In January 2019, my colleague Tom and I travelled to Ethiopia as part of a project I received funding for from the Europlanet Consortium.
The Europlanet Consortium formed in 2013, emerging from the collaboration between scientists involved in the Cassini-Huygens mission. I was lucky enough to get a Transnational Access grant (worth approximately €20,000) from Europlanet in June 2018 to collect samples from the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, a key Mars analogue site and one of the hottest places on Earth with annual temperatures on average 34 ºC and daily temperatures capable of exceeding 50 ºC.
We focused on sampling precipitate minerals surrounding hydrothermal vent systems in the main volcanic area of Dallol, as these may contain clues to the metabolic adaptions that any microbes living in this inhospitable landscape use for their survival.
In particular, I plan to analyse long-lived organic chemicals from the cells of these microbes that are preserved in the precipitates, as these ‘biomarkers’ can survive over geologic timescales and provide insights into microbial adaptations to environmental perturbations in Earth’s past.
We also sampled water from a range of vents, pools and lakes in the region, and plan to use a suite of geochemical analyses to try to determine whether they are all fed by the same groundwater sources as they are very different in terms of their pH and temperature!
