Earth's outer shell suffered a catastrophic break on 6 February last year, when a major fault came to life in southern Turkey. The Anatolian peninsula suddenly lurched to the southwest by as much as 11 metres relative to the Arabian peninsula. Nearly 60,000 people died in one of the most devastating earthquakes of modern times. An earthquake such as this occurs because Earth's crust is divided into shifting tectonic plates. The forces behind plate tectonics play a part in determining nearly everything about Earth, from its climate to the evolution of life. Despite its importance, plate tectonics has remained somewhat of a mystery. Since the early twenty-first century, geologists have been gathering data in search of answers as to when and how plate tectonics began. But these studies have produced a mess of often-contradictory results. 'You can have 30 people with 30 different specialisms and we will probably come up with 30 different numbers,' says petrologist Michael Brown at the University of Maryland in College Park....
Fatima Husain grew up in the heart of the Midwest, surrounded by agriculture. 'Every time you left your home, you saw fields of corn and soybeans. And it was really quite beautiful,' she says. During elementary school, she developed her own love of gardening and cultivated a small plot in her family's backyard. 'Having the freedom to make a mess, experiment, and see things grow was very impactful,' says Husain, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and a Hugh Hampton Young Fellow. This experimentation in the garden was the seed that blossomed into her fascination with science. 'When you think about gardening and agriculture in Iowa,' she says, 'you think about soil and its origins, which led me to geology and geochemistry and all these interdisciplinary fields that play a role in the Earth sciences.' Husain has maintained that scientific curiosity throughout her academic career. As a graduate student in EAPS' Program in Geology, Geochemistry, and Geobiology, she studies the fossil and genetic records of ancient and modern life forms to better understand the history of life on Earth. She says, 'Twenty years ago, I was a stoked kid working with topsoil in Iowa. Now, I get to work with ancient dirt and sediments to better understand Earth and life's past.'...
Life is shaped by the environment in which it lives. When looking at an organism today, that relationship can be easily observed. But when all youâre left with is a fossil or rock, it can be tricky to identify the environment in which it formed, let alone the life forms that might have left their mark in that sample. Geobiologist Tanja Bosak now faces additional challenges as she searches for signs of early life on Mars.
Scientists first need to backtrack what Mars might have been like in the past, and then what life might be expected in those conditions. This requires taking into account the different kinds of rocks and atmosphere seen on our neighboring planet today â and then estimating whether these aspects were the same billions of years ago. âItâs just a completely new, bigger direction,â she says.
A physicist during her undergraduate years in Croatia, Bosak was interested in big systems. After a brief stint as a meteorologist, she found the perfect field during her PhD at Caltech that combined her love for systems geology with biologyâs intriguing variations in organisms and evolution. Now a geobiologist in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Bosak works to reveal processes that preserve microbial fossils and rocks made or shaped by microbes in the geologic record....
