ago, in deposits on Greenland laid in the deep sea.
Image Astrobiologists Martin Van Kranendonk and Tara Djokic look at the fossilized remains of an ancient hot spring in Australia's Pilbara region. The Pilbara region ( ) contains some of the oldest rocks on earth, including the oldest fossilized remains known as stromatolites, as well as rocks like granite more than three billion years old. While it is thought that other iron deposits around the world formed around a similar time, the Pilbara's surface remains unearthed and undisturbed by the geologically catastrophic events.
The Aboriginal population of the Pilbara ( ) significantly predates, by 30-40 000 years, European colonization of the region. While the new findings of just how long The Pilbara has been continually inhabited are surprising for scientists, for Indigenous peoples, this is what they have known all along.
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