Is there life on our Solar System’s icy moons? Extreme places on Earth may hold clues

In their attempt to understand how life might thrive on other planets, astrobiologists often travel to the most extreme and inhospitable places on Earth. And when it comes to simulating environmental conditions on icy moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, Antarctica is about the closest analog we can get.

A new paper led by Alessandro Napoli from the University of Rome, Italy, highlights the rich microbial diversity near Concordia Station, a French-Italian research facility on the Antarctic Plateau, more than 3,000 meters above sea level. Here the average yearly temperature is only -50^oC (-58^oF), and winter temperatures can drop down to -80^oC.

Despite the freezing temperatures, the team found various types of bacteria, even in snow and ice samples, using DNA sequencing methodology. Most were proteobacteria, but there also were different types of archaea and fungi.

While the microbes were anything but abundant—their sparse numbers were close to the detection limit—the research shows that DNA sequencing-based techniques can work in remote and hostile environments. At these frigid temperatures, none of the detected microbes are expected to be active—they exist in a dormant state until temperatures climb high enough for their metabolisms to kick in again.

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