Astonishing Discovery – Researchers Discover Life 13 Feet Below Earth’s Most Inhospitable Desert

In a significant discovery for extraterrestrial life research, scientists found microbial life 13 feet underground in the Atacama Desert, Earth's most arid desert in northern Chile. While higher life forms are scarce, the hyper-arid soil, rich in salts and sulfates, supports bacteria. The first 80 centimeters of soil might offer protection from UV light and contain some water, but what lies deeper remained unexplored.

Dirk Wagner and colleagues investigated the deep subsurface biota, digging over four meters into the Yungay Valley's playa to collect soil samples. They developed a novel extraction method to ensure sampled DNA was from living organisms, washing out loose DNA before extracting DNA from intact cells for sequencing. They found Firmicutes in the upper 80 cm and Actinobacteria below 200 cm.

Some bacteria were genetically similar to Geodermatophilus pulveris and Modestobacter caceresii. The researchers propose that this community might have settled 19,000 years ago, later buried by playa deposits, and could extend indefinitely, revealing a previously unknown deep biosphere in hyper-arid desert soils. The deep bacterial community might rely on gypsum for water. Notably, Mars also has gypsum deposits, which could potentially support microbial life.