It’s expensive—and difficult—to send a sampling expedition to Mars. Canada is a heck of a lot closer, and it’s not a bad proxy.
The Lost Hammer Spring has a number of unique attributes that mimic parts of the Martian landscape, Whyte says. First, there’s the subzero temperature , as well as the extreme saltiness of the water—25 percent salinity, about 10 times as salty as seawater. Mars has been found to have salt deposits here and there, some of which might have been in, which perhaps would have been the last habitable spots on the planet.
On each of their trips to the remote Canadian region, Whyte and his colleagues scooped up samples of the briny mud, each just a few grams. Back at their lab, they used machines to isolate microbial cells and sequence their genomes and RNA to figure out what the microbes use for energy and how they tolerate the conditions in the spring. That could aid astronomers’ efforts to figure out where and how microbes might be sustained on Mars or other worlds.
“From a Mars analogue perspective, this study is really cool,” says Janice Bishop, an astrobiologist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. The Lost Hammer Spring might resemble the region on the western side of Mars’ Olympus Mons, the tallest peak in the solar system. There, from time to time in the past, brines might have percolated up through the permafrost, generating flowing cold springs, Bishop argues.
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