The Atacama Desert – a dry, unpopulated part of northern Chile that is home to some of the most insightful ground telescopes on Earth – is actually teeming with life underground, according to a team of researchers who recently studied the soils.
As LiveScience reminds us that scientists have already found microbial life beneath the desert surface. What we haven’t appreciated until now is the diversity of this life. The team behind this latest discovery collected soil samples to a depth of 13.78 feet (4.2 meters) in the Yungay Desert region, observing diverse microbial communities across depths and soil types. The team’s research was published this week in PNAS Nexus.
The living organisms include cyanobacteria and the extremophilic Actinobacteriota, as well as a nitrogen-fixing class of bacteria called Alphaproteobacteria. According to the team, the porous nature of the gypsum crystals creates a microclimate that protects microbes from the ultraviolet radiation above them, but allows enough light through for the microbes to photosynthesize.
“High salt concentrations may cause microbial colonization to cease in the lower part of the playa sediments,” the team wrote, but “microbial communities reemerge in the underlying alluvial fan deposits, possibly because gypsum provides an alternative water source.”
There is very little water in the Atacama; A 4 year course During an El Niño that brought heavy rains to other parts of central South America, the valley experienced only a single rain event measuring just 0.091 inches (2.3 millimeters). The team added that similar gypsum deposits on Mars could provide a water source for microbial life on the Red Planet, if they existed.
While NASA did it attempted to penetrate the surface of Mars before, and the The Perseverance Rover has collected a cache of interesting rock samples No mission on the planet has ever dug as deeply as the researchers recently did in the Atacama. The Chilean desert is so desolate Scientists use it as an analogue for MarsSo if life manages to survive beneath its surface, it’s worth considering the possibility that the Red Planet can do the same.
“Although gypsum may not be ubiquitous in the subsurface of all deserts, the presence of this subsurface niche may indicate that global desert biodiversity has been previously underestimated and that, under certain circumstances, a subterranean community may exist in the deeper layers of the driest deserts.” Places on Earth,” they wrote.
Recent research has bucked the trend of emerging science in the Atacama region and revealed life eking out an existence in its alien – albeit terrestrial – environment.
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