Ellesmere spring excites NASA scientists

A unique spring on Ellesmere Island may reveal how life could exist in the extreme, ultra-cold conditions found on other planets.

While scientists and wanna-be Mars explorers head to Devon Island because its Haughton Crater is a dead-ringer for Mars, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration says a glacier on Ellesmere Island is worth studying because it may be the closest thing to Europa – one of the planet Jupiter’s faraway moons – that can be found on Earth.

Ellesmere, with its glacial ice, exposed rock, sulphuric water, and potential for microbial life, is “the best terrestrial analogue” for Europa around, said Bob Pappalardo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a recent edition of Lunar and Planetary Science.

As a result, NASA is pushing for a multi-million dollar project to bring planetary scientists to Ellesmere. There, NASA would test technology in a down-to-earth experiment before embarking on a more costly, and much more risky, unmanned mission to Europa.

Europa is the smallest of the four moons around Jupiter, the fifth planet away from the sun. It’s entirely covered with ice, yet NASA believes this ice is actually floating on an ocean.

NASA wants to send a probe to Europa to check the moon out – but it’s 630 million kilometres away – and this probe would involve landing a spacecraft on an icy surface, deploying remote-controlled instruments, rovers and robots, as well as drilling a series of wells through the ice to reach the liquid ocean believed to exist beneath it.

So, before spending billions of dollars on this project, NASA wants to test some of its technology on Ellesmere Island, where conditions are similar to Europa’s.

NASA is eyeing Ellesmere because of one special spring, located on a glacier in the Borup Fiord Pass, which spews mustard-coloured water onto the ice.

That’s what first caught the eye of geologist Benoit Beauchamp, executive director of the Arctic Institute of North America, and Steve Grasby of the Geological Survey of Canada.

Beauchamp first noticed the yellow stain on the glacier a few years ago when he passed overhead in a helicopter. He said he was taken aback when he later returned to check the spring out: “It smelled like rotten eggs – a sure sign of sulphur.”

Grasby then visited the glacier in 1999 and 2001 and took a large number of samples of both the water and the various mound-shaped mineral deposits around the spring.

Laboratory analyses later showed 20 different kinds of simple, but unusual, bacteria thrive in the spring’s 3° C water.

“There’s bacteria in the ice, and beneath the ice -that’s the very exciting part of it,” Beauchamp said.

These bacteria are somehow able to transform the sulphur compounds from deep underground and use this as their energy source.

“They turn this compound, which is hard like gyprock you put on your walls, into native sulphur which is what you see on the surface,” Beauchamp said.

Along with the sulphur, there’s also an “extremely rare” occurrence of the mineral vaterite, known in only a handful of places around the world.

Beauchamp and his team are keen to resolve what’s exactly happening out there in the rocks, water and ice on Borup Fiord Pass.

“We think they can tell us about real life in an extreme environment,” Beauchamp said.

For its part, NASA is hoping the spring will reveal more about what Europa is like.

The interest generated by this spring convinced Canadian Space Agency and the Polar Continental Shelf Project to give money and support to the Arctic Institute of North America for more study this summer.

On June 21, Beauchamp and Grasby left for a two-week stay near the spring’s home on the glacier.

“It’s unique from what we know. We think it’s the only one,” Beauchamp said.

So, his chance spotting of the spring is looking more and more like a very good thing.

“When you look at rocks sometimes, you don’t look at glaciers. I just happened to look at it. Sometimes in science, serendipity is a good driver.”