THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH WITHOUT LIFE.: THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH WITHOUT LIFE.
In the Atac...: THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH WITHOUT LIFE. In the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, it looks as if nothing could ever survive. It is...
Wednesday 8 October 2014
THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH WITHOUT LIFE.
In the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, it looks as if nothing could ever survive. It is one of the driest places in the world, and some sections of the Mars-like expanse can go 50 years without feeling a drop of rain. “Towards Atacama, near the deserted coast, you see a land without men, where there is not a bird, not a beast, nor a tree, nor any vegetation.”
Yet Atacama is not devoid of life. Microorganisms called endoliths have found a way to cling on, by hiding themselves inside the pores of rocks, where there’s just enough water to survive. “They support a whole community of organisms that eat by products of their metabolism.
Life, it seems, has an incredible for finding ways to persist. Indeed, microorganisms have been around for nearly four billion years, giving them time to adapt to some of the most extreme conditions in the natural world.
Life exists at the other extreme, too, in subfreezing conditions. Bacteria in the genusPsychrobacter can happily live below -10C in Siberian permafrost and Antarctic glacier mud. Living cells recently turned up in a subglacial lake below the Antarctic ice. And Antarctica’s hypersaline Deep Lake hosts unique salt-loving species, even at -20C .To survive in these environments, microrganisms possess features such as specially adapted membranes and protein structures, and anti-freeze molecules within their cells. Given that the Earth has been covered in ice multiple times since life first evolved, “an ice-covered lake in Antarctica does not seem all that extreme.
Even if there are some lone holdouts of sterility in the natural world, however, the environment exists in a constant state of flux – and if extremophiles teach us anything, it is that organisms are always capable of adapting. “Give them enough time and they will find a way.
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