Ariel Anbar
Ariel Anbar is an isotope geochemist and President's Professor at Arizona State University. He has published over 180 refereed papers on topics ranging from the origins of Earth's atmosphere to detecting life on other worlds to diagnosing human disease.
Education and career
Anbar was born in Rehovot, Israel and raised in Palo Alto, California and Amherst, New York. He received a A.B. in Geological Sciences and Chemistry from Harvard University in 1989. While at Harvard, he worked under the supervision of Heinrich Holland and conducted experiments that suggested the importance of photochemical oxidation in Archean oceans, especially as a possible source of manganese oxides before the Great Oxidation Event. Since 2004, he has been on the faculty in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University. Anbar was a co-author with Felisa Wolfe-Simon on the 2011 Science article "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus". Reports refuting the most significant aspects of the original results were published in the same journal in 2012. Following the publication of the articles challenging the conclusions of the original Science article first describing GFAJ-1, David Sanders on the website Retraction Watch argued that the original article should be retracted because of misrepresentation of critical data. The article has been retracted, although Anbar argued that it should not have been.Research
His group was the first to report natural fractionation of molybdenum isotopes, including how and why molybdenum isotopes fractionate during adsorption to manganese oxides. This work provided a foundation for the use of molybdenum isotopes to study ancient ocean redox change. Anbar and colleagues discovered a "whiff of oxygen" fifty million years before the Great Oxidation Event.Anbar's group has also worked on iron isotopes, demonstrating abiotic fractionation in low and high temperature systems. They have also worked to develop the uranium isotope system as a paleoredox proxy, opening up the carbonate sedimentary record for investigation of changes in ocean oxygenation and their linkages to evolution.
Anbar has also been involved in development of method to use calcium isotopes to study bone disease.