Life in pink on Planet Earth
What did our Earth look like a billion years ago? Fantasy paints a lush green tropical landscape with marvelous vegetation and dazzling beauty of blue ocean. Yes, the picture imagined corresponds to the reality which has occurred a little bit later.
In fact, the oldest color on our planet is pink. This is indicated by the chlorophyll found in rocks under the Sahara Desert in Mauritania.
The chlorophyll found existed about 1.1 billion years ago and is older than its previous similar findings by about 600 million years.
Their findings says that cyanobacteria, that survive on sunlight, appeared on Earth much earlier than algae, which have been traced to around 650 million years ago.
But another fact deserves attention.
From the school program in biology, everyone knows that chlorophyll is a green pigment that produces the green color in the process of photosynthesis in the plants. It turned out that this law of nature is applicable only to modern flora. Paradoxically, the fossilized chlorophyll in concentrated form has a dark red and deep purple color.
When pulverizing the fossils for the molecular analysis, researchers distilled the colors to find a brilliant pink. And this suggests that the ancient ocean, in which this sunlight-absorbing bacteria lived, was in pink tones, according to scientists from the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University.
One of the co-authors of the study, Professor Jochen Brocks, described how prehistoric chlorophyll survived in exceptional circumstances. First, dead organic matter - a bloom of cyanobacteria, for example - fell quickly onto the seabed. Once there, it must be isolated from any oxygen, which spurs decay, and then the rock that holds the material has to remain in one piece for a billion years.
In addition, the researchers concluded that during the existence of free photosynthetic cyanobacteria, algae, as one of the oldest forms of life, were absent or were very scarce.
And only a few hundred million years later, algae would begin to multiply, eventually forming the basis of the food chain that will trigger the evolution of larger animals.
However, until the emergence of algae, bright pink planet was under the control of bacteria.
