![]() The following year, in 1977, a marine geology expedition discovered hydrothermal vents in the Galapagos Rift, deep beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean. Just before the first mission to the outer solar system, in 1976 – while Viking 1 was searching for life on Mars – botanists discovered bacteria eking out a living in porous sandstone in the cold, dry, thoroughly inhospitable mountains of Antarctica’s Ross Desert. Researchers have found 379 such lakes so far, and a series of discoveries in the last few years have confirmed the presence of microbial life beneath several of them. In 1970, airborne radio-echo sounding surveys found the first evidence of lakes hidden beneath several kilometers of glacial ice in Antarctica. Most of the liquid water we’ve found in the solar system is concealed beneath the icy crusts of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, but before scientists sent Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini out into the outer solar system to find those sub-surface oceans, they found analogues here on Earth. Second came the idea that the most basic conditions for survival – chiefly the presence of liquid water – could turn up in unexpected places. First came the idea that life could live in colder, darker, stranger places than biologists could have dreamed. ![]() That shift happened in two parts, fueled by discoveries in broadly different fields. “It’s been a big shift, but it’s been kind of gradual it just kind of kept creeping up on people,” JPL’s Diana Blaney, principal investigator on the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa, said. Until the last few decades, scientists assumed that the conditions for life, starting with liquid water, could only exist in a planetary neighborhood exactly like ours.
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