UCSB Earth Science Colloquium: Paleoenvironmental Context in the Search for Past Life on Mars
School of Environment
The University of Auckland | Waipapa Taumata
The search for life beyond Earth occupies exploration efforts of space agencies and researchers, and captures the imagination of the public. Mars is a top Solar System candidate in this regard because of its multiple, once habitable environments of surface liquid water that may have harbored microbial life at a time when Earth’s own biosphere was getting underway billions of years ago. Yet, validation of possible signals of past life in Martian rocks will likely require sample return, as well as study of multiple lines of evidence from within well-constrained contextual settings to identify biosignatures—i.e. distinctive suites of durable textural, mineralogical, and chemical indicators of life. Focusing on Earth’s hot spring deposits and unusual hydrothermal silica found at Columbia Hills on Mars, this talk takes a comparative paleoenvironmental approach to help narrow the search and potentially reveal the arguably best place in the Solar System to discover (fossil) life—version 2.0.