Life Underground: Investigating Microbial Communities and Their Biomarkers in Mars‐Analog Lava Tubes at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve (CotM) is a strong terrestrial analog for lava tube formations on Mars. The commonality of its basalt composition to Martian lava tubes makes it especially useful for probing how interactions between water, rock, and life have developed over time, and what traces of these microbial communities may be detectable by current flight‐capable instrumentation. Our investigations found that secondary mineral deposits within these caves contain a range of underlying compositions that support diverse and active microbial communities. Examining the taxonomy, activity, and metabolic potential of these communities revealed largely heterotrophic life strategies supported by contributions from chemolithoautotrophs that facilitate key elemental cycles. Finally, traces of these microbial communities were detectable by flight‐capable pyrolysis and wet chemistry gas chromatography‐mass spectrometry methods comparable to those employed by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument aboard the Curiosity rover and the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA) on the upcoming Rosalind Franklin rover. Using a suite of methods for chemical derivatization of organic compounds is beneficial for resolving the greatest variety of biosignatures. Tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH), for example, allowed for optimal resolution of long chain fatty acids. Taken together, these results have implications for the direction of mass spectrometry as a tool for biosignature detection on Mars, as well as informing the selection of sampling sites that could potentially host biosignatures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".