Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.p11d..08s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #P11D-08
Other
[0410] Biogeosciences / Biodiversity
Scientific paper
In the present, the Cuatro Cienegas Basin (CCB) is in the Chihuahuan Desert in the state of Coahuila, Mexico. However, in the early Triasic, the sea penetrated the region of CCB with the opening of Pangea and became a continental wetland with the closing the western interior seaway only 35 million years ago. Its particular tectonics made of CCB a valley surrounded by high sierras that rose above the sea level 700 mt. All available molecular data lead us to suggest that these ancient marine microbial mats have persisted for a very long time and during all that time, the living microbial community evolved and diversified locally due to the rarity of migration and sex. The struggle for life in these structured communities generated uncountable new species that had to deal with the environment, the neighbors and most of all with the extreme lack of P. What for a long time represented the most successful community assemblage in the history of planet Earth, became mostly extinct in modern earth. The herbivores and the competition with algae left few relict communities in extreme environments such as CCB, Shark Bay and Guerrero Negro. Lets remember that stromatolite reefs have fossils as old as 3.6 billion years and that they became so successful that they changed the planet atmosphere producing the great oxygenation event. We also have data that at CCB these extensive microbialites are very patchy and differentiated both taxonomically and genetically, implying that, even though they may look as a continuum in the wetlands, each patch has been geographically isolated for a long time allowing each community to diverge in its composition. All these particularities of CCB arise because, due to its unusual geology, the valley floor was never buried, hence its marine sediment, with extensive microbial mats, always had sun and water, maintaining both the ancient lineages and the oligotrophic conditions that characterized early earth. The lack of P (less than 0.05 nMol/l) inhibited the growth of algae and other opportunistic lineages, hence, the microbial mats is at CCB the base of the food web. Moreover, CCB pure gypsum and its extensive evaporites also represent a good model for Mars, a planet were intensive volcanisms in an ancient ocean originated similar deposits rich in sulfur and poor in phosphorites. Stromatolites at Cuatro Cienegas a time capsule to precambrian earth
Eguiarte L. E.
Sierfert J.
Souza Valeria
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