Driest Place on Earth Hosts Life
Driest Place on Earth Hosts Life
By Andrew Williams - May 18, 2015
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María Elena South: Mars on Earth in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Photo courtesy: Armando Azua-Bustos - See more at: http://www.astrobio.net/topic/origins/extreme-life/driest-place-on-earth-hosts-life/#sthash.0aLwfZ8k.dpuf
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Researchers have pinpointed the driest location on Earth in the Atacama Desert, a region in Chile already recognised as the most arid in the world. They have also found evidence of life at the site, a discovery that could have far-reaching implications for the search for life on Mars.
For more than a decade, the Yungay region has been established as the driest area of the hyper-arid Atacama desert, with conditions close to the so-called “dry limit” for life on Earth. Several academic papers have been published reporting on the extraordinary characteristics of the site and its relevance to astrobiologists as an analogue of conditions on Mars. However, following a more systematic search of the desert, a Chilean research team has now found a new site, María Elena South (MES), which it describes as “much drier” than Yungay.
Lead author Armando Azua-Bustos, an environmental biologist and research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, says the team discovered that MES has a mean atmospheric relative humidity (RH) of 17.3 percent and a soil RH of a constant 14 percent at a depth of one meter. This soil value matches the lowest RH measurements taken by the Mars Science Laboratory at Gale Crater on Mars, establishing the fact that conditions at the site are as dry as those found recently on the Martian surface.
“Remarkably, we found a number of viable bacterial species in the soil profile at MES using a combination of molecular dependent and independent methods, unveiling the presence of life in the driest place on the Atacama Desert reported to date,” Azua-Bustos says.
More:
http://www.astrobio.net/topic/origins/extreme-life/driest-place-on-earth-hosts-life/#sthash.0aLwfZ8k.dpuf
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