Looking for a view from another angle, Allwood and his colleagues went by helicopter to the Greenland site. Almost immediately after finding the site, they spotted a red geological flag. Stromatolite cones should always point upwards towards the sun. Yet, one meter from Nutman's discoveries, some stromatolites were upside down. "That alone is almost enough to refute a biogenic origin," Allwood said.
To get a more complete picture, Allwood carved a slab into the rock within half a meter of one of Nutman's sites. True stromatolites should be approximately triangular, regardless of their angle. And from an angle, the supposed stromatolites looked like triangles. But seen from another side, they were flat, like crests. It was like a long series of waves on the sea: sharp sideways, flat at the front. In Allwood's mind, these ridges appeared to have been "pushed, squeezed, bent and tortured," she said, through normal tectonic processes, not the delicate action of generations of microbial mats. .
In addition, Allwood found that the microcrystalline structures within the stromatolites were oriented in the same direction as the wider fold of the ridge, evidence that corresponds to geological and non-biological forces.
The ridges do not definitively exclude a biotic origin, according to Trower, who has not participated in any of these studies. But relying on Occam's razor, "it's probably not a stromatolite," she said.
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