Places On Earth Too Hostile For Life

Life can be found virtually everywhere here on Earth. You can find it on polar ice sheets, in scalding hot springs, and even kilometers underground. But life reaches its limits in some spots here on Earth — spots that, according to scientists, are too hostile for even the toughest microbes, like the briny lakes of Africa’s Rift Valley and the cold, dry soil of Antarctica’s Shackleton Glacier Valley.

Together the two projects “contradict the current wisdom that life is really everywhere,” says Nathan Smith, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California who was not involved with either project. “Both, in their own ways, in different types of environments, are homing in on what might be real barriers to life.”
In the Rift Valley lakes, in Ethiopia, volcanic gases venting from below acidify the water, which is also rich in salts from brines created by the evaporation of ancient and modern bodies of water. Add the heating effect of the volcanic activity, and the lakes represent an environment more extreme than any found in Yellowstone National Park or even in the Atacama Desert.

More details over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: Puri Lopez)


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