Ethiopia’s inhospitable Danakil Depression gives us clues about life on Mars

21.08.2023 - 11:56 / theunconventionalgardener.com / guest

Barbara Cavalazzi, Università di Bologna

The Danakil Depression, including the Dallol volcanic area is one of the most remote, inhospitable and poorly studied areas in the world.

They are both found in the Afar Region of Ethiopia and are part of the East African Rift System – an active tectonic plate boundary that’s splitting apart plates at a rate of 7 mm per year. The combination of this area’s geology and environment make it a uniquely extreme place to do research. In collaboration with the Europlanet research team, I am investigating the geological and biological aspects of the Danakil Depression.

Our aim is to study microbes, specifically extremophiles – organisms that thrive in extreme environments. They can live in hot springs, acidic fields, salty lakes and polar ice caps – conditions that would kill humans, animals, and plants. Their existence suggests that life can develop mechanisms to withstand physical and chemical conditions like those on the planet Mars.

There’s no other natural environment like it. What we have found at the site is a combination of extreme physico-chemical parameters. Toxic gases saturate the air, the pH is extremely acidic and saline and metal concentrations are very high.

In these extreme ecosystems we expect to find microbial life in the form of extremophiles, polyextremophiles and potentially new forms of polyextremophiles – these are extremophilic organisms that can tolerate, or adapt, to a combination of physico-chemical parameters.

This harsh environment was created by the splitting apart of the old African Plate into two plates – the Somali and Nubian Plates. In millions of years, these two plates will be definitively separated and a new ocean basin will form.

Much of the 40km by 10