Worms can thrive in Martian soil?

[NSEP]

I was looking around on the web today and i found this:

https://www.sciencealert.com/earthworms-can-reproduce-in-fertilised-mars-soil-simulant

Interesting maybe?

 

[Gyrfalcon5]

This is an interesting prospect, but you have to worry about the temperature, atmospheric pressure, and radiation levels that would exist on the Martian surface. This could be useful for future colonization efforts, however, and it is very good to know that some Terran creatures can live in these environments. Mars compost would be quite interesting  

[PB666]

47 minutes ago, NSEP said:

I was looking around on the web today and i found this:

https://www.sciencealert.com/earthworms-can-reproduce-in-fertilised-mars-soil-simulant

Interesting maybe?

 

There's no doubt in my mind to begin with, if you mix enough compost with martian soil those perchlorates will not last very long. The critical ingredient is not the earthworms, its the composing material they added.

Compost does two things, for alkaline soils (e.i. martian metal oxides in the soil immediately become bases upon hydration) and

Example

Na₂O + H2O ----> 2NaOH. 

NaOH + RCOOH becomes Na+RCOO- + H2O

NaClO4 + Acid <--------> HClO4
HClO₄ + 7H+ + electron donor (compost H:) ---------> 1/2Cl₂ + 4H₂0

For example peat is an excellent source of protons.

IOW, the earthworm part of the story is hype, they are just a canary in a coal mine. The critical ingredient is decaying organic material.

Edit:

I can put this another way, which might make the compulsive terraformers here unhappy, the Earth, at one time and still is, was very good at terraforming itself.
It is the fact that once life begins and takes off, it can force the climate and soil where it wants to be. The ideal of earth as a living thing just as a eucaryotic cell has multiple lives within it, and the body has many cells, the Earth's surface is a living thing compose of biomes with various biotypes that cooperate (through both their lives and deaths) to create a living surface.

If we remove this, we get something like Mars (too cold and small) or Venus (too hot and dense atmosphere). The old earth soil was this thin, methane was up there and spread loosely around. Now the organic material is a very dense and living layer decaying first by bacterial action, then by fungi, then by the activity of soil detritovores, then by the activity of plant roots, then by the decay of roots and plant leaves and start next cycle. In such a dense layer of organic material perchlorates or any kind of highly alkaline base cannot survive, since water is a prerequisite for soil, many soil oxides will decompose to base and the bases are unstable and become salts (like carbonates). Most of the biomass of the earth is now within the very top of earths crust.

Edited November 28, 2017 by PB666

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

I was looking around on the web today and i found this:

https://www.sciencealert.com/earthworms-can-reproduce-in-fertilised-mars-soil-simulant

Interesting maybe?

 

Sure it is. A simulant is well defined composition of some sort of regolith. Attention: it is not soil as soil contains organic matter, which the Marsian surface does not !

Marsian regolith is mostly volcanic, tephra, glassy stuff etc. This can contain nutrients necessary for plant growth, on earth it does. It only takes a few decades for lava until first pioneer plants show up in earthly weathering conditions.

Nasa has articles on how and with what they compose their simulants, last i read was from April when they said they wanted to prepare something derived from the Marsian rovers' data. I didn't expect them to deal out the stuff that fast

For now, it's all earthly stuff.

 

Edit: the worm's were probably planted mentioned to attract the media's attention. They are, of course, contaminations in this context and did not grow there "naturally" as a simulant is of course initially sterile.

Edited November 28, 2017 by Green Baron

[Nuke]

the spice will flow