News
Paper on using extreme Earth ecosystems as models for extraterrestrial exploration published in the Journal Life
August 27, 2021
Members of the Biddanda lab, as well as members of NOAA's Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary dive team, published a paper entitled "Extant Earthly Microbial Mats and Microbialites as Models for Exploration of Life in Extraterrestrial Mat Worlds" in Life.
The paper details current information on the soft mat ecosystems of Lake Huron's sinkholes near Alpena, Michigan, and on the hard mat ecosystems of the Laguna Bacalar microbialites in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. It also describes how those these types of systems could serve as model testbeds in the exploration for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond.
Read about how we might search for life elsewhere, on our Earthly home, for free.