Last week, the TalkingScience team trekked out to Staten Island to put on a Science Cabaret for students at I.S. 34. We were accompanied by a bee keeper, a biologist, a 3D artist from Hollywood, a few flamenco dancers, and our L’Oreal-UNESCO award-winning emcee (“Cindy the Scientist”). Cindy is a great story-teller, and while she was researching the history and science behind flamenco dancing, she came across some an interesting bit of information about the Rio Tinto, a river in Spain and a region that was once populated by flamenco-dancing miners.

Life near the Rio Tinto isn’t easy…in fact, it’s nearly non-existent when it comes to human life. The region is an isolated cavity that was abandoned hundreds of years ago. We’re not sure exactly what happened there since Rio Tinto was once the oldest known mining community, rich with legends about the wealthy King Soloman and tales about how Phoenician merchants arrived to set the foundations for the Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians who would later take over the area. It’s hardly a boom-town today, though.

Humans couldn’t possibly live sustainably in the region, but scientists believe that the conditions could be just right for a Martian since many of the region’s attributes are similar to those found on Mars. The Rio Tinto is located on top of an ancient hydrothermal system formed by sulfide minerals. Mars also has an abundance of sulfur, as well as iron, and these are the ingredients needed to form sulfide minerals. Because Mars also has volcanoes and ground ice, the conditions for a hydrothermal systems could exist….and maybe life could exist too. Not human life, of course– if we do discover life on Mars, it’s more likely to be in the form of extremophile microbes (microbes that can exist in extreme conditions). These microorganisms have already been identified in the Rio Tinto, which has a pH of 2.3 (it’s rare for living creatures to flourish in such acidic water).

In his article NASA Scientists to Drill for New, Exotic Life near Acidic Spanish River, author John Bluck notes that “scientists say evidence suggests the chemistry of the Rio Tinto and its biology may be a result of an underground biologically based chemical reactor fueled by organisms that do not need oxygen gas too survive.” So…alien life forms that don’t require oxygen or light? It sounds very science fiction to me, but you might need to head to the non-fiction area of the library to find out more about it soon. Once again, reality may prove itself stranger than fiction. I wonder if this new life form will be green or gooey, or have any super- powers? To be continued…