Fossil Microbes

Paleontologist Andrew Knoll has just been awarded the Crafoord Prize for Geosciences, a prestigious international award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The academy chose Knoll to honour his work on understanding the first 3 billion years of Earth's history. 

By examining layers of bedrock, Knoll can learn not only whether it is volcanic or sedimentary but also the age of the rock. He is one of many scientists discovering tiny living things that became fossils in the rock long ago, and he's one of the best in the world. These fossils are the tiny ancestors of every living thing on Earth. Learning about them is key to understanding the world's worst mass extinction.

Knoll has travelled the world, studying rocks in Newfoundland and Norway, China and Siberia. He's found tiny fossils from microbes that lived three billion years ago, a time when scientists used to believe there was no life yet on Earth. When the Mars probe Opportunity was sending back images from 2003 to 2018, Knoll was interpreting the data. He has kept his sense of wonder since he was a child finding fossils in the Appalachian foothills. And it was while caring for his own child, awake one night, that Knoll considered an idea that might explain the Permian extinction.

During the Permian extinction, 90% of species in the ocean and 70% of land animals died. Knoll wondered if that mass extinction might have been due to a rapid rise in CO2. He and his colleagues discovered the source of that CO2, a massive area of volcanic activity now called the Siberian Traps. 

You can read more about Dr Andrew Knoll, his research, and his award at this link.