Cool. Er, rather, downright cold, actually:
Methane-producing microbes have been discovered in two extreme environments on Earth – buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland and living in hot, dry desert soil. The findings lend weight to the idea that similar organisms may have lived on Mars.
Live microbes making methane were found in a glacial ice core sample retrieved from three kilometres under Greenland by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, US. It is the first time such archaea have been found at that depth, says Buford Price, one of the research team…
Scientists had already noticed that the concentrations of methane in the lowest 90 metres of the ice core was 10 times as high as that at other depths. Now the Berkeley scientists have found the likely cause – correspondingly higher levels of microbes that produce methane, known as methanogens.
These robust microbes in Greenland might tell us something about the unaccounted-for concentrations of methane found in the Martian atmosphere. There is no way for methane to persist in the atmosphere of Mars unless it is somehow being renewed. (And volcanoes have already been ruled out as a source.) Could hardy Martian microbes be lacing the atmosphere with methane the same way these microbes are stinking up the deep ice in Greenland?
Maybe.
And who knows? Maybe the two varieties of microbe are cousins.