Shuhai Xiao & The Interactions Between Life and Earth
Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geobiology soon to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, delves into his research on the early evolution of life and its environmental context, offering insights into the complex interplay between biology and geology through time.
My name is Shuhai Xiao and I'm a professor of Geobiology at Virginia Tech in the Department of Geosciences. My research is really to understand the history of Earth systems and how it can inform us about the future of our planet. So I'm going to use this piece of rock to show you how we read rocks. This is a piece of rock that was collected in Australia. It is about 3.5 bilion years old. This rock is laid down layer by layer and it's made of sandy sediment. But occasionally we see a structure like this. You can call this a sand cone with a very steep slope. Now, the only way to do that is When the sandy sediment was stabilized by a gluey layer of organic carbon, that was made by microbes. And because these organisms were photosynthetic, they compete for sunlight to do photosynthesis. So that allows them to make this conical structural and to stabilize the slope. So looking at this piece of rocks, we can say things about how organisms interact with the environment and sediment. My research has implications for the future of our planet. To predict what's going to happen in the next century or in the next 1,000 years, we need to know the past.
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