 TEAM MEMBERS
Indiana University
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Detection of bio-sustainable energy and nutrient cycling in the deep subsurface of Earth and MarsGeochemists, chemists, microbiologists, and hydrologists on the IPTAI team are collaboratively investigating physical and chemical limitations on life beneath the subsurface of Earth. Instrumental detection and monitoring of subsurface ecologies on Earth will be used to design life-detection strategies for the subsurface of Mars. The IPTAI team has recovered microbes (Bacteria and Archaea) from 10- to 100-million-year old, highly saline, fracture water at depths up to 3200 m in South African gold mines. Sulfate reducing bacteria appear to dominate this ecosystem; other indigenous microbial species can be detected, but their pathways of electron transfer are not fully characterized. We are interested in the identification of specific genes that are critical to the survival of microbes in a wide range of subsurface environments. Life forms in the subsurface of other planets presumably concentrate energy from geological sources similar to those on Earth but the composition and configuration of extra-terrestrial biomolecules could be radically different from those on Earth. In order to design effective life-detection instruments for subsurface planetary probes, we must identify the fundamental elements and behaviors common to subsurface ecosystems on Earth. A combination of field and laboratory experiments will be utilized to search for these unifying characteristics. RESEARCH SITE AT HIGH LAKE CANADA JULY, 2006-AUGUST 2007HIGH LAKE DRILLING CAMPAIGNNEWS RELEASE: May 2007, T.C. Onstott Time Magazine's The Time 100 - The People Who Shape Our World. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1595329_1615985,00.html NEW PAPERS The methane recently observed in the martian atmosphere could have been released from methane hydrates below the planet's surface, a new model suggests. Methane hydrates are one possible source of the gas, but the temperature and pressure below the planet's frozen surface would theoretically stabilize any stores to a depth of 6 kilometres. Megan Elwood Madden and her colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee now suggest that increasing salt levels may destabilize the hydrates. Their calculations from some predicted sources of high salinity suggest that hydrates might only be stable down to 1.7 kilometres in high-salinity systems. They say the decrease in hydrate stability with increased salinity might allow methane to be released, and escape through fracture zones into the atmosphere. NEW NASA PRODUCTs DEVELOPED BY THE IPTAI MEDIA GROUP:
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