ABSTRACT

Project will integrate geological, paleobiological and geochemical examination of a freshly-collected Archean sediment drill-core that will be obtained in the summer of 2004. This continuous core, ~ 1000 m in length, will sample the last ~ 250 million years of Archean stratigraphy in the Hamersley Basin of the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Sampled lithologies will include basalt, carbonate, chert and several kerogenous pyritic shale units.
This proposal is possible because of an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration with the Astrobiology Drilling Program (ADP) of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. The ADP will fund acquisition of this core. The NSF funds will be used for initial characterization of core materials to include a detailed study of paleoecology and paleoenvironment in kerogenous sediments. Importantly, core recovery will be over-seen by PI Buick and is geared specifically toward the proposed research.
Intellectual Merit: The general motivation of the proposed research is to characterize the nature of life and its environment in the late Archean, shortly before the rise of atmospheric oxygen. Many workers are examining the timing of this redox transition and its relationship to contemporaneous climatic oscillations that may include global ice ages. The team's interest, somewhat different but complementary, is to understand how the Archean biosphere set the stage for this singular environmental transformation. Specifically, a major goal of this project is to characterize the relative importance of different types of microbes in late Archean marine environments and, through lithofacies relationships, to study the envi-ronmental controls on their distributions. This goal will be achieved through integrated examination of hydrocarbon molecular biomarkers, redox indicators and biogeochemical cycling in kerogenous sediments.
Clean drilling methods, immediate sampling and prompt analysis will allow us to unambiguously deter-mine if taxonomically diagnostic sterane and triterpenoid hydrocarbons are indigenous to these rocks. These compounds are abundant in existing, poorly-preserved Hamersley Basin drill core and, if not contaminants, constitute the earliest biomarkers of eukaryotes and cyanobacteria. Further, analysis of the new core should permit us to examine the relative abundances and isotopic compositions of such compounds in an environmental context, yielding information about ecological relationships. Additional goals are to characterize the status of major biogeochemical cycles in the late Archean and generate a robust baseline for future investigations by conducting sedimentological and biogeochemical reconnaissance of the entire core. Collectively, this work will test the hypothesis that oxygen-generating cyanobacteria and aerobic microorganisms were present in Archean ecosystems and that the environmental imprints of these me-tabolisms remained muted for hundreds of millions of years after their origins.
Broader Impact: There are three areas of broader impact. First, ~ 6 graduate students will participate in an unusually integrative and multi-disciplinary research project spanning six major research universities. While each will be rooted in a single aspect of the program, these students will have substantive opportunities to bridge across subdisciplines and institutions. Second, because the planned drill core will ultimately be openly available in accordance with the ADP charter, this work will provide a lithological and chemostratigraphic framework of benefit to the wider research community. Third, it is hoped that this NSF-NASA collaboration will provide a positive precedent for future efforts by other investigators that might ultimately evolve into a broader inter-agency "Deep Time Drilling Program".

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