The Very High Life: Part One

Even in a wind-blasted, God-forsaken place like the top of Long’s Peak, Colorado — 14,259 feet — moss and lichen grow abundantly among the rocks. I’ve seen them there, snugly hunkered down on the acres-wide summit. This is a place that sees about a month or so of semi-balmy weather per year, followed with 10-11 months of relentless UV, ice, snow, freezing fog, blizzards, climbers, more ice, and the occasional crazed skier. Truly, there are few places on Earth life can’t make it.

What makes the following story (which I discovered here) so amazing, though, is the abundance of life — veritable oases, really — at almost 19,850 feet near the blasted summit of Socompa Volcano in the Andes. Scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder led by Dr. Steven Schmidt recently traveled there to investigate reports of complex plant communities growing at these extremely high altitudes on volcanic vents. The nearest, albeit sparse, plants growing without the benefit of vents peter out at about 15,100 feet — nearly a mile below. If the scientists confirmed their existence, such plant communities would be the highest known on Earth.

Socompa Volcano straddles Argentina and Chile in the Atacama Desert. 7,200 years ago, it was the site of a volcanic cone collapse ten times bigger than that of Mt. St. Helens, which you can see in this image of Socompa taken from space.

Just be glad you weren't there when this baby collapsed. Courtesy NASA.

First, a little perspective on the freezing, arid death-zone that is the top of Socompa, from the paper by the CU scientists in Applied and Environmental Microbiology (subscription required):

Here, along the western slope of the Andes mountains, the hyperarid Atacama Desert extends up to 3,500 m in elevation, above which climate records for the volcanic peaks to the east, including Socompa, are scarce. In this region, summer precipitation generally occurs as transient snow or hail, winters are cold and dry, and vegetation is sparse and limited to between 3,500 and 4,600 m elevation (4, 22). Mean annual temperatures below –5°C and precipitation of <200 mm are likely for Socompa (4, 25), and the absence of glacial features or permanent snowfields on the mountain is indicative of the arid climate (23). The region is cloud-free throughout much of the year, which, along with the high elevation, contributes to extreme solar total and UV irradiances (39, 44). Socompa’s slopes are barren for many square kilometers, as the highest vascular plants in the area are restricted to below 4,600 m elevation.

Let’s review: mean average annual temperatures below -5°C (that’s the mean?!), less than 20 cm (8 inches) of rain or snow for the year, and ~12/7 tanning-bed-turned-up-to-11 conditions. Have they checked for spice deposits?

Yet the fumaroles of the volcano provide warm, moist refugia from the otherwise-forbidding land. Fumaroles are cracks in the earth where gasses let off by magma or by water heated underground reach the surface. The fumaroles on Socompa seep warmth, carbon dioxide, water, and methane.  They are particularly inviting to life, the authors of the new study report, as they are not spewing steam, toxic sulfuric gases, acids, or [Dr. Evil voice] liquid hot magma [/Dr. Evil voice]. Not that a few forms of life wouldn’t find a way to work around or with most of those things, but you do tend to catch more flies with honey than with boiling acid.

So as I said, scientists, who for completely unfathomable reasons had failed to thoroughly investigate this volcanic Club Med previously (they seemed to find places like the Galapagos and the South Pole more inviting) finally ventured up there for a detailed look. What did they find? Wonderful things . . . which I will chronicle for you next time.

Coming in Part Two: Living delights from 2/3 cruising altitude.

Tagged as: extreme environments