Looking at the photo, you might think that it is somewhere on Mars. No, we are only limited to the Earth. There is a widespread misconception on the Internet that the driest place in the world is in Chile. In fact, the Atacama Desert is in second place. There is a place on planet Earth where there has been no precipitation for 2 million years. Can you guess where it is?
Let's find out more about it …
If you go deeper into Antarctica from the Ross Sea, you will get to three so-called "dry valleys" (Victoria, Wright and Taylor). Katabatic winds blow here (the fastest wind on the planet, reaching a speed of 320 km / h), which cause increased evaporation of moisture. Thus, the valleys have been free of ice and snow for about 8 million years. Moreover, in some areas for about 2 million years there was no precipitation at all.
However, water is still present in the valleys - in the form of the saltiest lakes on Earth. As temperatures sometimes rise to freezing, they thaw in places, giving the place a surreal tropical resort feel. In the largest of these lakes, polar explorers even go diving. They say that at the bottom lies the mummified corpse of a seal, which in an incomprehensible way hobbled here from the coast.
In the middle of Antarctica, covered with a solid snow and ice shell, a dark speck gapes - this is the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Today they are the driest places on our planet. For millions of years there has been neither snow nor rain!
The Dry Valleys - Victoria, Wright and Taylor - cover an area of 4,800 square meters (0.03% of the continent's area). Temperatures there often drop to -50 ° C, and there is a polar night for four months of the year.
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The dead seal is perhaps the only representative of the local fauna. The climate here is so harsh that even bacteria are present in very limited numbers, not to mention more multicellular organisms. This, by the way, was very much liked by American astrophysicists, who adapted dry valleys for testing Mars rovers. They assure that not only the absence of extra life, but also the local climate is very similar to the Martian one.
This unearthly corner is dry thanks to the Transantarctic Mountains, which shield the Valleys from wedges of continental ice penetrating from the south. Dry Antarctic winds sweep away snow drifts from the mountains. And the heated downward air flow "absorbs" the cold, causing moisture to evaporate. This is why there has been no snow or rain in the Dry Valleys for so long.
The Dry Valleys may seem like nothing is alive. However, it is not. There are reservoirs here, which, although covered with ice, but in them algae grow and bacteria develop. In addition, amazing rock-dwelling bacteria and anaerobic bacteria, whose metabolism is based on the processing of sulfur and iron, have been found in the more humid parts of the Valley.
Interestingly, the natural conditions of Mars are close to those characteristic of the Dry Valleys, so NASA conducted a test in the Valleys of the Viking spacecraft designed to explore the "red planet".
Now about the most tempting one. Why won't you ever get here? First, Antarctic tourism is generally a very conventional thing. That is, for fabulous money, of course, you can buy an excursion to the South Pole (you will be taken there by a military plane) or a sightseeing cruise on the Antarctic islands, densely populated by penguins and seals. Adding a few thousand more on top, you can also charter a yacht and dock somewhere on the Ross Sea. However, walking to dry valleys (about 50 kilometers through snowdrifts), you understand, will not work. Even if you suddenly have a private jet or helicopter lying around, it is unlikely that it will fly there and back without refueling from Chile or New Zealand. And if it does, it certainly won't sit down.
In general, one can only envy the polar scientists. By the way, they are the ones who own the yellow resort tents in the photographs.
By the way, if you do not get into the dry valleys of Antarctica, be sure to keep in mind another interesting place nearby. Approximately a thousand kilometers from the Antarctic deserts is the so-called "pole of inaccessibility" - the most remote point of the continent from the coast. In addition to being the most difficult to reach point on the planet, there is another attraction here - an abandoned polar station crowned with a bust of Lenin. It was founded by Soviet polar explorers in 1958 and existed for exactly two weeks, after which it was closed (apparently due to its complete uselessness). However, the fact of our presence at the most inaccessible point on the planet was recorded. By the way, three Englishmen (Rory Sweet, Rupert Lognsdon, Henry Cookson), who in 2007 for the first time reached the pole of inaccessibility on foot, using the power of kites, were convinced of this,and took pictures with Lenin.
In the valleys, mummified corpses of seals are lying here and there. In the cold, dry air, decomposition is slow, and some of these animals could have entered and died hundreds or even thousands of years ago. What the hell did they want here - it is completely incomprehensible; the only assumption is that the seals crawled into the valleys due to some kind of damage to the central nervous system and loss of orientation, and here they remained, exhausted.
And here's another opinion on the Internet: About seals - it turns out that this is not such a mystery. Dima skyruk, who worked as an ichthyologist in Chukotka, writes in the comments: “As for seals, in the same Chukotka there was a case when the sea froze, and walruses walked on land - 60 kilometers, to rivers or warm lakes, or in general - to find at least any thaw. The seals, of course, are not walruses, but personally I was not surprised to see this photo. You never know what could have forced the seal to walk 30 km on land. It's not that far. The animal was most likely already old and toothless (Antarctic seals grind their teeth when they gnaw and maintain ventilation holes in the ice). )
The sand, as far as can be judged from the photographs, is frozen like concrete, and forms a net pattern characteristic of permafrost - there is a certain amount of frozen moisture between the soil particles. Where there is more of it, photosynthesizing unicellular algae-endoliths live - right inside the stones, in microcracks under the surface of the cobblestones, at a depth of microns to several millimeters - depending on the transparency of the mineral. They live slowly, and they don't need much - a little sunlight, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, condensing water vapor and microelements: so some kind of organic matter is ready. And where there is organic matter, there are fungi and bacteria. At the top of this food pyramid are three types of microscopic, no more than 1 mm, nematode worms. In principle, there is still moss, but it has not worked for a long time - it is freeze-dried and preserved in the cold. Waits, frozen into the ground,next global warming. That's all.
Although no, not all. Each valley has frozen lakes, with brine lenses underneath the ice. The largest of them - Wanda, more than 60 m deep - is shackled with a four-meter thick ice shell. The ice acts like glass in a greenhouse, and the temperature at the bottom of the lake on a polar day, according to calculations, can reach + 25 ° C. In these closed worlds for thousands of years, perhaps, also live, developing according to their own laws, some microorganisms, still awaiting their discovery.
If life is ever found on Mars, it will also be in one of these two species - endoliths or inhabitants of subglacial lakes at the poles. Moreover, subglacial lakes in Antarctica have been discovered to date about two hundred and eighty - and most of them are hidden under the ice sheet at a depth of several kilometers. However, this is a separate story.