Scientists have come across ancient wrinkle structures in Morocco’s Central High Atlas Mountains. These wrinkle structures were 180-million-year-old fossilised and created by chemosynthetic microbes. These rocks formed at least 590 feet underwater in total darkness, powered by chemical reactions rather than sunlight in relatively unstable deep-sea environments.
“Let’s go through every single piece of evidence that we can find to be sure that these are wrinkle structures in turbidites,” says Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at The University of Texas at Austin. Because wrinkle structures, usually photosynthetic in origin, “shouldn’t be in this deep-water setting.
The researchers found elevated concentrations of carbon in the sediment layers, which is often associated with biological activity and provided an important clue that microbes were involved. These organisms might have lived off of sulphur or other compounds. Today, chemosynthetic microbial mats form on continental shelves, where underwater landslides and turbidites also occur. These landslides might have been crucial to the cycle that allowed the microbes to thrive by dragging down organic material, which would have decomposed and created compounds such as methane or hydrogen sulfide, food for chemosynthetic life.
“Wrinkle structures,” Martindale said, “are really important pieces of evidence in the early evolution of life.”
While the oldest evidence of microbial life dates back to around 3.77 to 4.28 billion years old, this particularly shocked scientists, as 180 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period, the deep sea was already crawling with complex animals like worms, crabs, and molluscs. These animals would constantly churn up the mud, which almost always destroyed the delicate microbial structure before they could fossilise. Finding intact microbes from that era is incredibly rare.( _WION_)
