Extreme microorganisms carpeting the Atacama Desert in Chile illuminate how life might have first taken hold on Earth’s surface.
offer clues about how life may have first found a grip on our planet’s surface billions of years ago.
Between the hills peeks an outcropping of the mother bedrock, a heap of quartz spiced with different minerals. At its feet lie its progeny, smaller chunks that have broken off over millions of years. Below them sits a parade of progressively smaller rocks, all the way down to the earring-size grains that first captivated Jung. The pebbles, which litter the desert floor, are known locally as “maicillo” and in English as “grit.
But the microbial community in Pan de Azúcar isn’t just any old biocrust. While traditional biocrusts drape themselves over the top layer of fine soil particles, and other kinds of organisms sprout directly on top of individual boulders, “the grit is in between—it’s a transition zone,” said, an ecology researcher at the University of Tübingen who now lives just outside Pan de Azúcar with Gutiérrez Alvarado.
The humans in the park are no different. On a ridge overlooking the coast sit four mesh panels the size of garage doors, which Gutiérrez Alvarado and the other rangers set up as fog collectors. Enough water condenses on them every day to supply a sink at one of the park’s few toilets. The fog is so thick that it once nearly caused Gutiérrez Alvarado to drive straight off a cliff face into the ocean; only a tiny sign on the ground reminded him to turn left at the last moment.
Van den Brink points out cactus lichens, which trap droplets of fog water that are sipped by the park’s wildlife.While all biocrusts perform some degree of weathering, the larger grains of the grit crust are especially suited for it. The process reveals the full potential of microbes to impact their environment. A microbial skin can glue together pebbles, break them down into soil, and fertilize that soil with essential nutrients. In effect, the crust can “terraform” the desert.
“For many years, [biocrusts] are preparing the system and the substrate to respond very fast to this input of rains,” Alfaro said. “These flower events depend on these tiny communities of microbes.” Pebbles filled with grit crust microbes form a patchy black layer that covers much of the ground in Pan de Azúcar.Before plants arrived, some researchers think, crusts of microbes could have helped prepare the land by transforming bare rock into fertilized soil. A biocrust well adapted to extreme conditions could take hold of a suitable substrate that held nutrients and was regularly moistened with fog.
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