Cave life studied for Martian clues
Mars image sent by the Spirit rover, credit: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, JPL, NASA. For a complete description of the picture, click here.
DB: This is Earth and Sky. Hazel Barton is a microbiologist at Northern Kentucky University.
JB: She’s looking for cave–dwelling microbes on Earth that might shed light on the possibility of life on Mars. Barton travels around the world collecting microbes from deep within the Earth – where there is no light and few nutrients.
Hazel Barton: Primarily what we’re trying to do is understand how life lives in very starved environments on Earth.
DB: Barton says cave–dwelling microbes are good at scavenging nutrients from unexpected places.
Hazel Barton: They. . . chew into the rock – so there are sources of energy in rock itself . . . In doing so, they leave behind a mineral biosignature. And this biosignature is very stable because now basically they’ve taken one rock and changed it into another rock . . . If we can understand the changes that these organisms create in rocks under certain conditions and with certain nutrient sources, you can use those as markers maybe on Mars or on other planets with rock outcrops to look for evidence of past life.
JB: Barton is now studying microbes that she brought back last June from Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.
DB: The microbes are so good at dealing with a lack of nutrients that they’re actually thriving in pure distilled water. Our thanks to the National Science Foundation – where discoveries begin. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
Read a complete transcript of our interview with Hazel Barton.
Cave Science: Hazel Barton
Author’s Notes:
Hazel Barton is a microbiologist at Northern Kentucky University. Her true passion is caving. Her first caving experience was on an Outward Bound trip in Wales when she was 14. “I actually thought I was claustrophobic,” says Barton, “and I thought going caving would be a good way to get over it. And I still haven’t gotten over it yet – much to my mother’s chagrin.”
In school, she studied microbiology. Later, she was working with one of the world’s leading experts on microbiology – Norman Pace. He asked her, why don’t you combine your interest in caves with your interest in microbes?
“And I said I don’t want to do microbiology in caves. Caving is what I do for fun. I don’t want to make it my job. The thing is there were questions in microbial ecology that we could only answer by going into caves. So by going into caves and doing this research, we were able to answer these questions that nobody else could because they couldn’t get there to do the research.”
Barton says caves have opened a whole new world of microbes to study. “So what we’re trying to do,” she says, “is understand how they live in these environments and it’s very difficult to do because most of the time to get at them, you have to drill down and do a lot of damage whereas caves allow us to go in and look at that interaction directly.”
Thanks to:
Hazel Barton
Ashland Endowed Professor of Integrated Science
and Assistant Professor of Biology
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights, Kentucky
