Primary fluid inclusions in halite crystallized in Saline Valley, California, in 1980, 2004-2005, and 2007, contain rod- and coccoid-shaped microparticles the same size and morphology as archaea and bacteria living in modern brines. Primary fluid inclusions from a well-dated (0-100,000 years), 90 m long salt core from Badwater Basin, Death Valley, California, also contain microparticles, here i...

The Alpine Haselgebirge Formation represents an Upper Permian to Lower Triassic evaporitic rift succession of the Northern Calcareous Alps (Eastern Alps). Although the rocksalt body deposits are highly tectonised, consisting mainly of protocataclasites and mylonites of halite and mudrock, the early diagenetic history can be established from non-tectonised mudrock bodies: Cm-sized euhedral halit...

Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) is an established method for analyzing multiscale and multidimensional imagery in a range of disciplines. In the present study this method was used for the 3D reconstruction of halite hopper crystals in a mudrock sample, based on Computed Tomography data. To quantitatively assess the reliability of OBIA results, they were benchmarked against a corresponding “g...

Halite crystals were selected from a 186 m subsurface core taken from the Badwater salt pan, Death Valley, California to ascertain if halophilic Archaea and their associated 16S rDNA can survive over several tens of thousands of years. Using a combined microscope microdrill/micropipette system, fluids from brine inclusions were aseptically extracted from primary, hopper texture, halite crystals...

In this study, we utilized transmission electron microscopy to examine the contents of fluid inclusions in halite (NaCl) and solid halite crystals collected 650 m below the surface from the Late Permian Salado Formation in southeastern New Mexico (USA). The halite has been isolated from contaminating groundwater since deposition approximately 250 Ma ago. We show that abundant cellulose microfib...

Introduction: Fluids in a near-surface environment on Mars were responsible for the formation and alteration of many minerals in the nakhlite meteorites. Halite is one of a range of such secondary minerals that includes clays, carbonates, sulphates, oxides, and iron oxy-hydroxides [1,2] which may have formed at different times, under different fluid flow regimes (groundwater, hydrothermal, crat...

Direct evidence of complex prebiotic chemistry from a water-rich world in the outer solar system is provided by the 4.5-billion-year-old halite crystals hosted in the Zag and Monahans (1998) meteorites. This study offers the first comprehensive organic analysis of the soluble and insoluble organic compounds found in the millimeter-sized halite crystals containing brine inclusions and sheds ligh...

This paper presents a framework for the implementation of online programming competitions, including a set of principles for the design of the multiplayer game and a practical framework for the construction of the competition environment. The paper presents a successful example competition, the 2016-17 Halite challenge, and briefly mentions a second competition, the Halite II challenge, which l...

Climate changes within Cenozoic extreme climate events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and the First Oligocene Glacial provide good opportunities to estimate the global climate trends in our present and future life. However, quantitative paleotemperatures data for Cenozoic climatic reconstruction are still lacking, hindering a better understanding of the past and future climate con...

We present a new and innovative way of determining the oxygen level of Earth’s past atmosphere by directly measuring inclusion gases trapped in halite. After intensive screening using multiple depositional, textural/fabric, and geochemical parameters, we determined that tectonically undisturbed cumulate, chevron, and cornet halite inclusions may retain atmospheric gas during crystallization fro...