Aeolian Transport of Viable Microbial Life Across the Atacama Desert, Chile: Implications for Mars

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2019 Aug 24

PMID 31439858

Citations 11

Authors

Armando Azua-Bustos

Carlos Gonzalez-Silva

Miguel Angel Fernandez-Martinez

Cristian Arenas-Fajardo

Ricardo Fonseca

F Javier Martin-Torres

Maite Fernandez-Sampedro

Alberto G Fairen

Maria-Paz Zorzano

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Here we inspect whether microbial life may disperse using dust transported by wind in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, a well-known Mars analog model. By setting a simple experiment across the hyperarid core of the Atacama we found that a number of viable bacteria and fungi are in fact able to traverse the driest and most UV irradiated desert on Earth unscathed using wind-transported dust, particularly in the later afternoon hours. This finding suggests that microbial life on Mars, extant or past, may have similarly benefited from aeolian transport to move across the planet and find suitable habitats to thrive and evolve.

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