Disaster could strike at any moment. For hundreds of millions of years, life on Earth has had to contend with a litany of existential threats: wayward asteroids, deadly pandemics, frigid ice ages and hellish volcanic eruptions. Today, the threat of climate change perhaps looms largest.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, almost one in five land species have a high risk of going extinct by 2100 if global temperatures continue to climb unchecked.
The situation in the oceans is just as dire, as marine biologist Dr Mary Hagedorn, an expert on coral reefs from the Smithsonian's National Zoo, explains. "They're disappearing faster than we can save them." Her work focuses on cryopreserving coral, including its sperm cells and larvae, by using liquid nitrogen to store them in a deep freeze. "Once the material is properly cryopreserved, it's basically in stasis for all time," she says. One day they could be reintroduced to help stabilise ecosystems.
Her success has led Hagedorn to what might seem an outlandish proposal: a vault on the Mooncontaining alive-but-frozen samples of cells from the species most important in rebuilding ecosystems.
BURIED ON THE MOON
Could this plan actually work? Hagedorn points to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, inside the Arctic Circle, as an example. Currently home to over a million seed species, it's there to safeguard our food supply against catastrophic loss of some of the world's most important crops. It's a so-called 'passive repository', meaning it requires no people or energy to maintain the seeds at -18°C (-0.4°F).
But deep-freezing live cells requires a temperature below -196°C (-321°F), the boiling point of the liquid nitrogen used in cryopreservation. "There's no place on Earth cold enough to have a passive repository that can be held at -196°C," says Hagedorn, "so we thought about the Moon."
This story is from the September 2024 edition of BBC Science Focus.
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This story is from the September 2024 edition of BBC Science Focus.
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