Life Can Survive in the Most Mars-Like Place on Earth
A rare rainstorm in the Atacama Desert offers a clue to how microbes persist in extreme conditions.
As one of the driest places on Earth, Chile’s Atacama Desert is one of the last places you’d expect a trip to be ruined by rain.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch happened to be so lucky. In early 2015, he was preparing for field work in the Atacama, which he expressly chose because he was hunting for life in extreme—i.e., dry—conditions. (On Earth, only the Dry Valley in Antarctica is drier than the Atacama.) Then in March, . “You had to prepare everything months before, and then, heck, it’s raining,” says Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin.
