Kindred Souls—Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys and Mars II
“We’re using the Dry Valley soils as a model for the more complex soils that exist in the rest of the world,” said Dr. Wall, who spent a few weeks here this season, her eighth since 1989. The dearth of species here makes relationships between organisms and their environment easier to discern, she said. “In normal soils, the soil organisms are extremely complex”, she said. “You’ve got almost as many species in the soil as you have above ground.” For example, she said, soil scientists have found as many as 110 different nematode species living in the grassland soil of Colorado, “and then you’ve got earthworms and ants and so on.”
Yet, originally called “Land of the Dead” by explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1903, Taylor Valley seemed to have no life with coarse and strewn boulders, no plants, and nothing alive in the lakes. However, lately science has found that millions of microscopic plants and animals live there, invisible to the human eyes and hidden in the soil, hidden under the perennially frozen surfaces of the valley’s lakes and inside its rocks. The latest researchers feel this area is of deep importance as how life traveled elsewhere in the solar system, such as Mars.
In this report written by Cornelia Dean, titled “Lake Hoare Camp, Antarctica”, many feel that there are clues in this area that point to life in more conventional earthly ecosystems. With Taylor Valley as one of the main “dry valleys” across the McMurdo Sound, located across from the big American base at McMurdo which is considered the hub of Antarctic exploration. A highly rudimentary ecosystem, scientists feel that it can easily be modeled as a starting point for understanding how the web of life is woven in lusher, more complex realms.
The “worm herders,” or nematode researchers measure what factors effect the abundance and variety of the nematodes. Whenever it is too cold or dry, they enter a complete state of suspended animation which is called “anhydrobiosis,” in which they lose up to 99 percent of the water in their bodies and become freeze dried. However, the scientists can easily bring them back to life by emerging them into water. But when they are freeze-dried, they can easily be carried around by the wind—found out when they were located in a meltwater pool in the top of the glacier. An advantage of this ecosystem in Antarctica is that it is so simple it is easy to study it, as compared to the complex and elaborate ecosystems.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
