Exploring Earth’s Driest Deserts Titelbild

Exploring Earth’s Driest Deserts

Exploring Earth’s Driest Deserts

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 In the 1970’s, the Viking rover landed on Mars and detected no life. In 2003, NASA took the same technology to the Atacama Desert in Chile and got the same reading. Was there really no life there? And by extension, no life on Mars? You might think that the driest place on Earth is the Sahara. But they’re actually polar deserts, like the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and high deserts, like the Atacama. There are places there where it hasn’t rained in 500 years—if ever. Surprisingly, the driest deserts are cold, not hot. That’s because cold air holds 20 times less water vapor than hot air. Though average temperatures in McMurdo are below freezing, the Atacama averages 70 degrees—but it’s in the rain shadow of both the Andes and the Chilean Coastal Range. It’s at 8,000 ft, where the air is very thin. And it’s near the equator, where solar radiation is extreme all year long. This is the most similar environment on Earth to Mars, which is why NASA is testing old and new Martian exploration technology here. While the Viking equipment missed any signs of life in the Atacama, new understanding of extremophiles—life found in extreme conditions—led NASA scientists to look beneath the soil and within rocks, where they found photosynthetic bacteria. And if life can exist here, in the most inhospitable place on Earth, we might also find it on the next mission to Mars.
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