"Funky properties of frozen water may have made life possible.""If life arose in one of these frozen zones, it might still exist there. Although life as we know it requires liquid water, there are places where life survives well below freezing. In the microscopic veins that permeate Arctic ice, for example, the high concentration of salt can maintain traces of water in a liquid state down to –65°F. Bacteria and diatoms inhabit those liquid veins, and Hajo Eicken, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, suspects that similar habitats could exist in the lower, warmer layers of ice on Europa, and perhaps on the other moons as well. “There’s potentially hundreds of meters of ice, if not maybe a few kilometers, that may well be quite habitable,” Eicken says."
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/did-life-evolve-in-ice
No comments:
Post a Comment