Life Has Been Found in a Low-Oxygen, Super-Salty, Sub-Zero Arctic Spring

Life has been found in a place that is very inhospitable to most organisms.

The Lost Hammer Spring in the Canadian Arctic is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.

If there is any evidence of extraterrestrial life, it could be found in the briny water that comes up from the depths of the permafrost.

It's going to be difficult to find life in extraterrestrial environments, but scientists think they may be able to find it.

There are some characteristics we can hazard a pretty decent guess at, like the fact that ocean worlds like Jupiter and Enceladus don't seem to have a lot in common with a desert world like Mars.

There is evidence that cold, salty oceans may be underneath the ice shells. Mars could also have liquid salty lakes. The environments are likely hypersaline. Salts reduce the freezing point of water. They're very low in oxygen.

There may be lakes beneath the southern polar ice cap of Mars. If there are lakes there, Lost Hammer Spring is close to what we think they would be like.

Water with less than one part per million of dissolved oxygen can be found from the depths of the permafrost. Trying to live in that would be hard. Without assistance, you couldn't.

Some crazy places have been found home to microbes. Microbiologist Elisse Magnuson and her colleagues wanted to find out if Lost Hammer Spring could be one of the lakes on Mars. It wasn't simple.

There is a lost hammer spring. isse Magnuson is a person.

It took a couple of years for us to be able to detect active communities.

When we were able to find evidence of active microbes in the environment, it was gratifying.

The next step was to identify the different types of microbes.

Most of the microbes they found were completely new to science and were able to thrive in a place like Lost Hammer Spring.

The microbes we found and described at Lost Hammer Spring are surprising because they don't depend on organic material or oxygen to live.

They survive on Mars by eating and breathing methane, sulfides, sulfate, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, all of which are found on the planet.

They can fix carbon dioxide and nitrogen gasses from the atmosphere, all of which makes them highly adapted to both surviving and thriving in very extreme environments on Earth and beyond.

This kind of metabolism can only be found in organisms that live in extreme environments. If there is life on Mars with a similar survival strategy, it is likely to be very small.

The team plans to cultivate and study some of the most active members of the community in order to learn more about how they adapted to thrive in such a hostile environment. The researchers said that this information could help them understand the likelihood of such organisms emerging on Mars.

Who is the poor man who lost his hammer 600 meters below the ice?

The research was published in the journal.