University of Ottawa
Probing for Life in Icy Lake Untersee, Antarctica: an Analogue of the Habitable Subsurface World on Enceladus — A key question for astrobiology is the distribution of life in the universe. Presently, we have only one example of life which is found on Earth. However, there is evidence that habitable
environments once existed on Mars and might currently exist within the subsurface ocean of Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. Therefore, space agencies have great interest in searching for evidence of life on these planetary worlds, or to at least search for environments with conditions that are compatible with life as we know it.

A goal of this project is to inform and enable future methods for the search for life at Enceladus. In 2005, the Cassini mission revealed this icy ocean world to have plumes of gas containing CO2, organic compounds and H2 venting into space over the south polar region. At Lake Untersee, a perennially ice-covered lake in Antarctica, the deep anoxic basin with its unusual biogeochemical processes serves as an analog environment, providing a model for the study of the compositi