Extreme Habitats: Life in the World's Most Inhospitable Places

In this episode of Wildly Curious (formerly For the Love of Nature), co-hosts Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole dive into some of the most extreme environments on Earth, where life somehow thrives against all odds. From the blistering heat of Yellowstone’s geysers to the frigid, salty landscapes of Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, these habitats push organisms like archaea and extremophiles to their limits. Discover how life can survive in boiling water, acidic pools, and even lakes so salty that nothing else can live there. This episode is packed with amazing insights and humor about nature’s most resilient creatures.

Perfect for fans of nature, science, and anyone fascinated by the extreme and bizarre places where life exists.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to For the Love of Nature, a podcast where we tell you everything you needed to know about nature and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Laura.
And I'm Katy. And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about Arcadia and how life finds a way to survive even in the most inhospitable habitats.
I'm hoping that the more times you have to say that, the more it deteriorates. Inhospitable?
Just keeps getting more and more messed up. So this episode is one of the segments where we explain a different, what is it? A different domain.
Domain.
Yes, domain. I'm like, what's higher? Yeah, a different domain.
And so we've done, what have we all done so far?
Well, we started with fungi, weirdly enough, but that wasn't a domain. Then we backtracked, and we did bacteria and, what was the last one we just did? Protista.
Yes, yeah, protista.
Yeah, yeah. Which wasn't a domain, that was the next one.
Something different, yeah. Yeah. So we're kind of jumping around, but so this is another one of those, at least my stuff, and I think Laura's too, it's shorter than normal, because we do know they're dead.
Yeah, and it's like in the other episodes we've been doing, which are all about, what have we been calling them? The, like Living Things taxa.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So in those, we've been like really focused on that stuff, breaking it down. This one's kind of got a spin on it, because there isn't a ton about Archaea. So we thought we would talk about where they live, which is extreme places, and then talk more about the habitats and then just mention some things about them.
Because I've got some more stuff besides just them. I've also got what else is living in these habitats. But, so I guess let's kick it off with what is Archaea.
Or Archaea. Yeah, Archaea. So it's a domain.
There's three main domains of life. If you remember, you know, if this is your first time listening to one of these, we are kind of breaking down the tree of life, and everything starts with domain. So you've got the bacteria, there are Archaea, and the eukaryotes.
So this is a lot like bacteria. A long time ago, they used to just lump everything. They just had things split into two groups, the bacteria and the eukaryotes.
Then they decided, well, actually, bacteria could probably split up into two. So it's two now. And they are both prokaryotes.
And if you remember from a past episode, a prokaryote is a cell without a nucleus. That's the difference between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. So bacteria don't have nuclei, and neither do archaea.
They're a really, really old type of organism. And typically, they live in what we call extreme habitats. And a lot of times, the name archaea is interchangeable with that of an extremophile.
File means love, so they love extreme places. Sometimes extremophile can just mean anything that lives in these extreme conditions, but a lot of times, it is those archaea, because they just happen to find that niche, and that's where they're living.
They really like it. They have a thing for hot places.
They got a thing for it. And there's actually, doing some research for this episode, there are way more extremophiles than I thought. I always figured there's the ones for heat, and the ones for salt, and there's a lot more than that.
There's acids, alkalines, oxygen, radiation, toxins. I mean, you kind of name it if there's an extreme of any characteristic of a habitat, there are some things that really, really love it, even if it's crazy hot or crazy cold or crazy salty or crazy unsalted, like all that stuff.
Yeah, anything that's the extremes.
Yes. Extreme! Well, you should shout it every time we say it.
That word comes up, extreme!
Now I have to look, I'm going to insert that a few different places now. Alrighty, so we divided this up to where I'm talking about all the hot places, and Laura, you're talking about cold, right?
Yeah, salty and cold.
I'm talking about hot, and you're talking about salty and cold.
Well, because there are, like we just said, there are different types.
There are so many different ones.
Yours probably is like acids and stuff, too.
Yeah, yeah, it has combinations of it, because normally when you have one, you have the other. It's not just hot, you know?
Yes, yes.
Alrighty. Did you want to go first? You want me to go first?
It doesn't matter to me. What do you want to do?
Bubblegum, bubblegum. No, I can go.
Okay, go for it.
I can go. Alright, the first arcade that I'm going to talk about is found in what was my opinion, one of the most iconic national parks in the US. Yellowstone National Park.
And what is Yellowstone most famous for? Their hydrothermal springs.
Or for the waivers and the geysers in the hot springs. The hydrothermal springs.
I mean, that makes sense to me. Come on, folks, Google out anytime you listen. No, no, no, that's what we're here for.
Alright, Yellowstone National Park, which is located in the northwest corner of Wyoming, and basically it's on the border of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, like all three right there. This park sees about 4.9 million people, give or take, but that was in 2021. And oddly enough, like, I thought given that it was Yellowstone, it would be like, well, way more.
I mean, this is also 2021, so I'm sure some of that is still limited by COVID numbers.
True, true.
But I always thought it would be one of like the top visited parks. It was the 12th in 2021. Yeah, so within Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres are several geothermal areas that contain about half of the world's active geysers, which is crazy.
Yeah, I didn't know that.
Half the world?
Yeah, half of the world's geysers. The United States? No, no, no, no, no.
Half of the world's active geysers, which number in more than 12,000 geysers all in one spot.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
What if they're counting as like geysers, just this little out of the ground, like a teeny one?
Maybe, maybe.
Or a geyser.
Yeah. Um, I don't, I, I don't know if, because I think if they're counting all the, like the geothermal areas too, like it's the geysers, but again, yeah, I don't know what they classify. Yeah, 12,000.
And looking at if they shoot stuff out of them.
Can you imagine the first person walking around, just like looking at every hole, seeing of like a hot spewing water is coming out. Right to the face. Yeah, this one's good.
This one's not good. Anyway, now our national parks are, I mean, you figure it's over half, half the geysers in the world. Our national parks just don't get enough credit sometimes.
Yeah. All right, so within these geysers, like below the surface, temperatures can reach 644 degrees Fahrenheit.
Whoa.
So although it is so hot, there are extremophiles that do live within the geysers at the surface where temperatures are not quite hot as the inside, but it is close to boiling temperatures. In Yellowstone National Park, there are three types of thermal features, and this is where we get into, like, it's double. It's more than just hot.
Alkaline chloride features, which are associated with cones made of centaur or colorful pools, that have a slightly basic pH. So those are the ones that are, like, you see, like, the really sweet pictures that are, like, blues and greens and yellows and all kinds of crazy things. A second type is calcium carbonate features.
Some of the notable places that they talk about was mammoth hot spring, and it forms when hot water interacts with limestone in the underlying rock. And the third category is acidic, which has such a low pH value that it eats the rock that hosts them. So it's just, like, slowly decaying its own rock over time.
It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Yeah, just taking over. In the superheated acidic features of the Norris Geyser basin and in the muddy rolling springs of the mud volcano area, I was like, mud volcano. Mud volcano, yeah.
Now I really want to go. Are two places where archaea can be found. So even though, again, even though we know that archaea exists, well, I'll get into that later.
Was it this one? Yeah, I do get into this a little bit later. Okay, so let me just put a pin in that.
Let's see here. When you see a hot, muddy, acidic spring, it isn't the mud that you were probably seeing. It's the result of a thriving community of archaea, which I didn't know that.
What?
Yeah. Yeah, it's the archaea.
That look like mud?
Yes. Like the... It's not the colorful ones.
Yeah.
It's like the mud volcano ones. A popular microbe is Sulfolobus.
Sulfolobus?
Sulfolobus.
But they like sulfur.
Right? Which is... That's the genus, and the actual species is often within archaea or named where it was found.
I'm like, okay. At least scientists think that's a little bit easier. But this one is Sulfolobus acidic calderius, because it's found in acidic calderian.
Calderian? Anyway, but they're found in the acidic pools in Yellowstone. So Sulfolobus archaea are most often isolated and most well known by scientists.
In sulfuric hydrothermal areas, it oxidizes sulfur into sulfuric acid, which helps dissolve the rocks into the mud. So they're there, and they're dissolving the rocks into the mud.
So the mud is not them. The mud is the byproduct that shows that they are living there.
Correct. Yeah. But it is eating the rock.
Them. Yeah. So, sulfolobus occurs at a pH of around 2-3, which is very, very acidic.
What's battery acid? I don't know. You keep talking.
I'm going to look it up.
And temperatures around 167 to 177 degrees Fahrenheit, making them acidophiles and thermophiles both. Sulfolobus cells are irregularly shaped and they have flangilar. Like I said before, sulfolobus is often one of the most studied and a recent scientist at Stanford University discovered a protein.
This is interesting, because remember, it wasn't until fairly recently we still don't know a lot about archaea at all. Like scientists just don't. And so, sulfolobus though is one of the most studied, but it's still not even that studied.
scientists had always figured out, figured that archaea could survive in these conditions because of like the shell that they had on. But they were never completely sure how the shell like survived all this until 2018. So that wasn't that long ago, yeah.
The scientists found when they took all these ones from this basin area in Yellowstone, they found that there was an unusual lipid membrane and in particular, this sopholobus acididarius whatever.
Oh lipid, everybody that's fat. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fatty. So it has like an outside fat membrane. Which was different than those found in other archaea.
So unlike plants and fungi, archaea organisms do not produce protective outer walls of cellulose. If you listen to our other episodes, their membranes do not contain the same and also their outside membranes do not contain. Yeah, lord.
Can't talk. The same chemicals as bacteria. So from previous research in archaea, scientists knew that the organisms produce a membrane containing the ringed molecule called calabatol.
I promise this is going to get interesting. So they thought that this molecule might hold on. They thought that it might underlie the species ability to withstand environments where the organism will perish.
So then what happened? They took the calabatol, mutated the genes, found out that it is different, but it's not different. They thought, they confirmed what they thought it was, but they were able to actually pin it down.
Because they were like, of course, everybody before this point was like, okay, well, we know about archaea. Clearly, they have to have some, like, other archaea have to have something, but what is it? And they didn't know what it was, and so they took them, basically, like, kept modifying the different archaea, breeding them, and then just exposing them to hot temperatures to see which ones survived, until they figured out exactly what it was that was helping them.
So that's, yeah. So, what is so monumental about the research, although it seems simple, like I said, is that while Kaera were for so long thought as a bacteria, and only separated from bacteria in 1977, this group of microbes has a lot of, like a lot, a lot of unknowns. Oftentimes it's a complete mystery, just because it's not really studied.
So, if you are a budding scientist and looking to make your mark in the world, I mean, we don't know a lot about Arcadia. I mean, it might not be all that interesting, but...
Which is so ironic because they're like, I mean, Arcadia is ancient. So, like, they're one of the oldest organisms, which again, totally makes sense. Think about early Earth and how, like, the hydro...
like, how hot and acid and all the stuff that everything was like. And we know nothing about them.
Yeah, and the scientists that are doing all this research about the outside, like, not only are we allowed, are we able to now figure out, okay, this is how they're able to survive because of how old they are, they're able to, like, take from the fossil records and kind of predict, like, evolutionary transitions between Arcadia. They can look at, like, a whole bunch of other things once we know, like, the different pieces and parts of it, which I thought was pretty interesting. So, anyway, so that's the first one was in Yellowstone.
There's a bunch of hot stuff.
In acid.
Do you remember that guy? It was like a...
What was it like?
Yeah, like a summer or two ago, some idiot went, like, out into the geysers, and I was like, oh my god.
It's like a hot tub, except it's hydrosulfuric acid, which anybody who's watched any, like, crime movies, that's what you dissolve bodies in.
Right. Gosh.
Oh, by the way, pH values for things, battery acid is, like, insane. It's like 0.8, but the hot spring actually has the same pH as lemon juice or vinegar, which doesn't seem that extreme, but that's the pH.
I feel like it, okay, I feel like even though that's the heat, like it's combined. The heat with it, yeah, the heat with it, I think it's what it is. Because, yeah, or maybe, like, that concentrated or something.
Alright, so my first one is called, it's, uh, it's a couple of different organisms live here, um, and it is Lake Natron in Africa. Have you ever heard of this place?
Lake, what is it? Natron.
I haven't seen it in pictures, but I don't know anything about it. So, it's in Africa, specifically in Northern Tanzania, right where it touches Kenya.
Oh, I've seen pictures of it. Okay.
402 square miles, and it's only 10 feet deep, and it's red, like the whole lake is red. Um, and that is because, um, it has one of the highest, if not the highest pH in the entire world. Um, and so we've been talking a lot about, you know, Katy was just talking about pH of 2 and like acids and stuff, so for those who don't remember or have not learned yet.
Yeah, your seventh grade science.
The pH scale indicates whether something is acidic or basic, and basic slash alkaline, they're like interchangeable terms. It goes from 0 at the acid end to 14 at the basic end. So this lake has a 10.5, which means it is very, very high alkalinity.
So what? Well, we all know acids can be harmful, but so can substances with high alkalinity. This lake has a pH in between that of detergent and ammonia.
That's a comparison? Hey guys, it has a pH of like basically your laundry detergent. It's fine.
Yeah, or cleaning of products like ammonia.
Yikes.
So, and that's, this is a lake, okay? So this isn't your wash machine. This is a lake where things are supposed to be living and you're supposed to get water from here.
Obviously not. So the pH is so high due to the amount of what's called natron, a naturally occurring chemical that is a mix of baking soda and sodium carbonate. This comes from the volcanic ash that's fallen and is contained in the volcanic rock in the area.
And it's fed by mineral-rich hot springs. So kind of like Katy's stuff, this is just on a much larger scale. So it's fed by hot springs that's dissolving the rock that is then causing this insane high alkalinity because there are no outlets for the lake water.
So it's just building and building and building and building.
It's doing in its own detergent.
Yeah, exactly. And it's like it's called Natron. There's stuff called Trona, salt and Magnesite.
And because it's really shallow, like I said, only 10 feet, it's uber concentrated and it's getting baked by the sun. So it also gets really hot. So unlike a hot spring, it's not from the ground.
This is from the sun and it can reach temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
I mean, I guess it's in Tanzania.
I mean, yeah, which is then causing more evaporation, which is then concentrating the water further. Um, so yeah, it's just like a, what do I want to say, exponential problem. So this like a super duper salty, insanely alkaline, gets boiling hot and is full of other chemicals and toxins.
Sounds like a great place to live. Well, surprisingly, life can be found here. Um, so, so probably, archaea do live here, although I couldn't find a ton of information on it.
So instead, there are some things that live alongside these. These are other extremophiles. We've got, um, spirulina, which is blue-green algae.
And you're going to see a trend here because blue-green algae can pretty much survive anywhere, it seems like. So although it's called an algae, it's technically a cyanobacteria, which is a photosynthetic bacteria. It has red pigments, despite the fact that it's called blue-green algae.
The whole name is wrong, okay? It's added to our badly named up creatures episode. It gives the, like, this red color, and also the native flamingos gives them their color.
When the cyanobacteria blooms, it produces toxins.
Wait, flamingos just chill in there?
Yeah. So I'm going to talk about them in a second.
I was like, they're going to burn their little feces. I mean, they are birds, so. Given that they're dumb.
So when the cyanobacteria blooms, it can produce toxins, which can be harmful to humans and deadly to wildlife. Cyanobacteria is actually a problem even around here. Like, when there are blue-green algae blooms, it produces those toxins that sometimes you hear about at lakes, and like, it can kill dogs and kids.
More things that can live there are the Acolyne tilapia, which are not tilapia. They are a cichlid fish, and they live on the edges. They're made to live in water that can get hot, have a pH over 10, and have a salinity buff 40%.
So they are a extreme fish.
EXTREME!
Just picturing them like little bros. Cichlids already have, like, weird, like, parody mouths. They're probably just going around headbutting each other saying EXTREME!
Then there are the Lesser Flamingos. This is bananas, okay? This place is the ideal...
Leave it to a bird to be dumb.
This is the ideal nursery for these dumb birds. As pretty much nothing else lives there. So they're like, you know what?
This is hostile to all life. Perfect for my babies.
This is exactly where I want to raise a child.
So around 2.5 million flamingos breed here, which is 75% of the world population, and 75% are born here. So of all the lesser flamingos in the world, 75% are born in this insane lake. Even they have to be careful, though, because the pH can become too high even for them, and it can become scolding hot and burn their little feet.
So they can only go in at 75%.
That's why they walk the way they do. That's why they walk the way they do.
Hot feet, hot feet, hot feet. So things do live here. But fun fact, lots of birds also die here by crashing into the lake.
People think it's likely due to the fact that there's some weird reflection stuff going on here. And so they crash in, and then their bodies desiccate and are chemically preserved by all the stuff, like the natron and stuff in the lake appears to almost turn them into stone. It's pretty cool.
You guys should Google the pictures. Also, a helicopter once did crash into it, and although everyone survived, they were all burned. So even though it's not an acid, it's at the other end.
If you took a bath in ammonia, you'd get some chemical burns. It's the same with this lake. So, extremophiles, not archaea, but are extreme nonetheless.
And also, that was a lie. So it was not a cold, salty place. This one was a hot, salty alkaline place.
Man, I don't know how... I was going to say, I don't know how these things survived, but for my last one, it's because they have a lipid outer.
Well, yeah, you're right, but I don't know about the tilapia and the blue-green algae. I mean, they must have something, something going on.
They've got to have some.
I mean, honestly, I really... I mean, I guess it's all relevant, but I feel like a hot spring is probably a worse place to live than this lake. But maybe not.
I mean, you get flamingos. Nice view, just all the dumb birds around you. All right, so the next arcade I'm going to talk about, there seems to be more research on these ones than the geysers at Yellowstone for the most part.
They do a lot of research on those ones at Yellowstone, but the word a lot is kind of relative. So the next one I'm going to talk about is hydrothermal vents.
Cool.
So these are the ones, and everybody has seen pictures of these and probably learned about them in some science class in elementary school. But they are basically underwater volcanoes, which look like chimneys and are found at spreading ridges and convergent plate boundaries under the ocean.
There was definitely a Magic School Bus episode on this.
Oh, for sure, for sure. When these volcanoes form, these hot springs are known as hydrothermal vents. Scientists first discovered the vents in the late 1970s while they were exploring an oceanic spreading ridge near the Galapagos Island.
But again, not that long ago. Yeah, not that long ago. The scientists also found that the hydrothermal vents were surrounded by a large number of organisms that had never been seen before.
Right? It wasn't just archaea. It was like a bunch of stuff that had never been seen.
So at the hydrothermal vents, the cold seawater is heated by hot magma and reemerges to form the vents, which spew up a hot current into the surrounding water. Seawater and hydrothermal vents may reach temperatures of over 700 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah.
Although at this temperature, the water does not boil because of the immense pressure from being so deep. That's what she said. Hydrothermal vents...
Which I never thought about that before. Like, it's so hot, but it's not boiling.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but because of the pressure. Like, the pressure of it. Hydrothermal vents are very important because they basically act as natural plumbing for the Earth.
The vents transport heat and chemicals from the interior of Earth and help regulate global ocean chemistry. In the process, I mean, even though they heat things up, this is naturally heating. We don't need, like, everybody to jump on board and be like, let's heat up our oceans even better.
Like, let's pollute our Earth even more. Heating oceans is a good thing. No.
This is natural, and it regulates it. So in the process of bringing up those minerals and stuff from the Earth's surface, they accumulate vast amounts of potentially valuable minerals on the seafloor. They bring them up and then just dump all of it on the seafloor.
The vents also support complex ecosystems of exotic organisms that have developed unique adaptations to high temperatures and environmental conditions we would consider toxic and enters archaea. So, just like at Yellowstone, the archaea not only had high temperatures to live at, but also an acidic environment. The archaea at the hydrothermal vents under the ocean combat both high temperatures and extreme pressure, again, being on the ocean floor.
Just like Yellowstone too, most bacteria in archaea could not survive directly in the superheated hydrothermal fluids of those chimneys, but the hydrothermal microorganisms are able to thrive just outside of the hottest waters. And there's sort of like what you were talking about. There's actually a lot of different things that live around here.
So they don't live like in them, but in the waters around them, similar to the geysers. In the temperature gradients that, like there's like a boundary.
That's what I was wondering how far away from a vent, like how does the temperature feel? I'd be curious.
Like how, I mean, you got to be able to fairly, I mean, they're getting close enough to capture a KO. Whether they're sending in a robot in there or not, I don't know.
I guess like before the heat, it's like intense. Like is it, like do you think it dissipates slowly? Or do you think because of like the pressure in the saltwater, it's just like, like cool, cool, cool, cool, cool?
Stuck. I feel like it would dissipate because it would start to slowly heat.
Yeah.
You know what I mean? Even though it might, it might be different because of like the, like the, the, because it's so mineral filled. So kind of like how you see two rivers that kind of, right.
They look like they meet and they're like, draw a straight line down the middle. It might be like that, but one, I don't think we would visually see it, but also like it would heat up the water around it. So the water, quote unquote, around the hydrothermal vent might be regular seawater, but it would still, because of contact with it, be warm.
I would assume.
I would assume too.
All right, so what's really cool and unique about the archaea found here in the hydrothermal vents is that instead of using light energy to turn carbon dioxide into sugar like plants do, they harvest chemical energy from the minerals and chemical compounds that spew from the vents. Oh, cool. This, yep, this, and I didn't know this, but this process is known as chemosynthesis.
The compounds such as hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen gas, different irons and ammonia, all lack carbon. The microbes release new compounds after the chemosynthesis, some of which are toxic, but others can be taken in nutritionally by other organisms. So archaea really are vital to other organisms found at the depths of the ocean near these vents.
Sort of like plants or allergies, the archaea here basically lay the foundation of life support in this ecosystem, which I also didn't know. Animals like crabs, limpens and mussels are there down by these vents and also feed on bacteria. But all these creatures need something different food-wise to survive in archaea go to help provide it.
Yeah. So there are some of the unique archaea that are there. Is methenpyroscandelari.
It's a heat and salt loving species of archaea that makes its home in the chimney walls of smokers. So there's different types of these thermal vents based upon like what they spew up and everything like that. And that particular one harvests energy from hydrogen gas and releases methane.
And then there's another one pyrolobus, which is firelobe, like meaning firelobe, and pyrodictum, which is fire network, are also found on chimney walls. And those microbes get their energy from hydrogen gas and produce hydrogen sulfide from sulfur compounds from the vents. So there's like dependent upon where you are, there's different archaea surrounding you or surrounding these vents to go ahead and take compounds, eat them, chemosynthesis, pop out something the other end, and it's nutritional for somebody.
So I thought that was really interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it's weird that they can eat things that like we don't usually think of as food or like, you know, plants eat, like essentially like they make their own food. These guys are like eating chemicals or eating minerals and things like that. It's weird that they could get enough things to survive.
It's so alien. It is, yeah. So my next and final extreme habitat.
Here's where we get cold, because this is the McMurdo Dry Valleys, which is in Antarctica. Never heard of them, but they are the... They're considered the closest terrestrial environment to Mars.
Because... So it's the largest ice-free region in our... Holy cow, I can't talk tonight.
Largest ice-free region in Antarctica. They're about...
You did it.
It's about 1,850 square miles. So basically, picture a wasteland. No ice.
Just soil covered in pebble rocks. The soil there is about 5 million years old. If you're looking at Antarctica, it's in the location west of the McMurdo Sound, which is south of New Zealand.
So straight south of New Zealand, it's right next to there. The lakes there are nearly always iced over. And it has what's called ephemeral streams, meaning they're not always around.
And it actually has the longest and largest river, which is the Onyx River, can be found there.
I need to find a man who would take me to Antarctica.
Oh yeah, just to say that you've been there and like to see the weirdness.
No, that would be cool.
So what makes it extreme? This area is known as a cold desert, which seems kind of like an oxymoron, I know. But it is bitter cold, extremely dry and very windy.
And it's caused by being in what is known as a rain shadow, which is basically the nearby mountains blocking all the rain. So there's another desert like that, the Atacama Desert in Chile there. That's like the driest place, one of the driest places on Earth, also the rain shadow of the Andes.
So like rain never falls in these places because it's all blocked by the mountains. There are mountains in Antarctica. So, let's see, the average temp is around 0 degrees Fahrenheit, although it can get down to negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit, and it gets around 0.4 inches of precipitation per year.
Okay, less than half an inch in the entire year.
Okay, and I thought Texas was dry.
Right, got nothing on Antarctica. And winds there can reach over 100 miles per hour, which is a category 5 hurricane wind, which is why all the rocks are so little, because they're just beaten all the time.
Constantly.
So it's just these frigid winds, 0 degrees, I mean, 0 degrees Fahrenheit, probably with no windchill, okay. I can't even imagine what it's like in 100 mile an hour wind. Geez.
So they're also extremely cold and salty lakes and ponds that are found here.
I didn't know any of this.
I don't know why I didn't think about it, but I didn't know. This only rang a bell for me, because remember when we did our astrobiology episode, I did lakes, and this is what that lake is. That's right, you did.
So there are some extremely cold and salty lakes and ponds. They have no outlets, so the salt concentration increases. Some are so salty, they literally never freeze in this frigid temperature.
They just can't freeze, it's too salty.
I wonder if like... Okay, so this is interesting.
Yeah.
Okay, just go with me. So like animals evolved, they adapted, but like, is that just coincidental? You know what I mean?
Like that seems very weird. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that just seems weird.
Like how would the lake... Like what's the purpose? And it's not like a lake can adapt and evolve, right?
You know what I mean?
So salt and fluid like affects boiling points and...
Yeah, same thing.
Yeah, so like the more salt that's in water, it makes their thresholds all wonky. That was actually, I think, my sixth grade science fair experiment.
But you know what I mean though? Like... Because it's not just regular water that...
How did... How does it exist? Why are you the way that you are?
But you know what I mean?
It's a little bit like...
How does it exist?
But you know what I'm saying?
But you know what I mean? Because animals adapt. But how did it just...
It didn't...
It just did?
It doesn't adapt. Yeah, it just didn't adapt, but it just is. That's highly coincidental.
Good thing for the lake.
Well, the lake doesn't care if it's frozen or not, probably.
What do you mean? The lake don't care if it's frozen.
It doesn't care. Katy, the lake's probably not sentient, although what we have learned from this podcast is that we probably can't jump to any conclusions. The plants are sentient is the question.
I still bring that up to so many people. Plants are alive, more alive. They're going to start judging us soon.
Continue. Now the lakes are next.
Speaking of lake, Lake Vonda, what is known as a brine pool at the bottom. Okay, this is cool. So a brine pool makes this place ten times more salty than seawater.
So apparently what happens is it's like it's also like a cold, like a briny aquifer. So when at some point this lake had been basically almost drained down and so that salt at the bottom was uber concentrated and whatever water was left, then it got more water. But because of the high salt content, that water doesn't ever mix and like the pressure.
And because you know it's iced at the top, so there's no circulation in that water. It is just a dead zone at the bottom, ten times more salty than the ocean. Those that are covered in ice, it can be up to 16 feet thick, which blocks 80 to 99 percent of the sun, which therefore makes them have very little nutrients in it.
And Don Juan Pond has a salinity of 40 percent, making it the saltiest place on planet Earth.
So it's because it's living in Antarctica, that's why it's salty.
Salty. Don Juan Pond.
Just angry. We have one lake having a midlife crisis, which is questioning its being. We have another one that just pissed off because it's salty living in Antarctica.
How did I end up here?
And then finally, besides the lakes, there are salty aquifers below the surface of the soil, and the soil itself can be incredibly salty. Some areas are up to 3000 parts per million of salt, which can lower the level of frostbite to things in the soil to negative 70 degrees Fahrenheit. So, like, they can't freeze to death.
Yeah, that's insane.
Yeah.
So the bacteria and the archaea that are living in that soil are like, don't care, not that cold. Just really, really salty.
Yeah, dang. I know they have scientists down there that like study, like constantly there's like bases and stuff that have scientists down there. But still, this is all like fascinating.
Yeah, so speaking of those science, so actually, specifically, there's a lot of research being done here by the LTER, which is the, of course I didn't write it down, but it's called the McMurdo Dry Valley's Long-Term Ecological Research Project and its Interdisciplinary Study of the Dry Valley's Aquatic Interactual Ecosystems, established in 1992 for the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research Program.
Because I was like, okay, who finds it national?
Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah, yeah, they're doing a lot of research. And so they have found, they've been studying like what lives here.
So what lives here? They have found a wide variety of life, surprisingly. I mean, I just talked about how cold, how salty, how windy, and you wouldn't believe the amount of stuff that they've found.
Of course, they have found the Archaea, mostly found in the lake water, lake sediments, and sometimes in the soil. But here's some other things. They found seven species of fungi, five species of yeasts, three dominant species of moth, moth, moth, no, moss.
No moths. 20 species of lichen, black, orange and green algaes, protozoans, which we talked about in our last taxa episode, a couple of metazoans, which are like larger organisms, but still tiny, springtails, rotifers, tardigrades, nematodes, etc. The old blue-green algae, which again, not algae, it's cyanobacteria.
These guys are known to be stress tolerant, and being dark in color, they can absorb more protection from UV. And they can start photosynthesizing within 48 hours after they get wet, even if they've been frozen. So it's just like, add water and I'm fine.
They can be frozen solid and just, I'm okay. So it's the perfect way for them to live. Viruses have been found here.
That's terrifying. Okay, yeah, that is what's terrifying.
That's what I'm talking about, scientists. I'm like, nope.
Yeah, I'm leaving, I'm done.
Diatoms, 62 species of those, and finally what's called cryptoendoliths, which very cool. These are microorganisms that hide and colonize the pores and spaces within rocks and soil. So those guys that can never get frostbite in that salty, salty soil.
Endoliths, also a type of extremophile. And then I just want to close with two things. One, I remember how I said that salty, salty Don Juan pond.
The salty, salty Don Juan pond.
Salty, salty Don Juan pond. You know, we've talked about how life can find a way, even in the most extreme habitats, except in Don Juan pond. It has never been found to have any active life within it, making it one of the few, if not the only place on Earth, void of life.
Besides, like, within the vents themselves.
There's still stuff around.
This is a pond that cannot... Like, they found evidence of dead life, but nothing active. At least not yet.
So maybe, but probably not. And then lastly, if our listeners want to learn more about extremophiles and have been like, you know what, I want to study extremophiles, guess what? There is an international society for extremophiles.
What? Yeah.
Didn't know.
Join, join up.
There's a group out there for everyone.
At least I'm assuming I found this on a scientific website, so I'm assuming the international society is for the study of extremophiles, not to consider themselves extremophiles.
Extremophiles, yeah.
Which, I feel like I consider myself an extremophile. I like extreme things. Like learning about extreme things.
I don't know, extreme, I don't know, experiences.
Laura doesn't have skills. She likes to learn, instead of all listing out Napoleon Dynamite, got computer skills. Laura likes extreme things.
I like learning about extreme things.
EXTREME! Good grief.
So, sorry, I'm glad Katy, you talked a lot about Arcadia, because mine was just like, and they're here, mostly mine was all habitat based. So, like I said, this was kind of a weird taxa, that's why we did not call this one a life taxa group. This was more of like, we're gonna mention that these guys exist, because it's important, and it probably will lay the groundwork for future podcasts.
But, the habitats is really the cool thing, and then the fact that these crazy organisms can live there.
Yeah, and again, we don't, scientists don't know a lot. I mean, we know some about Arkea, but not a whole lot to, like, find a whole lot of information about them on the internet. Like, we have done the other taxa one, where we have like descriptions and characteristics and all that kind of stuff, like, Arkea has some basic things, but that's it.
At least we know that, you know, like, when we're all gone and the Arkea will live on, the Arkea are gonna be just fine.
Just not in Don Juan Pond. So, everywhere else.
Not in Don Juan Pond.
Alright, everybody, that is it. We're getting close to the end of the season, I just realized.
No way, we're only halfway.
Halfway?
I think we're halfway. Katy's hoping we're almost finished. No, we're almost finished.
It feels like we are. It's just we've recorded these so far ahead of time. I'm like, I'm trying to keep count, but I just can't.
Anyway, great news if we're only halfway, because that means you guys can go check us out on Patreon and support us, so maybe you guys can, we get so many supporters that we could actually go down to Don Juan Pond.
That would be pretty.
Let's go see a place where there's just no life. Although, can you imagine, the packing, what do you even wear in a place like that? 100 mile an hour winds, frigid temperatures, you're so salty, your lips probably just crack as soon as you enter the place.
Crack off.
My lips feel like after they've been cold for a long time. You just start talking and they just crack and fall off.
And on that note folks, tune in next week.