Unearthly: Relational Geologies of Lake Salda and Jezero Crater

Keywords: Earth, home, alien, Mars, relational geographies, extraterrestrial, Turkey
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 11

Abstract

The key objective for the Perseverance rover’s mission on Mars is the search for signs of ancient microbial life. In October 2021, the first scientific results on the images taken by the rover were published, confirming the existence of a delta lake that existed in Jezero Crater over 3.8 billion years ago. Conceived as an analog environment to early Mars, Lake Salda, Turkey, is the only known lake on Earth that contains the carbonates and depositional features like those found at Jezero. Aiming to help Perseverance determine which rock and sediment samples to collect, in 2019, geologists conducted a survey of rocks formed with the support of microbes on the Lake. Lake Salda, in this way, emerges as an “unearthly” environment. A NASA article covered the survey as follows: “You may not be able to travel to Jezero Crater on Mars, but you can visit the next best thing: Lake Salda.” Another declared, “Mars and Turkey: Separated by space, united by geology.” Engaging with the panel’s invitation to be mindful of conflating earth and cosmos when it comes to the extraterrestrial, in this paper, I speculate about how the relational geologies of Lake Salda and Jezero might complicate analogical reasoning. If studies of analog environments are increasingly rendering the Earth alien, and the extraterrestrial familiar (Battaglia, Valentine, and Olson 2015, Messeri 2017, Praet and Salazar 2017), the relational geologies of Lake Salda and Jezero might further unsettle the divides between organic and geologic, life and nonlife, or earthly and unearthly.