LAKE SALDA, Turkey — As Nasa’s rover Perseverance explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data gathered on a mission much closer to home at a lake in southwest Turkey.
Nasa says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the nearest match on earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and which is believed to have once been flooded with water.
Information gathered from Lake Salda may help the scientists as they search for fossilized traces of microbial life preserved in sediment thought to have been deposited around the delta and the long-vanished lake it once fed.
“Salda … will serve as a powerful analog in which we can learn and interrogate,” Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa associate administrator for science, told Reuters.
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A team of American and Turkish planetary scientists carried out research in 2019 on the shorelines of the lake, known as Turkey’s Maldives because of its azure water and white shores.
Scientists believe that the sediments around the lake eroded from large mounds that are formed with the help of microbes and are known as microbialites.
