Quick Facts
name: Last Chance Lake
position: British Columbia, Canada
Coordinate: 51.32769655502273, -121.63335524817583
Why it’s great: The lake’s chemistry resembles conditions that may have given rise to life on Earth.
Last Chance Lake is a shallow, very saline lake with rare ChemicalThe lake has phosphate concentrations 1,000 times higher than the ocean, making it a modern-day replica of the environment in which life is thought to have emerged on Earth some 4 billion years ago.
Phosphate is an essential component for making nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA, as well as other life-giving compounds such as lipids. Although phosphate is bound to all living organisms, the element itself is rarely found in nature.
“Someone coined the term ‘the phosphate problem’ for the origin of life, meaning that these reactions require large amounts of phosphate.” Sebastian Haas“The second part of the problem is that phosphate concentrations in the environment are typically low, and the only real exceptions that we know of are these kinds of lakes,” the postdoctoral researcher in the University of Washington’s School of Earth and Space Sciences told Live Science.
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Last Chance Lake is one of the so-called “soda lakes.” Soda lakes are lakes with high concentrations of dissolved sodium and carbonates. The lakes were so named because they resemble water with a lot of dissolved baking soda. This chemical makeup makes these lakes High phosphate concentration.
In freshwater lakes, phosphate rarely occurs alone because it combines with calcium to form an insoluble substance called calcium phosphate, but in soda lakes, calcium preferentially combines with carbonate and magnesium, liberating phosphate.
“The cause of high phosphates in these lakes is high carbonates,” said Haas, who led the study of Last Chance Lake and neighboring Goodenough Lake in a study to be published in the journal Nature in 2024. Communication Earth and the Environment.
Haas said the high carbonate and high sodium concentrations were caused by a reaction between groundwater and the volcanic rocks beneath the lake.
Last Chance Lake is particularly interesting because it has the highest phosphate concentration of all known soda lakes. It’s also more saline than other soda lakes, making it difficult for life to exist, Haas said. The largest organisms his team documented in the lake were a brine fly (Ephydridae) and a brine shrimp (Artemia), He said.
Last Chance Lake formed after the last ice age, which ended about 10,000 years ago, Haas said. Radiocarbon dating indicates the lake formed at least 3,300 years ago and is fed only by a few springs and groundwater. Low inflow and high evaporation rates have concentrated the lake water with salts, including carbonates.
The harsh environment of Last Chance Lake mimics the conditions of early Earth where life may have originated. “We’re not saying with certainty that life originated in Last Chance Lake,” Haas says, “but it’s entirely possible that a similar lake existed somewhere on Earth 4 billion years ago, and we’re using Last Chance Lake to try to understand what that environment was like.”
Similar lakes may have existed on other planets billions of years ago. Solar SystemAccording to the study, Mars is one of them.
