The Quest for Mars: NASA scientists and Their Search for Life Beyond Earth

The only practical way to reach the island is by helicopter, weather permitting. “There are no guarantees, as helicopters only go out that far once a month,” Jim alerted me several weeks earlier, when we were starting to get serious about the field trip. “Please note there are NO insurance provisions. ANYONE going to Surtsey does so at his or her own risk, and there is some, as the island is still HOT and there are hydrothermal systems with 120° C water just beneath the ground. Also, the weather can change, and people have been stranded. I was urged to remind you of this. Also, what I must do out there will require vigorous hiking over lava and volcanic ash. Anyway, there is a chance we will get there for a day that I do believe you will thoroughly enjoy.”

Jim once mentioned to me that his colleagues considered him a bit eccentric. After pondering his disclaimers and warnings concerning Surtsey, I recalled a strange story I’d heard about him. In the heyday of the Apollo program, NASA was thinking seriously about sending people to Mars, yet the agency hesitated. Guiding a robotic spacecraft to the Red Planet is an intricate, ambitious, and unpredictable undertaking; a human mission would be far more risky and complex. NASA was stymied by the problem of getting its astronauts home. Jim came up with a unique solution: he offered to go to Mars on a one-way basis.

When I asked Jim about this story, he was mildly abashed. “I’m not proud of this now, but when I was younger, before I married and had kids, I volunteered to go.”

“One way?”

“Well, yes. The only way you could get a man there was one way. It would be too costly to get him back to Earth. So I would go there, have enough life support to explore and survive for two years, and then …”

“And then?”

“That would be all. And it would have been worth it, the scientific returns would have been spectacular, but that was before I had kids. Now I have other responsibilities I didn’t have then.”

The thin tin walls of the Heimaey airport terminal start to vibrate. There’s a sound almost below the threshold of hearing. We feel it in our guts as it gets louder and more intense. Thwacka-thwacka-thwacka … Rotors whirring, the Iceland Coast Guard helicopter, an impressively large and sturdy Bell Jet Ranger, descends into view. It is a noisy piece of equipment, manned by a crew outfitted with Day-Glo orange flight suits. These are the men of the Iceland Coast Guard, and they swarm around us like giant orange insects. A small group of Icelandic botanists has joined us, and our little group approaches the helicopter, deafened by the whine of the motor and the thumping of the rotor. A crew member, smiling crazily, hands each of us a life vest and a helmet equipped with a microphone. I place the helmet snugly over my head, and the unbearable thwacka-thwacka-thwacka subsides to a distant drumbeat. We strap ourselves into the seats, and the helicopter slowly rises from tarmac to a height of about six feet. We delicately revolve until the nose suddenly pitches forward, and we take off like a shot. This is flying. We swoop over the ocean at an altitude of about 500 feet, until we reach the island of Surtsey, fifty miles from nowhere. From the air, the place looks so barren and primitive and devoid of anything recognizable that even Heimaey, by comparison, seems civilized. The jagged gray lava formations of Surtsey rise to greet us. The helicopter sets down lightly on a concrete landing pad considerably smaller than my living room.

Less than twelve hours before, I was sitting in the back of a taxi cab in New York City, and Jim was fighting traffic on the way to Baltimore-Washington International Airport. It is now 10:30 AM local time on a rare, beautiful morning on sub-arctic Surtsey. Our coordinates are 63° 13” North, 20° 31” West.

The rotors slow almost to a stop. We emerge from the helicopter and wave merrily to the crew. The helicopter begins to whine, the rotors fling gritty volcanic ash into the air, and the machine lifts off.

It tilts toward the mainland and disappears, leaving a therapeutic silence.

We are alone on the newest place on Earth.

The temperature is in the high fifties, about as warm as it gets on the surface of Mars. True, the atmosphere here is saturated with oxygen and the gravity is approximately two-and-a-half times greater than the Red Planet’s, but as far as Jim is concerned, he’s on Mars.

Jim believes this is a particularly auspicious day to begin his mission, since July 20 is “Space Exploration Day,” also known as “Moon and Mars Day.” On this date in 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the lunar surface. Seven years later to the day, the Viking 1 lander transmitted the first images of the plains of Chryse to Earth. Quite a date, when it comes to planetary exploration. Some day, he believes, July 20 will be designated a national holiday for space exploration.

The botanists disperse ahead of us. Although he is exhausted from a sleepless night, Jim heads out with a bundle of topographic maps under one arm and a pair of bright orange Swarovski laser binoculars around his neck. “They are good to three-tenths of a centimeter. I have about fifteen different programs I can set it on, and if I want, I can connect it to my laptop,” he says. He wears hiking shoes designed for walking across lava, an olive drab NASA flight jacket, and a white baseball cap bearing the legend “Mars Observer,” a reference to the billion-dollar NASA spacecraft that vanished in 1993. No trace of it has ever been found, nor has a wholly satisfactory explanation been offered for its disappearance. Jim refers to the incident as an “act of God,” and wears this cap as a casual memorial to the lost mission.

As he sets out on this glorious Surtsey morning, he experiences an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. The last time he was here was 1991, and now he suddenly feels as though he’s home again, and he wipes his eyes. There’s a spiritual dimension to his scientific exploration that he can’t quite put into words. It’s an epiphany – a scientific epiphany, if there can be such a thing. “I felt as if I were back at a good place for learning and experiencing how life gains a foothold on a previously unborn, sterile world,” he later told me, when he was better able to verbalize, but now, at the moment he sets out, it’s the adrenalin rush he’s feeling, the intoxicating sense that the world, or this little volcanic part of it, anyway, belongs to him for the time being. There’s so much going on in his mind – calculations, memories, nascent hypotheses – that I think of Garvin as a highly emotional computer.

He allows the nostalgia to wash over him, and goes to work. Although Surtsey looks stonily barren from the air, close inspection yields different results. “Observing change is the central theme of Earth and planetary science,” Jim tells me. “What is changing? What has changed? Has life on the Red Planet – if it’s there, that is – changed or been changed by Martian conditions over time? Have environments on Mars eradicated the footholds of life that may have been established at one or more times in Martian history? With Surtsey, I am struck by the incredible pace of biological change in only seven years. What appeared as a nearly sterile, Mars-like vista in 1991 is now an alien landscape complete with kitchen-table-sized mounds of flourishing higher-order plants, dunes covered by grasses.” Jim mentions that ecological succession has changed the face of Surtsey at a rate ten, or even a hundred, times faster than typical terrestrial landscapes, and perhaps a million times faster than change on Mars. Thanks to the action of wind and water, Surtsey is destined to vanish beneath the surface of the ocean almost as quickly as it arose. “I’m going to have an equation by October that will contain the predictive lifetime for Surtsey,” he says. “We’ll have the first landscape volume erosion rate for an isolated volcanic island.” If the present erosion rates hold, Jim predicts Surtsey will vanish beneath the waters of the North Atlantic by 2045, and his subsequent calculations confirm this date. Think of this process as geological time-lapse photography. A world arises and vanishes before your eyes.

Ahead lies an impossibly steep curving wall of solid rock, 460 feet high; to the left, a craggy, broken crater – a tephra ring about fifty yards across. A tephra ring is a partial crater formed as exploding volcanic ash falls to the ground in a semicircle, usually molded by the prevailing winds, which on Surtsey can be fierce. Geology-speak is a Babel of languages. Tephra is Greek for ash. Lava is Hawaiian. Many other terms are Icelandic, which is among the oldest continuously spoken languages in the West, the language of the Sagas, and, at times, the language of geology.

Lava, in Icelandic, is hraun. “It’s the oldest word for lava there is,” Jim says. There are several subsets of hraun: apalhraun, which is rough lava, and helluhraun, which is smooth. A small volcano in Icelandic is a dyngja. Hlaup means “flood,” and jökull means “glacier.” If you put those two words together – jökulhlaup – you get something for which there is no exact equivalent in English: a catastrophic outburst flood caused by water trapped under a glacier, which cracks open the ice and violently disgorges.

This catastrophic event occurred in 1993 on an Icelandic flood plain called the Skeidararsandur. Blocks of ice as large as houses tumbled for miles across the flooded black primeval landscape in an orgy of geologic violence. A similar geological disaster also occurred on Mars in the distant past. The scale was immense. It is estimated that the Martian jökulhlaup released as much as 100,000 cubic meters of water per second, more than the entire flow of the Amazon river.

At the moment, we are standing on hraun, or, more precisely, helluhraun, with a little apalhraun scattered here and there. Looking into the tephra ring, Jim says he’s stunned “to observe the development of erosional canyons massive enough to drive a Hummer through.” He didn’t see anything like this on his last trip to Surtsey. The erosional scars remind him of features shown in the latest images from Mars Orbiter Camera, now circling the Red Planet.

“These mini-canyons, technically erosional gullies, expose the underbelly of Surtsey, the volcano. They give clues about its future and the processes that formed it. The sheer beauty of these signs of geologic aging and their abundance are remarkable!” He takes a closer look at the black windblown tephra. “See how it’s sorted? See how the small rocks have risen to the top? That sorting is common. Some of them are rounded.” Those smooth contours, he tells me, are diagnostic of wind and water, and he looks for similar shapes on Mars. “So far, we haven’t found a lot of really rounded ones on Mars,” he admits. But he keeps looking because evidence of water is essential to the detection of life beyond Earth. In fact, water has assumed such importance that the question of extraterrestrial life has been reframed; where scientists once inquired, “Is there life elsewhere in the universe?” they now ask, “Is there liquid water elsewhere in the universe?”

Many planetary geologists, Garvin included, now see convincing evidence that Mars once had lots of water, and may still have a tremendous amount of water even now. Their goal is to follow the water because they hope it will lead them to life. So they seek distinctive water signatures. They look for evidence of dried-up rivers and oceans and shorelines; they theorize about subsurface water, and they measure glaciers – anything associated with water.

Stepping lightly on tephra, Jim makes his way across the eastern side of the island, squinting and kneeling, taking measurements, orienting and reorienting himself, studying the landscape, observing the reverse sorting of the soil, in which “coarser fragments the size of popcorn nubs rise to the top of the soil horizon, leaving the finer, claylike fraction below.” He notes the fragmentation of large blocks of volcanic rocks. On the right, Jim confronts a landscape studded with pitted blocks ranging in size from softballs to basketballs. Those pits grab his attention. He spent a good deal of his graduate career at Brown in the mid-1970s studying patterns of pits and surface textures on terrestrial rocks and on Martian boulders photographed by the two Viking landers, trying, as he put it, “to unravel the geologic secrets of Mars.” Here is a banquet of strikingly similar boulders, on which he is ready to feast. He notes unpitted gray rocks with angular shapes – so-called “country rocks” – as well as pitted rocks, whose morphology speaks to him, telling of displacement from a lava flow.

Jim explains how this local landscape came to be: “Once the sea water was kept out of where the lava was bubbling up, a carapace of lava formed. And that lava is very important, because it protects the vent. The vent is where the hot rock comes up. That is the reason this island survives today.” He displays what looks to me like an ordinary rock, but to Jim, it’s a geologic sonnet. “This is tephra that tumbled downhill. See how it’s made up of bits of other stuff? It’s actually a breccia. A breccia is stuff made of other stuff, little welded bits as strong as concrete.” As I hold the raw geological material in my hand, Jim reminds me that this is what the rocks on Mars look like; the main difference is that they’re coated with a brown dust. He feels around the edges. “It’s a smooth little rock,” he says. “That means it’s been worn by erosive agents, so we look at the rounding of the corners to get an indication of what’s going on.” I carefully replace the rock so as not to disturb the course of Surtsey’s geological evolution.

The hraun we traverse feels like soft beach sand. Jim tells me that on Mars, the soil is ten times finer than what we’re walking on now. “It would be more like walking on talcum powder.”

We press on, and the terrain subtly shifts. “Now we have coarse stuff lying on the surface,” Jim remarks, as he tries to read the landscape. “Here’s a little piece of basaltic pumice. That’s a good one,” he says, slipping it into his pocket, which is, perhaps, not quite kosher. “That’s one for the spectrometer,” he explains. There’s an honor system in force here. You’re not supposed to disturb anything. You try not to leave footprints in this haven for scientists if you can possibly avoid it. “Now, this looks like – aha! This –” he announces, “is a little lava bomb.”

“What?”

“A lava bomb is something that flew through the air and went splat! And then it started to break. Already, it’s weathering away. See how it’s crumbling. Again, this is what we looked for at the Pathfinder landing site.” He calls my attention to smooth rocks inside smooth rocks, and he begins to interpret. “You can piece together the history of this rock,” he says. “These rocks were always smooth; they got pasted together at the time of the eruption.”

He sees some similarities between the geology underfoot and the Pathfinder landing site on Mars. NASA sent Pathfinder to a location on Mars where it was believed that a great outpouring of water once occurred. “Some people think the rocks in Pathfinder’s vicinity came to rest there as the result of one big flood, but that’s ludicrous. It’s a mixed population of rocks around Pathfinder,” which suggests, to him, at any rate, that the geological history of the area has been fairly complex. Water might have come and gone around the Pathfinder site more than once over the eons. I look around; if you photographed a replica of Pathfinder here on Surtsey, you could persuade a fair number of people that the spacecraft was actually on Mars. The more Jim talks, the more I feel a geological kinship between the two planets; Mars seems so Earth-like, or is it more accurate to say that Earth is so Mars-like?

Garvin kneels to inspect a delicate lava formation. “See the thin carapace of lava? This black stuff?”

“It’s very soft.”

“Right, very soft underneath.”

“It’s falling apart.”

“Not all of it. And that’s important, because that’s the action of a process that tears down rocks and makes clays. We take clays for granted. On Mars, there’s likely to be a lot of clay.”

“And water is necessary for clay.”

“Yes. You have to break rocks. Look at this.” He points to where the hillside is collapsing. “What you see is little mudflows. And look at this. Here is a beautiful little lava rock! Very angular. This is a classic, coated with fine-grain stuff. It’s almost a pentagon.”

Jim points to the volcano’s peak looming overhead and recollects the last time he climbed it. “The wind was blowing at forty-five miles per hour the whole time, and it was very hard even to talk.” That windspeed was moderate, by Surtsey standards; the island endures 200 days of gale-force winds a year. “When we were here in ’91, this area was a desert, but plants are taking over now.” Now, the main plant in evidence is the lowly sandwort, a simple succulent that has proliferated on Surtsey with astonishing speed; small, dense, and tenacious, it can boldly go where other vegetation can’t. Even mosses can’t get a grip on Surtsey; the wind rips them out of the ground and flings them away.

“Look! There is a gorgeous breccia. Notice it’s in a little hollow, okay? That’s called an apron. We look for those kinds of things on Mars. Outside, you can see there’s a layering to it that’s caving in. See the carapace of lava up there? It’s starting to break off. In a big storm, that could fall.” It looks like the burned crust of a pie at the edge of a pan. “Now, see how these rocks are perched? Notice the pits. That’s where Mars comes in.” You see something similar in images from Pathfinder, Garvin says – pits left by primary gas bubbles in the lava. He snaps a picture of the pitted rocks on Surtsey as he continues. “Look at these pitting textures! All different. It’s exquisite.”

He zeroes in on a block of lava that speaks to him in a private language. Crouching, he declares, “Now, this is not primary lava. It’s softer, and it’s been coated with a bright alteration stain caused by chemical weathering. It’s allochthonous. That means it’s out of place, been moved away.” I step back to take in the scene, and I realize the site looks like the Grand Canyon in miniature. “This could be the beginnings of a little Martian canyon system,” Garvin exults. “It’s gorgeous. Oh, God, wouldn’t I love to measure that with a laser!”

We’ve been picking our way around the base of the volcano, and now we turn away from it and face the ocean. Before long, Jim again shouts. “Look at that.” He points to a slight discoloration on a mound of stones, in which he sees vast implications. “That’s the high water mark from a wave, where the fine dust coated the rocks. Now that is the kind of shoreline we are looking for on Mars.” The subject of ancient shorelines on Mars carries the charge of controversy and borderline heresy. Several scientists have tried mapping the shorelines of ancient Martian oceans that vanished a billion or more years ago, but their work has yet to gain widespread acceptance. I try to imagine Mars as a wet place, covered with oceans, teeming with possibilities, but this is like trying to visualize oceans in the Sahara, for Mars is red and dry and cold.

A large empty plastic bottle catches my eye, disturbing my reverie. The object seems as incongruous here as it would on the surface of Mars. We notice pieces of plastic, and buoys, and rope, and blocks of wood studded with rusty nails. “The garbage of humanity,” as Jim calls it, has drifted out here, fifty miles from nowhere, a mocking reminder of home. All day long, he has been scrupulous about not disturbing plants or lava or rocks, to the point of walking in old footprints. Avoiding the detritus, we cross a hard, crusty portion of the beach. “Hard pan clays,” he remarks. “See how they crack? They’re desiccated. We look for things like that on Mars. More indirect evidence of water. Here on Surtsey, we have a microcosm. We have a scale where it’s easier to see things. One of the things about Mars to remember is that it’s a big planet, about forty percent as large as Earth. If we land in three or four places on Mars, we’ll learn about them, but we won’t get the big picture of Mars that way, so we study sites on Earth that we believe operate in a similar way.”

We approach the water’s edge, but a formidable barrier repels us: a giant collection of round, basketball-sized rocks. “If we ever saw a field of dense, interconnecting rocks like this on Mars, we’d know the action of water was responsible. But, we haven’t seen this, yet.” As a geologist, Jim looks for patterns, distributions, colors, textures, and shapes. He is the detective, and they are his fingerprints. If he successfully unravels the geological mysteries of Surtsey with them, he will also know more about the development of the Red Planet.

Turning away from the beach, Jim and I finally begin the ascent to the volcano’s summit. I’ve been trying to put off this chore, but here it is, the thing we must do. Jim reminds me that we are climbing an active volcano, and there’s always a chance that it could blow without warning. I recall Iceland’s uninterrupted pattern of volcanic outbursts every five years for the last 1,100 years, and I remind myself that it’s due for another eruption. I feel as though we’re crawling up the side of a giant, overstressed pressure cooker. Jim tells me that a series of sensitive seismometers has been placed on the volcano; in fact, all the volcanoes in Iceland are similarly equipped, and the seismometers are so sensitive that they can detect microseizures involving magma, or molten rock. I’m somewhat relieved to hear about this detection system, but in the event of a warning, I wonder how anyone would be able to convey the news to us. Six months after our visit, a big volcano finally did erupt beneath Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, located on the southeast coast, home to most of the country’s population.

The gray lava and rounded rocks give way to a smooth, steep incline. Jim estimates it’s twenty degrees, but it feels more like thirty to me, very steep, indeed. We zig-zag our way across, and look down on the larger of Surtsey’s craters, a craggy rusty red configuration filled with volcanic ash that from this height resembles a soft, inviting mattress. The wind picks up, and we crouch to avoid being flung down the slippery side of the mountain. Wind, incidentally, figures prominently in the Martian environment. On the surface, dust devils are everywhere. In the upper atmosphere, winds can reach 350 miles per hour, and wind storms occasionally engulf the entire planet, obscuring the surface for days.

Jim reaches a seep, a place where the ground comes apart, as if it were fabric that has been rent. A faint plume of steam rises from the wound, and the smell of sulfur permeates the air. Kneeling beside this smoldering, malodorous seep, I begin to think of Hell as a realistic notion, based on observable geology. Jim asks me to place my hand on the soil near the edge, and it feels like hot clay. A fine white crust along the rim contains bacteria that thrive in the heat and sulfur. This is the most primitive type of life on Earth, Jim reminds me. Life may have begun in volcanic seeps similar to the one at our feet, and it might have started the same way on Mars, on other planets, and on countless moons and asteroids – if it ever did.

These bacteria are examples of extremophile life, primitive life forms that have recently been discovered in places where biologists once assumed life could not survive because the conditions were too hostile – too hot, too cold, too dark, too salty, too deep. In recent years, many of the assumptions about the requirements for life on Earth – and, by implication, the possibility of life on Mars and other celestial bodies – have been overturned.

“We are finding out about the tenacity of life,” Jim said before the trip, “and it’s startling. We’re finding creatures that live at five times atmospheric pressure two miles deep in the ocean in places where the water would boil if there weren’t tons of pressure on top of it. We’re finding giant simple worms that look like garden hoses that live under those conditions. They don’t need any light, they scavenge the sulfur produced in volcanic eruptions deep in the ocean. They live off sulfur; they eat bacteria that grow in the sulfur, and that sustains them. Is there sulfur on Mars? Likely.” Life flourishes just about anywhere, it turns out, no matter how extreme the conditions. “Can you stick life a mile down in rocks and have it survive and bloom? Yes. Can you put it two miles deep in the ocean where there is no light of day, ever? Yes. Stick it on the coldest place on the planet and it will at least remain dormant there? Yes! Now, if you can form niches of life on Earth in such horrid environments, with pressure that would crush a human being to pulp and temperatures that would boil our skin – if you have life forms under those conditions, then it gets quite interesting. In fact, the question now in biology is: can you even produce a sterile environment?”