Researchers from McGill University working in the high Arctic region of Canada have discovered a spring that hosts a thriving microbial community. The Lost Hammer Spring is a fantastic Earth analog for Mars’s deep surface, with water temperatures around -50 degrees Celsius but a salinity of around 24%. That salinity keeps the water liquid, something we think is possible on Mars as well.

The water is also oxygen-poor, as it has to go through 600 meters of permafrost to reach the surface. This composition means that the microbes are predominantly sulfur-oxidizing bacteria and methane-oxidizing archaea. That’s exciting because we keep detecting methane on Mars using orbiting spacecraft, the Curiosity rover, and even some ground-based telescopes here on Earth. But we haven’t determined where the methane is coming from.

Methane is easily destroyed by sunlight, which breaks the molecules into constituent elements, basically, so there has to be some sort of renewal process at this point in the planet’s lifespan. One of the possibilities being considered is that there is subsurface microbial life on Mars producing methane, and with this analog, we have located a community that adds some probability to the possibility.

Even if this research doesn’t lead to the discovery of life on Mars, finding a new extremophile community continues to push the limits of where life can be found.

This work was published in Nature and led by Elisse Magnuson.

More Information

A Recent Discovery Could Unravel the Mystery of Martian Methane (Dirk Schulze-Makuch) 

“Active lithoautotrophic and methane-oxidizing microbial community in an anoxic, sub-zero, and hypersaline High Arctic spring,” Elisse Magnuson et al., 2022 April 8, The ISME Journal