Dirk Shulze-Makuch, a professor in the WSU School of the Environment, is a co-author of an upcoming paper that suggests scientists should look for evidence of life-forms that survived on the Martian surface when most or all of the liquid water had disappeared.
He presented the conclusions of the paper at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June. Understanding how microbes survive in dry environments on Earth — like the Atacama — could give scientists very specific information about where to search for evidence of similar life-forms on Mars. Not only that, but those microbes could have been alive a few billion years after the lakes and rivers disappeared and the last sediment fossils formed.