Journal
ADVANCES IN SPACE RESEARCH
Volume 49, Issue 2, Pages 271-279Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.asr.2011.10.001
Keywords
Soil organic carbon; Organic-variability; Atacama Desert; Extreme environments; Hyper-arid; Mars analog
Categories
Funding
- ASTEP
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The objective of this work was to investigate the variability of surface organic carbon within the hyper-arid Yungay region of the Atacama Desert. The fraction of Labile Organic Carbon (LOC) in these samples varied from 2 to 73 mu g per gram of soil with a bi-modal distribution with average content of 17 +/- 9 mu g LOC and 69 +/- 3 mu g LOC for low and high samples, respectively. Interestingly, there was no relation between organic levels and geomorphologic shapes. While organics are deposited and distributed in these soils via colic processes, it is suggested that fog is the dynamic mechanism that is responsible for the variability and peaks in organic carbon throughout the area, where a high LOC content sample could be indicative of a biological process. It was determined that there was no significant difference between topological feature or geographical position within the hyper-arid samples and LOC. This very curious result has implications for the investigation of run-off gullies on the planet Mars as our work suggests a need for careful consideration of the expectation of increases in concentrations of organic materials associated with following aqueous altered topology. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of COSPAR.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available