Thursday, 15 November 2018

Rains bring death to the Atacama Desert

A small, ephemeral lagoon in the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert

Water may be an essential element of life, but to the scarce microbes that inhabit the Mars-like Atacama Desert in Chile, it's death. Studying the effects of once-in-a-century rainfall in the hyperarid core of the desert, a team of astrobiologists led by Cornell University found that instead of causing a bloom of growth, the unexpected abundance of water killed off three quarters to seven/eighths of the microbe species present.

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Category: Biology

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from New Atlas (Gizmag) https://ift.tt/2DpVXZl

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