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Every morning for a week last year, astrobiologist Armando Azua-Bustos drove into the Atacama Desert and set up long lines of petri dishes. A researcher from the Center of Astrobiology in Madrid, Azua-Bustos wanted to see if he’d be able to catch any microbes with the dishes, and whether those microbes might start to grow.
He and his colleagues kept their expectations low. The Atacama Desert, which stretches about 1,000 kilometers along the coast of northern Chile, is the driest place on Earth—some spots haven’t seen rainfall in 400 years—and it’s blasted daily by ultraviolet radiation. Conditions are so harsh that the desert serves as a proxy for the surface of Mars, with scientists sending Red Planet rovers there for testing. For much of the 20th century, scientists wondered whether life could even survive there.
Knowing Atacama is a very windy place, we wanted to know ...
