Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...20922102d&link_type=abstract
2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #221.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,
Mathematics
Logic
Scientific paper
Inuit hunters of the North have long recognized ice as the natural state of water from which life flows on Earth. Although unaware of the microscopic world, they chart changes in properties of ice and water that derive from a succession of microbial inhabitants. Scientific hunters of the West have largely overlooked all but the warmest of ices as dynamic scenes of microbial life, considering the frozen realm to archive life forms instead. Deeply frozen glacial ice on Earth does appear to preserve microbes effectively, but isn't the ocean beneath the geologically dynamic ice of Europa believed too salty? Aren't the subsurface ices of Mars expected to be rich in all manner of mineralogical impurities? Wherever salt and other mineral impurities are sufficiently abundant in Earth ice, the ice contains interior liquid water that can range from nano-layer films on grain surfaces (glacial ice) to a porous network of brine (Arctic winter sea ice down to 20°C). Other recent studies of saline ices have indicated a world of interacting life forms, with viruses infecting bacteria in brines at -12°C (the lowest temperature tested), the domains of Bacteria and Archaea undergoing succession in winter ices (down to -28°C), and evidence that cellular maintenance may go forward incrementally even below the eutectic of seawater (-55°C). Microbes are also known to alter the physical properties of their icy homes by producing exopolymers that further depress the freezing point, either directly or by entraining more salt into the ice. Even the most inhospitable of ices to human hunters may contain interior oases for microbes, in control to some degree of their own space. In considering the habitability of icy worlds beyond Earth, we'd do well to learn more about the evolutionary prowess of microbes in adapting to conditions beyond our warm-blooded imaginations.
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