Meteorite Impacts Could Have Fostered Life on Early Earth

Congratulations to post-doctoral fellow and former PhD student Haley Sapers whose paper on “Enigmatic tubular features in impact glass” has been published in the prestigious journal, Geology. This paper was also featured in a news article in Science Magazine entitled “Meteorite Impacts Could Have Fostered Life on Early Earth“. In this paper, Haley describes for the first time, “the first putative microbial trace fossils hosted in meteorite impact glass”. As Haley notes in the abstract “as impact glass is a ubiquitous substrate on rocky bodies throughout the Solar System and likely common on the early Earth, the preservation of biological activity in impact glass has significant astrobiological implications for life on early Earth as well as for the search for life on other planets.”

Update: this work is the subject of a media release by Western and has been the focus of several online articles, including ones by Global Newsion, and sci-news.com.

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