Antarctica
On the other hand, is Antarctica, the planet’s largest desert, but not as devoid of lakes and streams as we like to imagine. Several polar desert oases are hiding lakes and streams, all filled with a variety of life including microbial mats, plankton and filamentous algae.
“While there are no bugs or fish in these waters, there are diverse microbial communities,” said Gooseff. “Some algae in the dry valleys go dormant for nine months or more and then begin to grown when hit by meltwater.”
One of these locations are the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Located west of McMurdo Sound, they are a row of valleys free of snow , the Dry Valleys are extreme deserts, that include Lake Vida and the Onyx River, Antarctica longest river.
Change will come to Antarctica, but it will probably take a longer time, overall, then it will in the Arctic. Why? Because of the large amount of permanent ice in Antarctica, which will take a much longer time to degrade, and because of the large white surface which is reflecting so much of the heat back into the atmosphere.
“We expect in the next several decades that we will see the Antarctic start to warm up,” said Gooseff.
When change does come to Antarctica, we will see water reaching dry soils filled with high concentrations of nitrogen, which will then mobilize the nutrients and increase the potential for habitable freshwater aquatic communities. Flow patterns will change, stream networks will expand, and the location of habitats and timing of life cycles will change.
And on top of it all, these changes will shed some light on what life is like on an entirely different planet; Mars.
“Beside the information that we can obtain about climate change on Earth, understanding what happens in Antarctica is important to understand what happens on Mars,” said Gooseff. “There is potential for microbial communities on Mars, and if they exist they will probably be similar to the McMurdo Dry Valley communities.”
Source: The Pennsylvania State University
Image Source: McMurdo Dry Valleys courtesy of NASA Visible Earth
