10/3/2023 0 Comments Ice towers of mount erebus![]() ![]() "When we woke up on Thanksgiving for our 'feast' and made our soup, we realized our hot water was no longer hot-just tepid. "It was over Thanksgiving so we decided to save our remaining dry soup mix and crackers for Thanksgiving day," Connell says. The researchers' next step will be to find direct evidence - namely, the life itself - in samples. ![]() ![]() While the DNA captured from the volcanic areas did not conclusively prove that the sites host living forms of the plants and animals, the samples nonetheless offer a tantalizing glimpse into what forms of life might live there. "It opens up the doors to some exciting discoveries about biodiversity in Antarctica." which makes me wonder if there might be species that are specially adapted to the caves and found nowhere else," Fraser says. "There were some sequences that didn't make a close match to DNA in online databases. But Fraser says the team also identified genetics of life that may be unique to the unusual environment of the volcanic ice caves. Most of the DNA collected from the caves match with species of, say, moss, algae and nematodes already detected at other sites on the continent. Hoffman presented the new work at the 6 th International Conference on Mars in Pasadena, California.It's in these caves that Fraser's research team collected soil samples that yielded the DNA of dozens of plant and animal species. “These are the locations on Mars where you are mostly likely to find liquid water, and they would be very easy to find because they will have these ice towers like signposts,” he says. Instead, he says that to settle the debate, the next generation of exploration needs to look in the places most likely to harbour liquid water, such as the warm spots in the Hellas Basin. Hoffman is best known for his theory that liquid water and life probably do not exist on Mars, arguing that carbon dioxide snow, rather than liquid water, etched out the gullies seen.īut Hoffman does not think his new idea is contradictory. The ice towers could grow as high as 30 m in the lower Martian gravity, and would stand out against the darker soil. That would provide the opportunity for the Mars Global Surveyor to capture high-resolution photos of the area, suggests Hoffman. The warm spots could be investigated visually as early as 2004, when the clouds are expected to clear over the Hellas Basin, a giant impact crater in the planet’s southern hemisphere. ![]() This means there is a chance that the ice might melt to provide liquid water as it sometimes does in the Mount Erebus towers, says Hoffman. On Mars, such icy towers would be doubly good for life because not only would they be relatively warm, but the ice would filter out some of the dangerous ultra-violet radiation.įurthermore, the Hellas Basin is at low altitude, and therefore has relatively high atmospheric pressure. No one has investigated whether the Mount Erebus towers harbour microbial life, although microbes are known to thrive in far harsher conditions in Antarctica. “Anything about Mars is going to be speculative, but this is a really good working hypothesis for the exploration of Mars.” UV filter “It’s really fascinating,” says Malcolm Walter, director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney. The thermal anomalies – top left and bottom right – in the Hellas Basin remain day and night ![]()
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