Yellow Arctic snow could help detect life on Jupiter moon

This sulphur-rich spring, located on a glacier in the Borup Fiord Pass on Ellesmere Island, smells like rotten eggs and spews out mustard-coloured water on to the ice. The spring is home to tiny bacteria, which somehow thrive in the cold, weird sulphuric water. (FILE PHOTO)

RANDY BOSWELL
Postmedia News

A patch of yellow snow in one of the most remote corners of Arctic Canada has supplied fresh insights into an exceedingly rare natural phenomenon that could help scientists detect life — if it exists, as some experts suspect — on one of Jupiter’s moons.

The colourful smear on a glacier at Ellesmere Island’s Borup Fiord Pass has become a key target for researchers hoping to understand how microbes are leaving sulphurous deposits in the harsh polar environment, which NASA scientists and their colleagues from Canada see as a potential proxy for probing Europa, Jupiter’s streaky surfaced, ice-encased moon.

In a new study published in the journal Geobiology, scientists including Calgary-based federal geologist Steve Grasby report that they’ve isolated the species of bacteria — marinobacter — that appears to be causing the stain by “biomineralizing” sulphur bubbling up from a spring somewhere below the ice.

And Grasby, a Geological Survey of Canada researcher who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, said the team’s sharpened understanding of the biochemical mechanisms involved in creating the yellow stain on Canada’s northernmost major island will ultimately help space scientists construct better diagnostic equipment to test for life on Europa during a future probe to Jupiter.

The Borup Fiord Pass site is “the best analogue we have for what could be going on on Europa,” Grasby told Postmedia News on Monday. “All of this can help design a better mission.”

The new study, led by researcher Damhnait Gleeson of NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stated that the sulphur-loving microbes of Ellesmere Island could be key to developing telltale “biosignatures” for life “relevant to future exploration of Europa and Mars.”

Gleeson said Monday that, “the more we can learn about detecting viable biosignatures under a range of extreme conditions, the better prepared we will be to design new life-detection missions.”

NASA has previously described the Canadian Arctic’s sulphur oddity as a scientific wonder “like none other on Earth.”

But Grasby said he recently discovered another icebound spring — just five kilometres from the Borup Fiord location — that also exhibits a sulphur streak.

He has taken samples for future study, adding that he’s “excited about having a second site.”

NASA, he said, still has it right in recognizing the “uniqueness” of Ellesmere Island’s yellow stains: “There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.”

Last year, a Canada-U.S. research team discovered that the Borup Fiord spring can be pinpointed by infrared sensors housed in an orbiting spacecraft.

Detailed in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment, the 2010 study showed how the Hyperion “hyperspectral” sensor aboard NASA’s EO-1 Earth Observing satellite was able to filter images to isolate the unusual chemical activity happening at Borup Fiord’s sulphur spring.

Located 600 million kilometres from Earth and smaller than our own moon, Europa has been described by NASA as being “near the top of the short list of places in our solar system that might harbour extraterrestrial life.”

Scientists believe the distant moon is covered in ice that “might conceal an ocean of liquid water,” a prime prerequisite for life.

In another study published last year, a team of Canadian scientists announced they had discovered “unique,” methane-eating microbes living in a cold, salty spring on Nunavut’s Axel Heiberg Island, off the southwest coast of Ellesmere.

That find at Lost Hammer Spring was hailed as proof that similar organisms could have survived in such inhospitable conditions on ancient Mars — and could even be living there today.