MICROBIALITE TEXTURES AND CHEMICAL SIGNATURES IN CONTINENTAL SETTINGS: SOME THOUGHTS ON DATA NEEDS

The combination of the exciting results from the Mars rovers and petroleum finds in lacustrine carbonate reservoirs has energized research on continental microbialites. It is clear from even a cursory review of the literature that continental stromatolites, thrombolites, dendrolites, and other microbial macrostructures differ considerably from marine varieties. Some have suggested that these microbialites provide better analogues to ancient Earth and possible extraterrestrial settings because they form in more extreme environmental settings and, in some cases, lack the impact of metazoans. Furthermore, in any scenario where an ocean forms, whether on Earth or Mars, there must be an antecedent lacustrine stage that might provide the initial chemical beakers in which early life may form. As a result, it seems evident that we must continue to investigate continental microbialites if we are to have a deeper understanding of exobiological and early Earth microbial processes. In any effort to understand or interpret microbialites we must thoroughly characterize the range of textures, minerologies, and chemistries of both ancient and modern varieties. This type of work is being done, but the results are dispersed throughout the academic literature. We have begun to develop a digital microbialite database and atlas of microbialite forms and textures for the settings in which we currently work. These settings range in age from the Proterozoic through the Recent. The database includes extensive image data, as well as morphological, textural, petrographic, and geochemical observations and data. We developed the database and atlas for our undergraduate student research programs, in an effort to maintain data consistency. However, we believe that a community-wide effort to construct such data repositories would be extremely useful to our research agendas and would support broader efforts in the geoscience community on geoinformatics.