Astrobiology

Digging Into Greenland Ice: Unraveling Mysteries in Earth's Harshest Environments

admin — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 05:08:47 +0000

Digging Into Greenland Ice: Unraveling Mysteries in Earth's Harshest Environments admin Fri, 11/10/2023 - 00:08

“You're in the middle of an ice sheet, and it’s one of the most desolate places on Earth. There are no living animals there. There are no plants there. The only animals you see are birds. They might be lost.”

That’s how Rachel Moore describes the view from the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet. “It's a really challenging environment, but it was really, really interesting to be there. I was there for nearly 50 days.”

Moore is an expert at collecting data in difficult research environments, traveling to some of the most extreme places on Earth in order to research microbes, and what hints they might give regarding astrobiology.

“It all started in grad school, when I joined a microbial ecology lab,” Moore recalls. “I pretty quickly learned that I love to do really difficult, challenging projects. I got interested in working around fire, biomass burning and forests, and I started collecting bacteria from the air. That was a challenge in and of itself, just trying to collect these really tiny things while standing in the smoke from the forest fires. But from that I learned that I loved to go out into the environment and collect things and try to understand everything around me.”

“I have a lot of different projects, but they all connect through astrobiology,” Moore says. “I’m interested in anything that hasn't been answered yet.” Moore is also leading a project called EXO Methane, which is investigating if different Archaea could survive in Martian and Enceladus-like environments. She’s also collaborating on a project that will send a probe to Venus next year.

Moore started her postdoctoral research at Georgia Tech, and is now continuing her work as a Research Scientist in the same laboratory. “The first project I started in this lab focused around how microbes can survive a really, really dry environment,” she adds. To study this, Moore traveled to the Atacama desert in Chile — the driest place on Earth, and also one of the best analogs to the surface of Mars. “What we were interested in there is how organisms survive intense radiation and intense desiccation. And how does that change as you look at different sites in the Atacama?”

Then, this past summer, Moore traveled to another extreme environment — Greenland. “Instead of being hot and dry, Greenland is extremely cold and dry,” Moore explains. “So it was similar in some aspects, but completely different in terms of logistics and sampling methods. Because we were there in the summer, the sun never set. We were also at high elevation — 10,530 feet above sea level.”

Beneath the ice

The project was started by Nathan Chellman and Joe McConnell from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), and Moore’s role this year was to investigate the microbiology component of the research. “They had been seeing some anomalies in methane and carbon monoxide in ice samples,” Moore says. “We were curious if microbes might be producing some of this, either in the ice core after it’s been sampled, or while it’s still in the glacier.”

“The microbes would not be swimming around or anything” in the ice cores, Moore explains, “but it’s possible that their metabolism is still active, and they’re potentially able to make some of the gases, like methane, in this frozen environment. Our goal was to measure these things in the environment.”

Gathering samples wasn’t easy. “We set up a lab on the glacier, and we set it up in a trench to try to keep any of the ice cores that we pulled out roughly at the same temperature as the glacier itself,” Moore says. Because of that, “weather was a huge, huge thing. Anytime it would get stormy, the wind would blow all of the snow around, and it would fill the entrance to our trench. We had to dig ourselves out several times. People would put out flags so that you could see your way back to the main house or back to your dorms.”

The team hopes that this research will give a more defined record of the past from the Greenland Ice Sheet, improving climate change predictions. Moore also notes applications in astrobiology, adding that “there are a lot of icy worlds like Mars, Enceladus, and Europa, with either an icy crust over the ocean or glaciers on the northern and southern poles.”

Moore was also able to test new technology in the field, using a tool built by Georgia Tech undergraduates alongside her advisor Christopher Carr, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. An ice melter that can be used to take and clean ice samples, the tool is a miniaturized prototype that may be able to help take measurements on Mars, or in similar remote environments in the future.

“Being able to take a tool that Georgia Tech undergraduates made to Greenland and test it on 600-year-old ice in the field was a really cool experience,” Moore adds. “We brought Starlink with us, and so I was able to video call the undergraduate team while I was testing their tool, which was really special.”

The team is now lab-analyzing ice cores that they brought back from Greenland, unraveling which microbes might be present and potentially active. “It's really interesting to see: Is this all chemistry? Is it biology based? Or is there some intersection of the two?” Moore says. “Maybe there's some chemistry or photochemistry happening, plus some biology happening. Whatever it is, we'll have to wait and see.”

Summary sentence

Rachel Moore spent nearly 50 days in one of the most remote places on Earth, collecting ice cores; the research has implications for climate change predictions and searching for signs of life on icy worlds.

Summary

Rachel Moore is an expert at collecting data in difficult research environments, traveling to some of the most extreme places on Earth to research microbes and better understand astrobiology. This summer, she traveled to Greenland to collect ice cores, spending nearly 50 days on top of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The research could improve climate change predictions, while also helping astrobiologists better search for signs of life on icy worlds.

Dateline

Thu, 11/09/2023 - 12:00

jess.hunt@cos.gatech.edu

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Written by Selena Langner
Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston

Associated importer

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College of Sciences

Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Astrobiology

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cos-climate

cos-microbial

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Earth and Environment

Water on the Moon May Be Forming Due to Electrons From Earth

admin — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 05:08:47 +0000

Water on the Moon May Be Forming Due to Electrons From Earth admin Fri, 11/10/2023 - 00:08

Scientists have discovered that electrons from Earth may be contributing to the formation of water on the Moon’s surface. The research, published in Nature Astronomy, has the potential to impact our understanding of how water — a critical resource for life and sustained future human missions to Earth's moon — formed and continues to evolve on the lunar surface.

“Understanding how water is made on the Moon will help us understand how water was made in the early solar system and how water inevitably was brought to Earth,” says Thom Orlando, Regents' Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry with a joint appointment in the School of Physics, who played a critical role in the discovery alongside Brant Jones, a research scientist in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech.

“Understanding water formation and transport on the Moon will help explain current and future observations,” Jones adds. “It can help predict areas with high concentrations of water that will help with mission planning and in situ resource utilization (ISRU) mining. This is absolutely necessary for sustained human presence on the Moon.”

The role of solar wind

“Water production on airless bodies is driven by a combination of solar wind, heat, ionizing radiation and meteorite impacts,” Jones explains. Solar wind — a continuous stream of protons and electrons emitted by the Sun, traveling at 250 to 500 miles per second — is widely thought to be one of the primary ways in which water has been formed on the Moon.

While solar wind buffets the Moon’s surface, Earth is protected due to its magnetosphere, a shield that forms as a result of the magnetic fields associated with the hot metals circulating in the Earth’s molten interior layers. However, solar wind is affected by the magnetosphere, forming the northern lights (aurora borealis) and southern lights (aurora australis) at Earth’s poles, and stretching the spherical shield into having a long “tail" — the magnetotail — which the Moon passes through periodically on its orbit around Earth. When the Moon is in the magnetotail region, it is temporarily shielded from the protons in solar wind, but still exposed to photons from the Sun.

"This provides a natural laboratory for studying the formation processes of lunar surface water," says University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa Assistant Researcher Shuai Li, who led the research study. "When the Moon is outside of the magnetotail, the lunar surface is bombarded with solar wind. Inside the magnetotail, there are almost no solar wind protons and water formation was expected to drop to nearly zero."

Surprisingly, while the Moon was within the magnetotail, and shielded from solar wind, the researchers found that the rate of water formation did not change. Since water was still forming in the absence of solar wind, the researchers began to theorize what could be responsible for forming the water.

Building on previous research, Orlando and Jones hypothesized that electrons from Earth could be responsible.

A work in progress

“This work was actually based, in part, on our previous studies examining the role of ionizing radiation in metal-oxide particles present in nuclear waste storage tanks,” Orlando explains, adding that in a previous project as part of an Energy Frontier Research Center called IDREAM, they showed that water forms when a mineral called boehmite is irradiated with electrons produced by energetic particles after radioactive decay.

While boehmite does not exist on the Moon’s surface, minerals with similar compositions are present, and Orlando and Jones theorized that, like the boehmite, irradiation from electrons might be producing water on lunar surface grains. “Despite the incredibly different physical environments,” Orlando says, “the chemistry and physics is likely very similar.”

The solar wind water cycle has the potential to make huge impacts on human discovery of the Moon and beyond. “While some of these water molecules will be destroyed by the Sun, some will eventually make it to the cold spots in permanently shadowed regions at higher latitudes,” Orlando says, in “the regions where some of the planned Artemis landings will be.” The next step? “Our hope is to prove that the hypothesis is correct!”

Orlando and Jones have been studying the role of solar wind on the in situ production of water on the Moon, Mercury, and other airless bodies as part of the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) center called Radiation Effects on Volatile Exploration of Asteroids and Lunar Surfaces (REVEALS).

The realization that electrons from Earth were part of the dynamic lunar water cycle was a direct result of the interactions of several scientists with diverse backgrounds made possible by the SSERVI support. The work, which will further expand on the solar wind water cycle — including other sources of energy beyond surface temperature like meteorite and electron impacts — will continue in a new Georgia Tech-led SSERVI program, the Center for Lunar Environment and Volatile Exploration Research (CLEVER).

Summary sentence

The research, which was published in Nature Astronomy last month, has the potential to impact our understanding of how water, a critical resource for life and sustained future human missions to the Moon, formed and continues to evolve.

Summary

New Nature Astronomy research by Thom Orlando and Brant Jones shows electrons from Earth may contribute to the formation of water on the Moon’s surface. The work may impact our understanding of how water — a critical resource for life and sustained future human missions to the Moon — formed and continues to evolve on the lunar surface.

Dateline

Thu, 11/09/2023 - 12:00

jess.hunt@cos.gatech.edu

Contact

Written by Selena Langner
Editor: Jess Hunt-Ralston

Associated importer

Keywords

College of Sciences

Astrobiology

space science

cos-planetary

go-researchnews

go-imat

go-bio

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Science and Technology

Astrobiology

Digging Into Greenland Ice: Unraveling Mysteries in Earth's Harshest Environments

Beneath the ice

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Water on the Moon May Be Forming Due to Electrons From Earth

The role of solar wind

A work in progress

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