This Plant Is So Extreme, Scientists Think It Could Thrive on Mars

Mosses are among Earth’s great terraformers, transforming barren rock into fertile soil, and now a team of scientists is proposing that these non-vascular plants could do the same thing on Mars.

If we should Introducing life from Earth to our red neighbour is another matter – we don’t have a very good track record of doing so on our own planet.

But if We decide that it is worth modifying the soil of Mars to create a second home for us Earthlings. Ecologist Xiaoshuang Li and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a candidate that they think should do the trick.

The Earth’s surface was once extremely inhospitable to life, but that didn’t stop a group of organisms called bryophytes – which today includes mosses, liverworts and hornworts – from tearing themselves away from the fertile safety of the oceans in search of new horizons.

The success of these terrestrial pioneers hinges on their ability to harness and digest nutrients that seep or leak onto rocks, while surviving extremely hostile conditions that would reduce other living things to dust. But as they spread across Earth’s rocky frontier, they created soils, which paved the way for other, less resilient life forms to gradually set foot on dry land.

This genetic talent continues to serve mosses around the world, and researchers believe we could harness their innate talents to colonize Mars, laying the foundation for other, less sustainable life forms, such as crops.

Unlike the lush forest mosses you might imagine, which have it pretty easy compared to their ancestors, Syntrichia caninervis is committed to maintaining an extremely frugal lifestyle. It thrives in the deserts of China and the United States, as well as in the icy mountains of the Pamirs, Tibet, the Middle East, Antarctica, and circumpolar regions.

The Gurbantunggut Desert in northwest China is a hub for S. caninerviswhich grows here more densely than anywhere else in the world, despite temperatures that range from -40°C to 65°C (-40°F to 149°F) and relative humidity that drops to 1.4 percent.

Li and his colleagues put this foam to the test – and grew S. caninervis Stepping out of your extraordinarily large comfort zone is no small feat.

In the laboratory, they tested the plant’s responses and recovery from extreme dehydration, prolonged freezing (-80°C for 3 or 5 years and -196°C for 15 or 30 days), radiation (at doses of 500 to 16,000 Gy), and Mars-like conditions at the Planetary Atmosphere Simulation Facility (PASF) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In the Mars simulation, the plants were subjected to pressures of about 650 pascals (Pa), similar to the 680–790 Pa on Mars. At night, the temperature was -60 °C and during the day, 20 °C, which is equivalent to conditions on Mars in the equatorial and mid-latitude regions. They also simulated the composition of atmospheric gases and ultraviolet radiation levels to be closer to those on Mars.

Dehydration was, for S. caninervisa walk in the park. And in the extreme cold, she shrugged. All the frozen plants regenerated after thawing, with plants dehydrated before freezing recovering much faster than their soggy peers.

Faced with radiation levels of 50 Gy that would kill humans, S. caninervis didn’t blink. At 500 Gy, its growth even seemed to accelerate.

Mosses that were dehydrated and then exposed to Mars-like conditions were able to behave as if nothing had happened after just 30 days of recovery. Their hydrated counterparts took a little longer to recover, but still survived to tell the tale.

“Although there is still a long way to go to create self-sustaining habitats on other planets, we have demonstrated the great potential of S. caninervis “as a pioneer plant for growth on Mars,” the researchers write.

“In the future, we hope that this promising moss could be taken to Mars or the Moon to further test the possibility of colonization and plant growth in space.”

Even if moss on Mars turns out to be a terrible idea, the fact that S. caninervis Earth’s ability to transform a completely barren land into a “living skin,” even after surviving such extreme conditions, offers some hope for life on our own planet, which is, it seems, more resilient than we sometimes think.

This research was published in Innovation.