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we're um 79 nearly 80 degrees north a

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place called bok fjord

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at the base of a volcano called

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falifield and this volcano is one of the

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only places in the world where a geology

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is similar to martian meteorites

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called alh301

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and it's our terrestrial analog for our

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mars landing site and we use this to

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test rovers and instruments that are

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these rocks are very much like mars

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meteorites so that was kind of the

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attraction to come here in the first

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place

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you know the things that are in here

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could support life now did they support

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life on mars we don't know or has there

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ever been life on mars we don't know

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but uh in my mind

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the only possible energy source on for

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organisms on early mars or even present

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day mars is chemosynthetic that is

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they're using energy from rocks

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because there's there's no other way to

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to live you either have to eat other

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organisms

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or you have to use photosynthesis

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there's no other source

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so the only only possible source for

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early life on mars or earth would be

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chemosynthetic

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there are two different types of

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carbonate on here

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there's some globules on the outside and

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there's some

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in here

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gases that formed these kind of pockets

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in the uh

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in the lava itself

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so we know that this material and this

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process that form these kind of things

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uh happened on mars

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that's why this is a mars analog site

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and that's why we're deploying the rover

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and the instruments

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they really just look like iron coatings

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kind of yeah is that the carbonate the

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carbonate's um a more magnesite

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uh hematite rich magnesium

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we should go check with kevin and see

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what results they've been getting on

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there

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the olivine samples they've been running

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i think they just started uh

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they moved to the next gully over

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not for some privacy yeah i don't know

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so

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there is a record here of ancient life

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in both

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chemical terms as well as structural

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but what we also have discovered in

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other places of svalbard and here is

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that life persists in these really harsh

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environments that

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we consider mars analog

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or at least as close as we can get to

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omar's analog while staying on earth

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and so

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what we're trying to understand is how

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can we detect life

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in these rocks meaning

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both the modern and the ancient and can

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we distinguish the two

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we also need to know how is it that life

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persists here because it's an extreme

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environment as maybe

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as

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environments because it's incredibly

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cold it's very dry so we want to be able

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to figure out how how are we going to

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i think we take for granted the

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background knowledge that we have of how

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life persists elsewhere on earth

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in interpreting what we see here if you

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take any one of these rocks and find

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indications of life you almost have to

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then imagine

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what if you found this on mars and you

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found the same observations

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is that really an indication of life how

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much confidence do you have in that

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it the whole process of going through

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this forces us to go back to

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first principles of science and how we

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interpret those observations and

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it's very difficult to do and you only