Arizona Geological Society
2025 Speaker Series
Tuesday, 2 December 2025 | 5:30 - 8:00 PM
Location: Hexagon Mining Division Office
40 East Congress Street, Suite 150, Tucson, Arizona 85701
Parking: On the street or parking garage (Old Pueblo Parking)
Social Hour - Sandwiches from Beyond Bread (5:30-6:20 PM MST), Presentation (6:20 PM MST)
AGS Publications will be available for sale at Tuesday's meeting.
Will need cash or check (no credit cards)
For those planning to attend the event, please register by 6:00 PM on Sunday, November 30, 2025
Livestream URL Pending
The Arizona Geological Society thanks Hexagon
for generously providing the venue and drinks
Stromatolites and Friends: Earth Niches through Time
Daniel M. Aiken, Consulting Geologist
Abstract: Contemplating the widespread and diverse forms of microbiolites, from pre-ancient shorelines and watery depths, to remote nutrient-choked locales around the globe, one must envision our earliest one-celled emissaries as innovators on earth, creating the web of sustenance our oxygen, our food chains, our resource basket.
With the slow and relentless buildup of living forms, our home planet has demonstrated the capacity for stable living systems almost since the amassing of the earliest chondrules, those primitive grains of the young solar system.
In my mind, there has been a teleological inevitability about the development of evolution's tools: the viability of liquid water, the baffling construction of chlorophyll and photosynthesis, the flourishing construction of chemical life and colonies in the slow- living deep crust up to shallow niches; the handing off of genetic instructions and victorious responses to adverse environments, seen as the ongoing growth of complexity and the chimeric, that is to say, lateral transfer of subsystems.
Stromatolitic life (see photo to right) is malleable, from two to three to four dimensions, domal, digitate, angular, and mat-like, to name a few.
Can we see the planetary transformation, not just through the lens of the remote billions of years, but as the underlying fact of our present existence, connecting us to stars?
Here we have the ecological deliberations with our complex friends and foes in the latest Tree of Life - bacteria that is eating rock and light, drinking ancient and modern water, consuming space and leaving what is called waste or by-products, which is really the creation of habitability as perceived by we metazoans, the new kids on the block.
The next voyager time-capsule to deeper space should include a hunk of layered stromatolites as a representation to aliens of the real Earth, to demonstrate the universality of how life on Earth and Mars began and continued by constant layering, revealed as one fleeting generation at a time, glued together within the physics of living matter.
Bio: Dan Aiken has been active in the mining community of Tucson since 1974, having worked for Duval, Cyprus, Phelps Dodge, and FreeportMcMoRan. He was a former geologist at Sierrita, Esperanza, Twin Buttes, and Johnson Camp, and has been engaged with a variety of other mines in Arizona and New Mexico. He enjoys GSA and AGS field programs and has taken many geological travels to places around the globe. He is resuming a position as AGS counselor for 2026, a position he held previously. He has led numerous field trips and taught training sessions regarding aspects of porphyry copper deposits. Recently he has been engaged with his company Nature Studies, and taught and tutored at the Tohono O'odham Community College in Sells, Arizona for four years between geological commitments. He was in the docent program at Arizona State Museum during Covid, enjoys collecting rocks, and returns frequently to the Northwest, where he previously graduated from University of Oregon.
Hexagon Mining Division Office - 40 East Congress Street,
Suite 150, Tucson, Arizona 85701
