Evidence of new strains of bacteria in a lake hidden under an Icelandic glacier far from the sun has revealed how life might thrive in sub-surface oceans on the icy moons around Saturn and Jupiter. ‘Our preliminary results reveal new branches of life here,’ said Dr Gregory Farrant from Matís, a governmental research institute based in Iceland.
The lake – called Skaftárkatlar – is one of the best places on earth to study how life might evolve in the isolation of a subterranean ocean on a far away moon, as it lies beneath an ice sheet 300 meters thick and its waters have probably never been exposed to the atmosphere.
‘It’s tricky to analyse DNA of microbes that are totally new to science because there’s no prior knowledge about them,’ explained Dr Farrant, who is the lead investigator on an EU-funded research project called AstroLakes. ‘We’re dealing with a lot of unknowns.’
The team is studying microorganisms found in 10 precious samples taken from the lake over the last decade. Sampling beneath the glacier is difficult – a pump pulses hot water down to melt the ice in a column and then a sampler is sent to the bottom, collecting small volumes of sulphur-rich water.
The work is predicated on the idea that underground oceans probably represent our best chance of finding life on other planets.
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