Word: geochemist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when -did life begin? Cyril Ponnamperuma, 55, a Ceylon-born geochemist at the University of Maryland, has been seeking answers to this question for much of his career. He has created precursors of life in laboratory simulations of the earth's primitive atmosphere and while with NASA in 1970, identified amino acids (the building blocks of protein) in the Murchison meteorite, which had fallen in Australia a year earlier. Last week, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, Ponnamperuma presented three new pieces of evidence that the processes leading to the formation of life can take...
...ship in midocean, about 200 miles southwest of the Azores, had penetrated 1,910 ft. into the earth's hard crust under the Atlantic bottom sediment. It returned core samples from depths never before explored; the previous record penetration was 260 ft. into the submarine crustal rock. Said Geochemist William Melson of the Smithsonian Institution: "It was like probing into the unknown, getting samples we had thought about for years but had never been able to reach...
...volcanic vents on earth, they speculated that volcanic activity might well have occurred on the moon as recently as 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. That would have upset the widely held view that the moon has been largely dormant for more than 3 billion years. Said NASA Geochemist Robin Brett: "If the material is indeed so young, we may have witnessed one of the important finds in Apollo geology...
...photographic outpouring also pleased scientists at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, who found the pictures highly useful in initial identification and examination of the freshly arrived lunar rocks last week. Geochemist Paul Cast, the Manned Spacecraft Center's chief lunar scientist, noted, for example, that the closeups of the moon's surface were so clear that the orange soil showed up as a distinct band in the surrounding material. To Cast, those sharp color boundaries were another indication that the orange soil is young by lunar standards and a product of relatively recent volcanism on the moon...
...Wasserburg jumped up from his fourth-row seat and practically pressed his nose against the TV screen to see the coloring for himself. NASA'S Egyptian-born geologist Farouk El Baz, who had helped train the astronauts, beamed proudly. Even the space agency's cautious Australian-born Geochemist Robin Brett exulted: "We have witnessed one of the important finds in Apollo geology...