From lemons to ham, salt is a handy food preservative. But researchers studying some really old salt crystals found them preserving something else — evidence of life.
“There are little cubes of the original liquid from which that salt grew. And the surprise for us is that we also saw shapes that are consistent with what we would expect from microorganisms,” said Kathy Benison, a geologist at West Virginia University. “And they could be still surviving within that 830-million-year-old preserved microhabitat.”
The salt crystals (aka halite) that Benison and her team studied were originally found in central Australia. Benison was part of the team that published these findings in the journal Geology.