Ildikó Gyollai and Márta Polgári

Márta Polgári: “As a young schoolchild, my favourite pastime was collecting beautiful pebbles beside the Danube. Later I became fascinated by Earth sciences, became a geologist and studied the formation of iron and manganese ore deposits weighing hundreds of millions of tonnes. I realised that micrometre-sized bacteria create these deposits and immersed myself in the nanoworld. This experience later led me into meteorite research. My results suggest that some meteorites, including Martian ones, have worm-like textures and mineral compositions resembling the ores, suggesting that bacterial activity may have played a role in their formation.”

Ildikó Gyollai: “As a preschooler, I was captivated by The Land Before Time; my first drawing depicted dinosaurs and volcanoes. Later I collected rocks beside roadworks and on family outings: shell-bearing limestone and red calcite. For a secondary-school competition I wrote about the Gánt bauxite mine under the title ‘In Search of a Mysterious Martian Landscape’, foreshadowing my later research. University fieldwork took us into mines where we found rarer minerals. In Szaniszló Bérczi’s team I studied alterations in historical Hungarian and Antarctic meteorites. Later, at the University of Vienna, I investigated how Earth escaped the Snowball Earth ice age. Geological processes and meteorite impacts did not fit the data. With Márta Polgári, we concluded that organisms could also cause such effects, particularly iron- and manganese-oxidising bacteria. At a thousandfold magnification they resemble strings of beads; similar structures can even be found in meteorites.”