Hawaii volcano: Kilauea helps Nasa Mars investigation in groundbreaking study
A team of scientists have conducted fieldwork in the Kilauea fields since 2015 as part of a four-year Nasa-led research project.
One of the questions they are investigating is how life on ancient Mars could have developed.
Darlene Lim, a geobiologist at the Nasa Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley and the project’s principal investigator, said: “The reason why there continue to be questions, and programs like ours that go out and try to answer the questions — was Mars habitable? Is it currently habitable? — is that nobody really knows.”
Basaltic terrain can host a huge range of microorganisms which led the scientists to investigate Hawaii.