Stromatolites and Friends:  Earth Niches through Time

Описание: On 4 Dec. 2025, Dan Aiken presented “Stromatolites and Friends: Earth Niches through Time” to 45 members of the Arizona Geological Society. The Society thanks Hexagon Mining for providing the venue. The presentation runs for 75 minutes.

Title Stromatolites and Friends: Earth Niches through Time

Daniel M. Aiken, Consulting Geologist

Abstract: Contemplating the widespread and diverse forms of microbiolites, from pre-ancient shorelines and watery depths, to remote nutrient-choked locales around the globe, one must envision our earliest one-celled emissaries as innovators on earth, creating the web of sustenance our oxygen, our food chains, our resource basket.

With the slow and relentless buildup of living forms, our home planet has demonstrated the capacity for stable living systems almost since the amassing of the earliest chondrules, those primitive grains of the young solar system.

In my mind, there has been a teleological inevitability about the development of evolution's tools: the viability of liquid water, the baffling construction of chlorophyll and photosynthesis, the flourishing construction of chemical life and colonies in the slow- living deep crust up to shallow niches; the handing off of genetic instructions and victorious responses to adverse environments, seen as the ongoing growth of complexity and the chimeric, that is to say, lateral transfer of subsystems.

Stromatolitic life (see photo to right) is malleable, from two to three to four dimensions, domal, digitate, angular, and mat-like, to name a few.

Can we see the planetary transformation, not just through the lens of the remote billions of years, but as the underlying fact of our present existence, connecting us to stars?

Here we have the ecological deliberations with our complex friends and foes in the latest Tree of Life - bacteria that is eating rock and light, drinking ancient and modern water, consuming space and leaving what is called waste or by-products, which is really the creation of habitability as perceived by we metazoans, the new kids on the block.

The next voyager time-capsule to deeper space should include a hunk of layered stromatolites as a representation to aliens of the real Earth, to demonstrate the universality of how life on Earth and Mars began and continued by constant layering, revealed as one fleeting generation at a time, glued together within the physics of living matter.