Why the Search for Life on Mars Is Happening in Canada’s Arctic

One of the most cold springs on the planet can only be used by the hardiest organisms. Lost Hammer Spring is located in the unpopulated Higharctic region of Canada. A few hundred miles from the North Pole, the spring is surrounded by snow, ice, salt, and rocks. He traveled to this out-of-this-world place to study the microbes that live in its salty, icy, low-oxygen water in hopes of learning about life on Mars.

In a new paper published in The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, Whyte and his colleagues say that the organisms that live a few inches down in the spring can survive. The majority of Earth species rely on solar energy. The area smells like rotten eggs even from a distance because the microbes eat and breathe methane and hydrogen sulfide. The site is called the "stinky springs" by the research team. There are bugs that are eating rocks and they are doing this under very Mars-like conditions.

The Red Planet has been the focus of the search for aliens. More than 3 billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, and had a protective atmosphere, according to scientists. While the planet is almost completely inhospitable to life now, researchers envision past Martians eking out a life at the bottom of a pond. Scientists have been sending rovers to trundle along the surface to look for signs of alien life. It is difficult to send a sample expedition to Mars. Canada is a very close proxy.

There are a number of unique attributes of the Lost Hammer Spring. The subzero temperature and extreme saltiness of the water are the first things that come to mind. Salt prevents the water from freezing. Some of the salt deposits on Mars may have been in brines a long time ago, which would have made it the last place on the planet to be hospitable. The water at Lost Hammer is almost completely devoid of oxygen, which is rare on Earth but not on other worlds. The fringe of where life can exist at all is where any creature holding out there counts as an "extremologist".

Each time they traveled to the remote Canadian region, they took a few grams of briny mud. To figure out what the microbes use for energy and how they respond to the weather in the spring, they used machines to isolated the cells and sequence them. Figuring out where and how microbes might be sustained on Mars or other worlds would be aided by that.