Extremophile Hunting
In seeking to understand ourselves and our place in the universe, we continue to look for the possibility of life elsewhere. This search has led to us to look many places -- in the deep reaches of place; within our solar system; and closer to home, right here on our beloved blue marble. There are places on Earth that we've never explored, even while we're busily destroying it. One such place, is Lake Untersee, in Antarctica, where a team of NASA scientist have just departed for, looking for alien life. Alien, not in the extra-terristrial sense -- but alien in that they may find life like we've never seen before.
Lake Untersee is an extreme environment. It is a subglacial lake that is permanently covered in ice (for now anyway), fed by the Anuchin Glacier, the lake has no outlet. Water loss is via evaporation and ablation. The upper 70 metres of the lake is highly alkaline, with a pH similar to bleach, and the lake's sediment produces more methane gas than any other natural body of water on the planet. (As a side note, this is one of the dangers of global warming. There are huge amounts of methane trapped in the Arctic and Antarctic ice. Its release will only accelerate the pace of climate change.)
The conditions in Lake Untersee are similar to what is found in similar bodies in space: Mars, comets and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. If life is found in the lake, the probability increases that we will find extra-terristrial life where similar conditions exist. Lifeforms found in extreme environments, extremophiles, have already been found in other extreme regions of the planet. One such extremophile, a bacteria found in an Alaskan tunnel, was frozen for 32,000 years, and returned to life once thawed.
Gives a new perspective on life and Earth's ability to endure -- endurance that may not be a trait of the human species.
Lake Untersee is an extreme environment. It is a subglacial lake that is permanently covered in ice (for now anyway), fed by the Anuchin Glacier, the lake has no outlet. Water loss is via evaporation and ablation. The upper 70 metres of the lake is highly alkaline, with a pH similar to bleach, and the lake's sediment produces more methane gas than any other natural body of water on the planet. (As a side note, this is one of the dangers of global warming. There are huge amounts of methane trapped in the Arctic and Antarctic ice. Its release will only accelerate the pace of climate change.)
The conditions in Lake Untersee are similar to what is found in similar bodies in space: Mars, comets and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. If life is found in the lake, the probability increases that we will find extra-terristrial life where similar conditions exist. Lifeforms found in extreme environments, extremophiles, have already been found in other extreme regions of the planet. One such extremophile, a bacteria found in an Alaskan tunnel, was frozen for 32,000 years, and returned to life once thawed.
Gives a new perspective on life and Earth's ability to endure -- endurance that may not be a trait of the human species.
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