Sunday, February 10, 2008

I thought this was interesting


In this news article from NASA, scientists are on their way to explore an unusual lake in Antarctica. This lake under the ice cap. It is fed by glacial melt. The strangest thing about it, however, is that its pH puts it in the range of Clorox or perhaps even more alkaline than that. People have been poking around our planet for a long time and they have found organisms that live in ice, in boiling temperatures, in methane rich environments, and in other extreme conditions. While exobiologists conjecture about the possibility of life outside our planet, other biologists have found life here on Earth in conditions just about at inhospitable as anything we can imagine being found on other worlds. So, a group of adventurers is going to explore Lake Untersee in Antarctica to see what is there. I liked the description the writer used for the exploration for life outside the "Goldilocks Zone."

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