A VITAL clue to the riddle of when life began may have surfaced in Greenland. A geologist believes he has found brine from the Earth’s primordial ocean there, trapped in lavas that erupted on the seafloor 3.8 billion years ago.
Jacques Touret of the Free University in Amsterdam discovered the fluid in rocks from the Isua formation of western Greenland. This is the oldest known oceanic crust, formed right after an intense bombardment by giant meteorites. Life is thought to have emerged shortly after this period – what may be the earliest fossils are 3.5 billion years old – but…
