Earthly extremes hint to life elsewhere
If Jocelyne DiRuggiero was looking for life on Mars, she wouldn’t dig in the planet’s red soil. Instead, she’d head where you might not expect. “I’d go to the salt flats, because there’s more water there,” DiRuggiero said. In saying that, DiRuggiero drew on her experience investigating extreme environments, places that the hardiest single-cell organisms call home. Her recent investigation of Chile’s barren Atacama Desert, a high plateau that scientists believe is the driest place on Earth, showed that the microbial communities appeared to be thriving best in rocks composed of salts, which retained the most moisture. DiRuggiero, a biologist from Johns Hopkins University, presented her findings on Wednesday (May 18) during a talk at Harvard’s Geological Museum sponsored by Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative. For most of Earth’s history, life has been dominated by microorganisms. Scientists estimate that life began 3.4 billion years ago and that the animal life that dominates the planet...