Its a place few people have seen or even imagined, and distant from familiar, everyday surroundings. The weather can be as harsh as the terrain at times with winds and blinding snow reaching 110 mph. For four months the darkness is company only to the sounds of cracking ice and the ever present howling of the winds.
The surrounding mountains rise up majestically to soaring, pinnacled peaks, blocking the passage of the continental ice that surrounds them. The gentle slope of the Anuchin Glacier flows in from the north halting at its edge. Lake Untersee: within the mountains of Queen Maud Land is a world that resembles Earth’s earliest biosphere.
One dominated by microbial life forming the same fabrics and structures that we see preserved in sediments dating back 3.45 billion years. Beneath the thick perennial ice-cover are cyanobacterial mats growing undisturbed as they did billions of years ago – its like a postcard from the past; one that can help us understand how those early ecosystems thrived on a planet with an atmosphere nearly devoid of oxygen.
But cyanobacteria had discovered how to use the sun by harnessing its light as energy and splitting water to combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere. And in the process releasing oxygen, they began an event that over geologic time transformed our planet to a world capable of sustaining multicellular life.
View video: https://youtu.be/qs2hUZP-6Bo
As you can see, Lake Untersee is a difficult place to live and work. But we are seeking new knowledge. Knowledge that will inform us about Earth’s past history and help us understand its future. Our research also helps guide the search for evidence of life on other distant worlds such as Mars or the outer moons of Jupiter or Saturn…or beyond.
For additional information see: Discovery of large conical stromatolites in Lake Untersee, Antarctica
D. T. ANDERSEN, D. Y. SUMNER, I. HAWES, J. WEBSTER-BROWN, C. P. MCKAY
Article first published online: 19 APR 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1472-4669.2011.00279.x
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Astrobiology
