Salt can be used as a food preservative. Researchers found evidence of life when they studied some really old salt crystals.
There are little cubes of the original liquid. Kathy Benison, a geology professor at West Virginia University, said that the shapes they saw were consistent with what they would expect from the microorganisms.
The halite that Benison and her team studied was originally found in central Australia. The findings were published in the journal Geology.
The video shows how the liquid looks when it moves inside.
Science supports the idea that these organisms could still be alive.
We know by studying life in modern extreme environments that there are organisms that are able to undergo a survival mode, like a hibernation. She said that they are still alive, but slow down their biological activities.
Benison thinks that if there are organisms in the crystal, they could be alive. The halite needs to be opened in order to confirm that it is still alive.
Benison plans to do just that, even though cracking into that crystal might seem bold. She said there was no need to worry.
It does sound like a really bad B-movie, but there is a lot of detailed work that has been going on for years to try to figure out how to do that in the safest possible way.
Bonnie was not involved in the study, but still offered some comforting words.
She said that an environment that has never seen a human will not be able to cause disease.
The findings opened the door to finding life on other planets, as well as studying the origins of life on Earth.
Billions of years, probably, since the waters of Mars could have been teeming with life. We need longer experiments in rocks that have been around longer on our planet in order to understand what could happen on Mars.
Maybe they could help us find evidence of aliens.
The piece was reported on the radio by two people. It was edited by Sarah Handel and adapted for the web by Manuela Lopez Restrepo.
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