Hardwear Sessions

Editor's Note: J. Judson Wynne is a cave research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Southwest Biological Science Center and the SETI Institute, Carl Sagan Center, and is a PhD student in Biology at Northern Arizona University. Wynne is also an adventure athlete and longtime Mountain Hardwear user -- which is why we're featuring his story on our blog.

Chile's Atacama Desert is arguably the driest place on earth. Cave scientist J. Judson Wynne (who goes by "Jut") and his fellow researchers are studying caves in the Atacama Desert as part of Phase 2 of the "Earth-Mars Cave Detection Program." This is a three-year exobiology research project that hopes to explore Martian caves for signs of life. As Wynne explains, "If there's life on Mars, the best place to look is underground."

Glen Cushing, Wynne's colleague at Northern Arizona University, explains that caves are attractive, because "the Martian surface is an extremely harsh environment" and caves might protect microorganisms from surface radiation. Cushing spotted dark, ovoid spots on the Martian surface, and speculated that they might be caves, rather than craters. If there truly are caves on Mars, Cushing notes, they could "become habitats for future explorers, or could be the only structures that preserve evidence of past or present microbial life."

Fast forward, then, to the Atacama expedition. Before scientists can explore caves on Mars, they must hone their skills here on Earth. So Wynne and his fellow researchers decided to head to the Atacama Desert. As Wynne explains, "Because we can't go to Mars just yet, planetary scientists seek out places on Earth that are the most Mars-like. The Atacama is characterized by high UV (due to its high elevation), wide diurnal temperature fluctuations, hyper-arid and has been hyper-arid for millions of years -- a lot like Mars." All in all, the Atacama Desert presents an excellent opportunity to study an "analogue" to the Martian environment.

In the Atacama, the team's goal is to "define mission and instrumentation requirements for detecting caves on Mars using thermal infrared imagery."

While perhaps not beyond the realm of possibilities even for the driest place on earth, Wynne and his crew did not expect to find water there. Nor did they expect to find so many animal bones.

The scientists found a subterranean water deposit in one of their study caves. In an interview with LiveScience (an online science magazine), Wynne said, "Much to my surprise, as we moved halfway through this passage, my foot completely sunk into the soil. It was mud! There was a lot of it. It is all contained within the salt stream flow that meandered through the passage."

Wynne is currently working with other scientists to determine how the water was deposited in this cave.

More spectacular, perhaps, was the scientists' discovery of the Cuevita de Huesos ("Small Cave of the Bones"). The bones proved a startling surprise.

Wynne described the discovery in his blog, "We found hundreds of thousands of bones and skulls eroding out of the cave walls...mixed in with tree branches...I'm not certain whether these animals were dumped into this small piping cave by prehistoric people or whether these animals were trapped in a flood and accumulated in the portion of the unconsolidated sediment, which is now the piping cave."

Visit Wynne's blog for a day-by-day account of the team's adventures in Atacama.