Stromatolites

In the hyper-saline water of Hamelin Pool at the base of Shark Bay in W.A. the rocks aren't quite what the appear to be. They are living things, Stromatolites, which are the oldest living organisms on the planet. Some scientists believe they were the first living things on mother earth. Dr Phillip Playford is a scientist and historian who has studied every facet of stromatolites.Hamelin Pool is the location of the best example in the world of living marine stromatolites. The water of Hamelin Bay is twice as saline as usual sea water because of a bar across the Bay's entrance and rapid evaporation from the shallow water. Most living animals, which feed on the bacteria and algae of which stromatolites are composed, cannot tolerate such saline conditions. As a result stromatolites can grow here successfully, undisturbed. Most stromatolites are extremely slow growing. Those in Hamelin Pool grow at a maximum of .3mm a year, so those which are up to a metre high are hundreds if not thousands of years old. Stromatolites are formed through the activity of primitive unicellular organisms: cyanobacteria (which used to be called blue-green algae) and other algae. These grow through sediment and sand, binding the sedimentary particles together, resulting in successive layers which, over a long period of time, harden to form rock. For at least three-quarters of the earth's history stromatolites were the main reef building organisms, constructing large masses of calcium carbonate.However their most important role in the history of the earth has been that of contributing oxygen to the earth's atmosphere. The organisms which construct stromatolites are photosynthetic. They take carbon dioxide and water to produce carbohydrates, and in doing this they liberate oxygen into the atmosphere.When stromatolites first appeared on earth about 3.5 billion years ago there was little or no oxygen in the atmosphere. It was through the oxygen-generating activity of stromatolites that other animal life on earth was able to develop. Conversely, it is believed that the decline in numbers of stromatolites is related to the evolution of animals that consumed cyanobacteria and algae.Stromatolite fossils are evidence of the earliest life on the earth. Western Australia perhaps has the best stromatolite fossils, giving a record through the eons of time. Fossils of the earliest known stromatolites, about 3.5 billion years old, are to be found near Marble Bar in the Pilbara. Hamelin Pool gives an indication of what the earth may have looked like 3.5 billion years ago when stromatolites were widespread. Because of their range and numbers it is a place of great interest to botanists and geologists alike. A jetty has been constructed allowing the stromatolites to be viewed without doing them irreparable damage.It's a humbling thought that all life on this planet could have started from something so simple as the blue-green algae which created these rocks millions of years ago.Dr Playford is a consultant for the Department of Minerals and Energy, and a former Director of the Geological Survey.Stromatolite fossils can be viewed at the Western Australian Museum, Perth, W.A.

More on the Large Hadron Collider

Fears of an impending apocalypse have prompted death threats to a group of scientists working on the most expensive non-military experiment ever attempted. Particle physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will on Wednesday throw the switch on the AUS$6.6 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The scientists at CERN will begin to shoot protons around a 27km ring-shaped tunnel at almost the speed of light. Within a few months they will smash the sub-atomic components into one another, generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the sun, but in a tiny space. The scientists hope to observe the conditions that existed in the aftermath of the Big Bang and possibly hunt down an elusive particle postulated in theoretical physics, known as the Higgs Boson. There's even a chance that the collisions could create mini black holes, which the scientists believe would quickly blink out of existence. And it's this potential for black holes that has critics of the project worried. Theoretical chemist Otto Rossler, from Germany's Tubingen University, lodged an emergency injunction with the European Court of Human Rights to prevent the LHC being turned on. Dr Rossler, who has been the experiment's foremost critic, and other signatories to the appeal said the LHC's potential to create life-sucking black holes violated the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights. The court rejected Dr Rossler's appeal, but he still believes that a mini black hole could "eat the planet from the inside" within four years of forming. UK newspaper the Telegraph reported today that CERN scientists had received threatening telephone calls and e-mails. But team member Professor Brian Cox — once the keyboardist with pop group D:Ream — said the experiment posed no danger to the public. "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat," he told the Telegraph. The growing hysteria prompted CERN to publish a peer-reviewed report reiterating the LHC's safety. Scientists working on the project point out that cosmic rays from space slam into the earth's atmosphere, producing similar or greater collision energies to those that will be found in the LHC. These collisions happen all the time — yet mini black holes have not yet consumed the earth, CERN says. "The LHC safety review has shown that the LHC is perfectly safe,” Jos Engelen, CERN’s Chief Scientific Officer, said in a statement. "It points out that nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth — and the planet still exists.”

The new world starts Wednesday September 10, 2008

Particle physicists believe they will throw open a new frontier of knowledge on Wednesday when, 100 metres below ground, they switch on a mega-machine crafted to unveil the deepest mysteries of matter.
The most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together, with the aim of filling gaps in our understanding of the cosmos.
It may also determine the outcome of novel theories about space-time: does another dimension - or dimensions - exist in parallel to our own? After nearly two decades and 6 billion Swiss francs ($A6.6 billion), an army of 5,000 scientists, engineers and technicians drawn from nearly three dozen countries have brought the mammoth project close to fruition.At 9.30am (1730 AEST) on Wednesday, the first protons will be injected into a 27-kilometre ring-shaped tunnel, straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Whizzed to within a millionth of a per cent of the speed of the light, the particles will be the first step in a long-term experiment to smash sub-atomic components together, briefly generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun in a microscopic space.Analysts will then pore over the wreckage in the search for fundamental particles. "We will be entering into a new territory of physics," said Peter Jenni, spokesman for ATLAS - one of four gargantuan laboratories installed on the ring where a swathe of delicate detectors will spot the collisions.
"Wednesday is a very major milestone." The LHC is massively-muscled machine compared to its CERN predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider, and an ageing accelerator at the legendary Fermilab in Illinois. It has the power to smash protons or ions - particles known as hadrons - together at a whopping 14 teraelectron volts (TeV), seven times the record held by Fermilab's Tevatron. The leviathan scale of the project is neatly juxtaposed by its goal, which is to explore the infinitely small.
Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.(the ethers LT)Particles passing through it would acquire mass by being dragged through a mediator, which theoreticians dubbed the Higgs Boson.The standard quip about the Higgs is that it is the "God Particle" - it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive.French physicist Yves Sacquin says that heroic work by the LEP and Fermilab has narrowed down the energy range at which the devious critter is likely to spotted.Given the LHC's capabilities, "there's a very strong probability that it will be detected," he said. Some experts are also hopeful about an early LHC breakthrough on the question of supersymmetry.The supersymmetry theory goes way beyond even the Higgs. It postulates that particles in the Standard Model have related, but more massive, counterparts.Such particles could explain the unsettling discovery of recent years that visible matter only accounts for some four per cent of the Universe. Enigmatic phenomena called dark matter and dark energy account for the rest.CERN Director General Robert Aymar is confident the massive experiment will yield a correspondingly big breakthrough in penetrating these mysteries.
"It is certain that the LHC will yield the identity and understanding of this dark matter," he said in a video statement.CERN has had to launch a PR campaign aimed at reassuring the public that the LHC will not create black holes that could engulf the planet or an unpleasant hypothetical particle called a strangelet that would turn the Earth into a lump of goo.It has commissioned a panel to verify its calculations that such risks are, by any reasonable thinking, impossible, and France too has carried out its own safety probe.Either way, the end of the world will not happen on Wednesday, for the simple reason that the LHC will not generate any collisions that day.These will probably be initiated "in a few weeks" as part of a phased programme to commission the LHC, testing its equipment and evaluating work procedures before cranking it up to full strength, said Jenni.Looking at the daily mountain of data that will have to be analysed, "it will take weeks or months before one can really hope to start discovering something new," he cautioned."The LHC is more than a machine. It is the intellectual quest of our age," the British weekly New Scientist said in this week's issue."With luck... today's physics textbooks will start to look out of date by the end of 2009."