14 DAY TRIAL // Astrobiologists have for a long time recognized the difference between assessing the possibility that life ever existed on the Red Planet, and determining the chances that it may have survived to this day. The issues are very separate from each other in the sense that, even if life once existed on Mars billions of years ago, it's very difficult to predict whether it still exists today. A team of Canadian researchers has recently conducted a series of scientific investigations, which determined that the answer is most likely yes.
The McGill University team was part of a larger, international collaboration, which also included scientists from the University of Toronto, the SETI Institute, and the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC). Experts with these institutions discovered that the Lost Hammer Spring, which is located on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada, is capable of supporting microbial life. This site was selected because of the similarities it shares with the surface of Mars, especially in terms of temperature and chemistry.
The Spring holds extreme concentrations of salt, a compound that lowers the freezing point of water considerably. One of the leading theories on how liquid water on Mars was possible is that the streams there contained high amounts of salt as well. This allowed them to remain flowing at temperatures that would have otherwise turned them into rock-hard blocks of ice. The Spring was additionally found to contain no oxygen, and so the research team was very curious as to how precisely this essential gas was produced.
“We were surprised that we did not find methanogenic bacteria that produce methane at Lost Hammer. but we did find other very unique anaerobic organisms – organisms that survive by essentially eating methane and probably breathing sulfate instead of oxygen,” explains Dr. Lyle Whyte, who holds an appointment as a microbiologist at the McGill University. He was also the leader of the new investigation. “The point of the research is that it doesn't matter where the methane is coming from. If you have a situation where you have very cold salty water, it could potentially support a microbial community, even in that extreme harsh environment,” he adds.
“There are places on Mars where the temperature reaches relatively warm -10 to 0 degrees and perhaps even above 0ºC, and on Axel Heiberg it gets down to -50, easy. The Lost Hammer spring is the most extreme subzero and salty environment we've found. This site also provides a model of how a methane seep could form in a frozen world like Mars, providing a potential mechanism for the recently discovered Martian methane plumes,” the expert concludes.