Driest desert may hold clues to alien life on Mars
Washington, Feb. 27: For the first time, researchers have observed specialised bacteria in the world’s driest desert, that can rebound after lying dormant for decades, a finding that points towards the possibility of alien life lurking in the soils of Mars.
Scientists from Washington State University ( WSU) in the US studied the driest corner of South America’s Atacama Desert, where decades pass without any rain.
Scientists have long wondered whether microbes in the soil of this hyper- arid environment, the most similar place on Earth to the Martian surface, are permanent residents or dying vestiges of life, blown in by the weather.
In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers showed that even the hyper- arid Atacama Desert can provide a habitable environment for microorganisms.
The researchers found that specialised bacteria are able to live in the soil, going dormant for decades, without water and then reactivating and reproducing when it rains.
“It has always fascinated me to go to the places where people don’t think anything could possibly survive and discover that life has somehow found a way to make it work,” said Dirk SchulzeMakuch, from WSU, who led the study.
“Our research tell us that if life can persist in Earth’s driest environment there is a good chance it could be hanging in there on Mars in a similar fashion,” said Schulze- Makuch.
Researchers went to the Atacama for the first time in 2015 to study how organisms survive in the soil of Earth’s driest environment. After an extremely rare shower, the researchers detected an explosion of biological activity in the Atacama soil.
They used sterilised spoons and other delicate instrumentation to scoop soil samples from various depths and then performed genomic analyses to identify the different microbial communities that were reproducing in the samples.
The researchers found several indigenous species of microbial life that had adapted to live in the harsh environment.
The researchers returned to the Atacama in 2016 and 2017 to follow up on their initial sampling and found that the same microbial communities in the soil were gradually reverting to a dormant state as the moisture went away.