By Phil Williams

Christopher Romanek, who worked on the team that discovered possible signs of ancient life in a meteorite from Mars, will speak about the discovery in the first President's Lecture of the year.

Romanek, an assistant research scientist with UGA's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, says that he is convinced carbonates found inside the meteorite were formed at low enough temperatures for life to flourish around them on Mars. Romanek was co-author of a paper in the journal Science which turned the scientific world on its ear in August.

His lecture, entitled "Is There Life on Mars?," will be given at the Tate Student Center theater at 3:30 p.m. on Oct. 23. It is free and open to the public.

Romanek will bring chips from the actual meteorite, discovered in Antarctica 13 years ago. The rock was formed on Mars about 4.6 billion years ago, and scientists believe it became covered with microorganisms between 3.6 billion and 4 billion years ago. Some 16 million years before the present time, a comet or asteroid apparently struck the Martian surface and blasted pieces of the rock into space, where they drifted for millions of years. The meteorite found in Antarctica fell to Earth about 13,000 years ago.

Studying 'globs'
Romanek became part of the team that studied the rock before he came to UGA during a two-year postdoctoral National Research Council fellowship at the Johnson Space Center near Houston. An expert in carbonate formation, Romanek studied the meteorite's unusual carbonate spheroids or "globs," as they came to be called.

"I found that the samples were extremely enriched in carbon 13 compared to materials on Earth," says Romanek. "So it was clear this rock wasn't from the Earth. However the signature was nearly identical for the fingerprint that has been proposed for the carbon dioxide of Mars. Using other models of the isotope record, I concluded that these spheroids must have been formed between zero and 80 degrees Celsius."

Crucial discovery
That discovery was crucial in the theory that the rock held fossilized microorganisms, because no scientists believe microorganisms could exist at the much higher temperatures sometimes associated with the formation of such rocks.

Capturing world attention
The story that microscopic life may have once existed on Mars captured world attention for several days when the research was published in August.

The President's Lecture series was created in 1990 by President Charles Knapp to give the university and Athens communities an opportunity to hear outstanding UGA faculty members.