High life

By Bob Grant High life Socompa towers in the background of this photo taken on a National Geographic Society-funded expedition to the volcano in 2009. Courtesy of Preston Sowell The windswept peak of Socompa Volcano, on the border of Argentina and Chile, is not a nice place to visit. Parching winds scour the mountain's gravelly slopes, temperatures can swing from below freezing at night to more than 38 degrees Celsius during the day,

Written byBob Grant

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The windswept peak of Socompa Volcano, on the border of Argentina and Chile, is not a nice place to visit. Parching winds scour the mountain's gravelly slopes, temperatures can swing from below freezing at night to more than 38 degrees Celsius during the day, and the scarcity of oxygen atop the more than 6,000-meter peak fends off all but the hardiest of mountaineers. You certainly wouldn't want to live there. That is, unless you happened to be a microbial community inhabiting the thin crust of soil covering loosely-packed gravel, and imbibing your nutriment from gases seeping up from the heart of the dormant lava cone.

"It just looks like the surface of Mars," says University of Colorado at Boulder microbial ecologist Steve Schmidt, of Socompa's lofty peak. "Up to about 5,000 meters, you'll see an occasional lizard maybe, but above that there's really nothing." But that didn't stop Schmidt, with ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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