{"id":188105,"date":"2024-04-25T12:24:41","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T17:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/19000-year-old-biosphere-with-links-to-mars-discovered-beneath-desert"},"modified":"2024-04-25T12:24:41","modified_gmt":"2024-04-25T17:24:41","slug":"19000-year-old-biosphere-with-links-to-mars-discovered-beneath-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/19000-year-old-biosphere-with-links-to-mars-discovered-beneath-desert","title":{"rendered":"19,000-year-old biosphere with links to Mars discovered beneath desert"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/19000-year-old-biosphere-with-links-to-mars-discovered-beneath-desert2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As the driest nonpolar desert in the world, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is home to very few species of plants and animals. With rainfall often occurring only once a decade, the desert is so dry that <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/solarsystem.nasa.gov\/resources\/2606\/looking-for-life-the-atacama-desert-and-mars\/\" target=\"_blank\" data-cms-ai=\"0\">NASA<\/a> uses it as a stand-in for the Martian landscape. But what\u2019s living beneath the parched surface? New research suggests it\u2019s very small, abundant, and old, very old.<\/p>\n<p>While the Atacama Desert\u2019s aridity means that higher forms of life are scarce, it\u2019s well-known that <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/abs\/10.1073\/pnas.1714341115\" target=\"_blank\" data-cms-ai=\"0\">diverse bacteria<\/a> dominate its soils. However, the researchers aimed to go deeper to see what species of microbes lived more than a meter (3.3 ft) beneath the surface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the driest nonpolar desert in the world, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is home to very few species of plants and animals. With rainfall often occurring only once a decade, the desert is so dry that NASA uses it as a stand-in for the Martian landscape. But what\u2019s living beneath the parched surface? [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}