well I’m really happy to be here with
everybody this evening and share with
you a bit of a potpourri from an alien
planet from an alien planet that is near
and dear to our hearts because we live
on it and because we live on it we think
we know about it but the truth is that
there are huge vast tracts of the
surface and particularly the subsurface
that are really unknown to us and so
each one of these little planet lips
that go to make up our planet actually
harbors life-forms and conditions that
are radically different from what we
experience on the surface and my way of
substituting for getting into my rocket
ship and cruising the galaxy looking for
cool life-forms which is what I grew up
wanting to do is to have stayed closer
to home because I don’t have a rocket
ship yet come on NASA and try to explore
templates for the kind of life that we
might find on the planets in our own
solar system and what kinds of
signatures would those leave well
National Geographic has played a big
role in my life I had my first magazine
subscription as a little kid
courtesy of my cousin in 1968 early on
in my attention to caves they sponsors
some of our work and this is the
centerfold from the January 2000 I
actually was able to be a centerfold
model and looking as glamorous as I
usually look in these kinds of deals and
there I am with Diana Northup and Mike’s
ability two colleagues from the
University of New Mexico and I’m diving
for flame ball Matt’s totally suited up
if you’ve read the the magazine article
this time around you will know that we
are still working on that system 15
years later and we are still mystified
by the
Mendes amount of biological activity in
what is to us an extremely toxic
environment this is why we’re all duded
up because we are kind of life-form
humans and higher animals find this kind
of environment very toxic but we are
still looking at snottites these are the
famous snottites and I’m gazing lovingly
at them and taking samples of them which
we will haul back to the lab and then
try to poke them with sticks and get
them to grow and look at their DNA guts
and all that kind of stuff but this is
not where my caving career started it
actually also started by way of a
National Geographic special that was
called mysteries underground in 1992 and
that same year with several other
colleagues I had published a paper
suggesting that the best place to look
for life on Mars was not on the surface
of Mars but would be in the subsurface
and I was looking for a way to get into
the subsurface of Earth to see what we
could find down there and I was way too
poor to actually do drilling and we
couldn’t get anybody to pay for it and
we saw this National Geographic special
and it said a couple of really important
things about the cave it said it was
pristine that it had been dug into which
meant less contamination it had a lot of
sulfur and we already knew that Mars was
a very sulfur rich planet and then the
third thing was that one of the
geologists from the USGS Geological
Survey said that he thought he had seen
some kind of little microbial life forms
on some of the formations and so we were
sold and we called him up and we said
you don’t know us but we’re from NASA
and we’d like to go into your cave so we
trained for three hours which if we had
known then what we know now of course
this was completely nuts and then we
went on an expedition for five days into
this cave now this cave is a huge system
it’s a hundred and thirty-eight miles of
map passage so far and exploration is
still under way of course we were
captivated by many of the scenes that
you see this is a beautiful image of
what’s known as the chandelier ballroom
these are big sila night crystals but
really the quarry that I am always after
is shown in these orange materials
behind where the young man is standing
this brown stuff in the middle it’s not
a spectacular but this is where the real
quarry lay and there are some of my
little friends now these are all
microorganism types that are unknown to
science in fact virtually everything we
find in the subsurface is unknown in the
databases that we have of surface
life-forms the tiny ones there we call
them the tiny guys isn’t that original
these guys are about 100 nanometers
across one of your hairs is about 100
micrometer x’ across so this is a
thousand times smaller than that and
these are some of the smallest
life-forms that are clearly growing and
alive that have ever been found
the ones with hairy bits sticking off
when we call them Smurfs for obvious
reasons and then the others are the
death stars well these are just a few of
the microbial forms that we see in the
subsurface and this is really what got
us going and really caused me to focus
my career from a lot of the surface
extreme systems that I had been looking
at up until that point in my career I
just want to dazzle you with cool stuff
okay so one of the amazing things about
caves is just how big the spaces can be
underground here’s a couple of examples
and if you’ve never been to Carlsbad or
Mammoth Cave or any of the beautiful
show caves around the world this is
probably what you are looking at
something like that but there are many
other peculiar and amazing structures so
see all that white material when you’re
actually there it’s sort of sparkles
like sugar there’s 18 kilometers this
River underground this is snowy River in
Fort Stanton cave about only an hour and
a half away from my campus but the thing
that gets us about this is not just a
spectacular mineralogy but all those
dark streaks on the wall that’s where
the real action is you can almost hear
them calling they’re saying hey hey
stupid we’re up here and they’re tiny
little microbial voices and when we take
samples of those we can find that sure
enough they are made by bacteria that
make their living a chemical
transformation of minerals that contain
the element manganese this is a pretty
exotic way of making your living they
don’t eat sandwiches for lunch like we
do they eat rock and minerals and this
is ubiquitous in these kinds of systems
this is one of my colleagues crawling
through some of that beautiful white
material in this material besides its
beauty it also contains fossilized
microorganisms so we can see that the
cave is preserving not only the live
guys that we can go in and look for now
but also the potential for preserving
that material into the future to be
tested this is a potpourri of some of
our little friends the upper-left-hand
is spots of goo and little colonies and
all of that is alive there are probably
two or three thousand strains of
microbes in there not a single one of
which is very closely related to
anything on the surface this isn’t a
lava tube cave in Hawaii the upper right
hand side is what under some
circumstances would just turn into an
ordinary stalagmite dripping water
saturated with mineral and yet in some
circumstances it turns into nests of
so-called cave pearls why we think it’s
biology we think it’s the gooey biofilm
that microbes produced that actually
causes that to occur in a mine in
northern Minnesota called the Sudan mine
there are bore holes very narrow that go
down to much deeper levels and when you
sample those deeper levels you still
find microorganisms they’re even more
exotic and making their living in a
totally non oxygen environment this is a
salty briny iron mush that they’re
living in and you can see little bubbles
of their activity coming up from below
in that same mine on a March afternoon
in 1962 the miners were told that the
mine closed and they threw down all
their stuff and left and discussed 50
years later what we find are these
structures that you can see this Tower
of dark material actually growing on one
of those miners jackets that had been
guarded on that day and this is entirely
composed of iron and manganese utilizing
microorganisms and the minerals that
they excrete if you go to southeast
Alaska and are lucky enough to be able
to find one of the caves that exists
there in the Tongass National Forest and
you take a sample of some of the
material there and you bring it back to
the laboratory and look at it with a
scanning electron microscope you will
see this beautiful forest of crystals
all of those filamentous things that you
see weaving through them our microbes
and the microbes are facilitating the
creation of these beautiful structures
here these pool out of which these
fluffy footballs or proof balls we call
them this is the poof ball see and this
is a system that is always right around
or below freezing so you can see that
the temperature range within which we
can operate is really great this system
is in Ukraine this is one of the largest
gypsum caves in the minute in the rock
type gypsum in the world it’s between
ninety and a hundred kilometres of
passage so it’s a very big system and
it’s covered by these screaming red
towers it looks sort of like stalagmites
and the color is indeed as brilliant as
you can see from the knife that’s in the
picture and when we look at those with
an electron microscope we see that this
is not just mineral it is composed of
these tulip-shaped microorganisms all
glued together with iron compounds we
don’t know who those are even something
like granite and this shows a granite
cave in northern Spain with colleagues
from Spain and Portugal and Brazil just
looks like an ordinary granite surface
but actually the granite itself is sort
of a yellow color and that gray color
that you’re seeing is really composed of
these little guys so fluffy strings of
bacteria are making their living on the
inside of this granite cave and they are
producing beautiful little silica
containing speleothems or decorations as
they’re called tiny little stool
Heights and stalagmites and they are
doing that because by their very life
processes they’re helping to dissolve
that granite so individually they’re
very tiny but in the aggregate they’re
incredibly powerful even in ice which is
particularly important when we come to
think about icy bodies in our own solar
system and the potential presence of
life in those systems this is Erin
Curtis one of our graduate students at
New Mexico Tech is doing his
dissertation work on the ice caves
around the volcano Mount Erebus in
Antarctica and not only these are
magnificent caves with beautiful
decorations in them just like you would
find in a limestone cave perhaps but
there are also life forms in those ices
here’s one that looks like a twisted
candy cane so there is nowhere that is
bug-free no matter what you hear on TV
about how you should live a germ-free
life you should not believe that I want
to give you a glimpse of a mystery that
we are pursuing and have been pursuing
for about 15 years and you can see some
of the macroscopic evidences of it in
this beautiful little cave decoration
here this is a copper mineral called
chrysocolla and it is a beautiful blue
color and when we first saw these we
were entranced and thought gee they seem
to be gooey and they were gooey and we
took samples of them and lo and behold
they had many microorganisms in them
since this initial effort we found them
in many different caves around the world
and they often contain structures that
look like this these look like empty
mesh stockings right but we don’t know
what they are we don’t know what kind of
life form they are they all have the
same pattern although there are
variations and now we’ve found them in
probably about 50 or 60 different caves
around the world in all different kinds
of chemistry’s all different kinds of
temperatures all different circumstances
some are shallow some are deep we don’t
know who these are
they’re not fungi they’re not amoebas
they’re not bacteria we don’t know
so 15 years of pursuing what I think of
as the wild Boojum right here on this
planet even with all of the science that
we have at our disposal and we still
have aliens right here underneath our
feet I want to end with this spectacular
image by a wonderful cave photographer
Carson Peters this is the Nike system in
Chihuahua in Mexico National Geographic
has done a wonderful article on that in
2008 there have been two National
Geographic television specials that
we’ve been privileged to participate in
and yes those crystals are that big and
the reason that we’re in these little
orange suits is not to keep us warm as
you might think but to actually keep us
cool enough to work in there so we are
essentially in suits packed and ice in
order to keep us from dying from the
heat in there the heat ranges from about
105 degrees to perhaps well over 140
degrees Fahrenheit and this is just not
survivable for humans and yet this
entire system has microbes everywhere it
has them in the walls on that orange
material and particularly interesting to
us it has them in little tiny fluid
pockets within the giant crystals and
because the crystal growth rate has been
measured and also aged dated we know
that the samples that we were able to
take and some of those crystals are at a
time depth of between about 10 and
perhaps about 50,000 years so we have
been able to go into the crystals and
use these little pockets as time
capsules and not only were we able to
find DNA and organic remains of
microorganisms but we’re able to
actually bring a lot of them into
culture alive so we’re very excited
about this because this shows that
microorganisms can tolerate significant
periods of time geologically significant
periods of time in a state of relative
inactivity and yet still remain viable
still remain life containing and still
able to be brought
back to life so to speak once they get
released from these materials so our own
mini solar system underneath our feet is
acting as practice really as we try to
do what my colleagues have suggested and
that is take our knowledge take our
science take our melding of the
discipline of science with the magic of
exploration and the beauties of what we
see and what we experience and combine
those together in order to advance our
knowledge of the universe so we are
right on the cusp of this kind of
exploration and the work that I and my
colleagues do will hopefully help to
give us models for how organisms can
make their living in this amazing array
of planets that we have in our solar
system and this amazing array of planets
that we apparently have in our galaxy in
our universe thank you
you
everybody this evening and share with
you a bit of a potpourri from an alien
planet from an alien planet that is near
and dear to our hearts because we live
on it and because we live on it we think
we know about it but the truth is that
there are huge vast tracts of the
surface and particularly the subsurface
that are really unknown to us and so
each one of these little planet lips
that go to make up our planet actually
harbors life-forms and conditions that
are radically different from what we
experience on the surface and my way of
substituting for getting into my rocket
ship and cruising the galaxy looking for
cool life-forms which is what I grew up
wanting to do is to have stayed closer
to home because I don’t have a rocket
ship yet come on NASA and try to explore
templates for the kind of life that we
might find on the planets in our own
solar system and what kinds of
signatures would those leave well
National Geographic has played a big
role in my life I had my first magazine
subscription as a little kid
courtesy of my cousin in 1968 early on
in my attention to caves they sponsors
some of our work and this is the
centerfold from the January 2000 I
actually was able to be a centerfold
model and looking as glamorous as I
usually look in these kinds of deals and
there I am with Diana Northup and Mike’s
ability two colleagues from the
University of New Mexico and I’m diving
for flame ball Matt’s totally suited up
if you’ve read the the magazine article
this time around you will know that we
are still working on that system 15
years later and we are still mystified
by the
Mendes amount of biological activity in
what is to us an extremely toxic
environment this is why we’re all duded
up because we are kind of life-form
humans and higher animals find this kind
of environment very toxic but we are
still looking at snottites these are the
famous snottites and I’m gazing lovingly
at them and taking samples of them which
we will haul back to the lab and then
try to poke them with sticks and get
them to grow and look at their DNA guts
and all that kind of stuff but this is
not where my caving career started it
actually also started by way of a
National Geographic special that was
called mysteries underground in 1992 and
that same year with several other
colleagues I had published a paper
suggesting that the best place to look
for life on Mars was not on the surface
of Mars but would be in the subsurface
and I was looking for a way to get into
the subsurface of Earth to see what we
could find down there and I was way too
poor to actually do drilling and we
couldn’t get anybody to pay for it and
we saw this National Geographic special
and it said a couple of really important
things about the cave it said it was
pristine that it had been dug into which
meant less contamination it had a lot of
sulfur and we already knew that Mars was
a very sulfur rich planet and then the
third thing was that one of the
geologists from the USGS Geological
Survey said that he thought he had seen
some kind of little microbial life forms
on some of the formations and so we were
sold and we called him up and we said
you don’t know us but we’re from NASA
and we’d like to go into your cave so we
trained for three hours which if we had
known then what we know now of course
this was completely nuts and then we
went on an expedition for five days into
this cave now this cave is a huge system
it’s a hundred and thirty-eight miles of
map passage so far and exploration is
still under way of course we were
captivated by many of the scenes that
you see this is a beautiful image of
what’s known as the chandelier ballroom
these are big sila night crystals but
really the quarry that I am always after
is shown in these orange materials
behind where the young man is standing
this brown stuff in the middle it’s not
a spectacular but this is where the real
quarry lay and there are some of my
little friends now these are all
microorganism types that are unknown to
science in fact virtually everything we
find in the subsurface is unknown in the
databases that we have of surface
life-forms the tiny ones there we call
them the tiny guys isn’t that original
these guys are about 100 nanometers
across one of your hairs is about 100
micrometer x’ across so this is a
thousand times smaller than that and
these are some of the smallest
life-forms that are clearly growing and
alive that have ever been found
the ones with hairy bits sticking off
when we call them Smurfs for obvious
reasons and then the others are the
death stars well these are just a few of
the microbial forms that we see in the
subsurface and this is really what got
us going and really caused me to focus
my career from a lot of the surface
extreme systems that I had been looking
at up until that point in my career I
just want to dazzle you with cool stuff
okay so one of the amazing things about
caves is just how big the spaces can be
underground here’s a couple of examples
and if you’ve never been to Carlsbad or
Mammoth Cave or any of the beautiful
show caves around the world this is
probably what you are looking at
something like that but there are many
other peculiar and amazing structures so
see all that white material when you’re
actually there it’s sort of sparkles
like sugar there’s 18 kilometers this
River underground this is snowy River in
Fort Stanton cave about only an hour and
a half away from my campus but the thing
that gets us about this is not just a
spectacular mineralogy but all those
dark streaks on the wall that’s where
the real action is you can almost hear
them calling they’re saying hey hey
stupid we’re up here and they’re tiny
little microbial voices and when we take
samples of those we can find that sure
enough they are made by bacteria that
make their living a chemical
transformation of minerals that contain
the element manganese this is a pretty
exotic way of making your living they
don’t eat sandwiches for lunch like we
do they eat rock and minerals and this
is ubiquitous in these kinds of systems
this is one of my colleagues crawling
through some of that beautiful white
material in this material besides its
beauty it also contains fossilized
microorganisms so we can see that the
cave is preserving not only the live
guys that we can go in and look for now
but also the potential for preserving
that material into the future to be
tested this is a potpourri of some of
our little friends the upper-left-hand
is spots of goo and little colonies and
all of that is alive there are probably
two or three thousand strains of
microbes in there not a single one of
which is very closely related to
anything on the surface this isn’t a
lava tube cave in Hawaii the upper right
hand side is what under some
circumstances would just turn into an
ordinary stalagmite dripping water
saturated with mineral and yet in some
circumstances it turns into nests of
so-called cave pearls why we think it’s
biology we think it’s the gooey biofilm
that microbes produced that actually
causes that to occur in a mine in
northern Minnesota called the Sudan mine
there are bore holes very narrow that go
down to much deeper levels and when you
sample those deeper levels you still
find microorganisms they’re even more
exotic and making their living in a
totally non oxygen environment this is a
salty briny iron mush that they’re
living in and you can see little bubbles
of their activity coming up from below
in that same mine on a March afternoon
in 1962 the miners were told that the
mine closed and they threw down all
their stuff and left and discussed 50
years later what we find are these
structures that you can see this Tower
of dark material actually growing on one
of those miners jackets that had been
guarded on that day and this is entirely
composed of iron and manganese utilizing
microorganisms and the minerals that
they excrete if you go to southeast
Alaska and are lucky enough to be able
to find one of the caves that exists
there in the Tongass National Forest and
you take a sample of some of the
material there and you bring it back to
the laboratory and look at it with a
scanning electron microscope you will
see this beautiful forest of crystals
all of those filamentous things that you
see weaving through them our microbes
and the microbes are facilitating the
creation of these beautiful structures
here these pool out of which these
fluffy footballs or proof balls we call
them this is the poof ball see and this
is a system that is always right around
or below freezing so you can see that
the temperature range within which we
can operate is really great this system
is in Ukraine this is one of the largest
gypsum caves in the minute in the rock
type gypsum in the world it’s between
ninety and a hundred kilometres of
passage so it’s a very big system and
it’s covered by these screaming red
towers it looks sort of like stalagmites
and the color is indeed as brilliant as
you can see from the knife that’s in the
picture and when we look at those with
an electron microscope we see that this
is not just mineral it is composed of
these tulip-shaped microorganisms all
glued together with iron compounds we
don’t know who those are even something
like granite and this shows a granite
cave in northern Spain with colleagues
from Spain and Portugal and Brazil just
looks like an ordinary granite surface
but actually the granite itself is sort
of a yellow color and that gray color
that you’re seeing is really composed of
these little guys so fluffy strings of
bacteria are making their living on the
inside of this granite cave and they are
producing beautiful little silica
containing speleothems or decorations as
they’re called tiny little stool
Heights and stalagmites and they are
doing that because by their very life
processes they’re helping to dissolve
that granite so individually they’re
very tiny but in the aggregate they’re
incredibly powerful even in ice which is
particularly important when we come to
think about icy bodies in our own solar
system and the potential presence of
life in those systems this is Erin
Curtis one of our graduate students at
New Mexico Tech is doing his
dissertation work on the ice caves
around the volcano Mount Erebus in
Antarctica and not only these are
magnificent caves with beautiful
decorations in them just like you would
find in a limestone cave perhaps but
there are also life forms in those ices
here’s one that looks like a twisted
candy cane so there is nowhere that is
bug-free no matter what you hear on TV
about how you should live a germ-free
life you should not believe that I want
to give you a glimpse of a mystery that
we are pursuing and have been pursuing
for about 15 years and you can see some
of the macroscopic evidences of it in
this beautiful little cave decoration
here this is a copper mineral called
chrysocolla and it is a beautiful blue
color and when we first saw these we
were entranced and thought gee they seem
to be gooey and they were gooey and we
took samples of them and lo and behold
they had many microorganisms in them
since this initial effort we found them
in many different caves around the world
and they often contain structures that
look like this these look like empty
mesh stockings right but we don’t know
what they are we don’t know what kind of
life form they are they all have the
same pattern although there are
variations and now we’ve found them in
probably about 50 or 60 different caves
around the world in all different kinds
of chemistry’s all different kinds of
temperatures all different circumstances
some are shallow some are deep we don’t
know who these are
they’re not fungi they’re not amoebas
they’re not bacteria we don’t know
so 15 years of pursuing what I think of
as the wild Boojum right here on this
planet even with all of the science that
we have at our disposal and we still
have aliens right here underneath our
feet I want to end with this spectacular
image by a wonderful cave photographer
Carson Peters this is the Nike system in
Chihuahua in Mexico National Geographic
has done a wonderful article on that in
2008 there have been two National
Geographic television specials that
we’ve been privileged to participate in
and yes those crystals are that big and
the reason that we’re in these little
orange suits is not to keep us warm as
you might think but to actually keep us
cool enough to work in there so we are
essentially in suits packed and ice in
order to keep us from dying from the
heat in there the heat ranges from about
105 degrees to perhaps well over 140
degrees Fahrenheit and this is just not
survivable for humans and yet this
entire system has microbes everywhere it
has them in the walls on that orange
material and particularly interesting to
us it has them in little tiny fluid
pockets within the giant crystals and
because the crystal growth rate has been
measured and also aged dated we know
that the samples that we were able to
take and some of those crystals are at a
time depth of between about 10 and
perhaps about 50,000 years so we have
been able to go into the crystals and
use these little pockets as time
capsules and not only were we able to
find DNA and organic remains of
microorganisms but we’re able to
actually bring a lot of them into
culture alive so we’re very excited
about this because this shows that
microorganisms can tolerate significant
periods of time geologically significant
periods of time in a state of relative
inactivity and yet still remain viable
still remain life containing and still
able to be brought
back to life so to speak once they get
released from these materials so our own
mini solar system underneath our feet is
acting as practice really as we try to
do what my colleagues have suggested and
that is take our knowledge take our
science take our melding of the
discipline of science with the magic of
exploration and the beauties of what we
see and what we experience and combine
those together in order to advance our
knowledge of the universe so we are
right on the cusp of this kind of
exploration and the work that I and my
colleagues do will hopefully help to
give us models for how organisms can
make their living in this amazing array
of planets that we have in our solar
system and this amazing array of planets
that we apparently have in our galaxy in
our universe thank you
you
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