Researchers look to B.C. lake in search for life on the red planet
Fri Jun 13, 6:22 PM
By Sean Patrick Sullivan, The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER - Scientists will be diving deep into a British Columbia lake in the coming weeks to study organisms they hope will provide a window into life on ancient Mars.
Researchers from two Canadian universities, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency will embark on a two-week expedition they hope will also help in eventually sending people to the moon and then Mars.
Bernard Laval, a civil engineering professor at the University of B.C., is one of the leaders of the research at Pavilion Lake, about a five-hour drive north of Vancouver.
The lake is unique in its population of freshwater microbialites - reef-like structures that resemble fossils of what's believed to be the first life forms on Earth.
"Normally when you dive in the bottom of a freshwater lake in British Columbia, you find mud and branches and some hubcaps and beer bottles maybe, but this lake, once you get below 15 metres, you find these large carbonite reefs," said Laval, who is also working with researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
Between three and 3.5 billion years ago, these living, breathing ecosystems covered the oceans of the world, Laval said, but began to recede as life evolved and became more complex.
Like a handful of sites around the world that are analogous to planetary exploration, the bottom of Pavilion Lake offers a unique opportunity to simulate conditions in space, Laval said.
As well, conditions on ancient Mars - which was thought to be warm, wet and covered in vast oceans - likely resembled those on Earth at the time the original microbialites thrived. Learning more about the existing microbialites and the ancient fossils may help scientists identify remnants of life on other planets, he said.
After all, scientists can only look for life as we know it here on Earth, which started out as rocks made by bacteria.
"How these microbes leave evidence that life was there will help us design experiments to look for life on Mars," Laval said.
The Pavilion Lake research project will also be conducting the deep-water equivalent of planetary exploration, with a few substitutions: sonar from boats instead of remote sensing from orbit; scuba divers instead of space-suited astronauts; and submersibles instead of rovers designed to roam the moon's surface.
Like planetary exploration, the scientists will be using all tools at their disposal to put together a big-picture view of the lake's bottom.
A single scuba diver can only gather so much information, Laval said, much like a solitary astronaut could only do so much if plopped on the surface of the moon.
"He'll be able to tell you in great detail what's going on 20 metres around him, but if you want to get a big map, you take a picture from orbit," he said.
"We're going to be able to go much deeper than we could with scuba diving, and we're going to be able to survey the lake much more comprehensively than we could with a diver."
