In 2020, a group of scientists from the United States described in PNAS  a bacterium living within gypsum rocks that secreted a substance to  dissolve the minerals around it, releasing individual water molecules sequestered inside the rock. “They’re almost like miners … digging for water,” says [Professor] David Kisailus, a chemical and environmental engineer at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the study’s authors. “They can actually search out and find the water and extract the water from these rocks.” Examples like these are just a taste of what Atacama’s microbes might teach us about survival at extremes, Kisailus says. Read More