Kindred Souls—Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys and Mars
Nestled in a row of valleys in Artarctica—Victoria Valley, Wright Valley, and Taylor Valley—the McMurdo Dry Valley runs from north to south in a country that has one of the world’s most extreme deserts. Consisting of winds that can reach up to 200 mph, it can remove all the water, ice, and snow during a process called the katabatic winds. In Greek this means “going down”, a method when cold occurs, the dense air is pulled downhill simply by the force of gravity.
The name Dry Valleys are named because of their extremely low humidity, along with their lack of snow or ice cover. Considered to be one of the last great frontiers on Earth, Antarctica is an environment which has freezing temperatures against biologic metabolism functions, keeping water in a perpetual solid, ice state. Considered the closest environment to Mars, it is now considered as one of the primary laboratories for inhospitable conditions in order to obtain extraterrestrial information in our solar system—in particular, Mars alone.
The Phoenix was recently sent up to Mars to gather water/ice samples for signs of life on the red planet. A similar basis of life has been studied in Antarctica, where dry cold conditions preserve biomolecules. The standard freeze-dried preservation of microorganisms and frozen storage of the biochemicals with Antarctica’s particular drying process is part of what successfully fossilizes the organisms and preserves their organic derivatives.
The cores of the molecules are considered excellent biomarkers for extant surface life, especially in extreme desert habitats. The very low Antarctica temperatures adds to their longevity, also having the ability to decrease the kinetic energy and slow down its entropic decay under extremes of UV stress.
Due to the UV stress, the deserts in Antarctic deserts are also considered excellent places to study the influence of early evolution of microbial life on Earth, in addition to the putative development and Martian early survival. Presently, there is evidence of viable bacteria in the Antarctica permafrost up to one million years, (Vorobyova et al. 1997).
Through studies, the locations of the microorganisms are found to exist in the upper layers of the ice sheet, while the microorganism fossils are found in deep ice cores. What has been discovered in Antarctica is that colonies of bacteria are able to hibernate in the long extreme winters. In the Antarctica summers, the sun is able to melt the smaller quantities of liquid water around each of the dust particles. Forming a tiny solar collector which acts as very tiny solar collectors, the bacteria wake up and go through their life-cycles.
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