Alien landscapes on Earth

The mysterious and beautiful planet Earth is fraught with many secrets. Our planet is believed to have formed about 4.54 billion years ago from a large cloud of interstellar dust and gas.

Planet Earth is the only object known to man at the moment in the Universe, inhabited by living organisms. The earth is home to millions of different species of living things, including humans. At present, science cannot give an unequivocal answer about the existence of life on other planets.

It is possible that we will never reveal all the secrets of our and other planets. But there are places on Earth that would definitely please the inhabitants of other worlds.

See the unearthly landscapes of our amazing planet.

9 PHOTOS

1. Shark Bay in Western Australia.

85% of the entire history of planet Earth was inhabited only by microbes. The only evidence of this is the products of the activity of cyanobacteria - stromatolites. Most often, stromatolites can be found in extremely salty waters. And living specimens that have survived to this day can be found in Shark Bay.

2. The Shark Bay is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List due to its unique ecosystem.

3. Yellowstone National Park.

What makes the color of the water in this hot spring so beautiful? Life, that's what!
The water takes on such an unusual color under the influence of extremophiles. These are living things that need extreme environmental conditions or are well adapted to them.

4. Lassen Volcanic National Park in California.

Hell on Earth, or Bumpass Hell, is a hydrothermal site where underground waters are heated by hot magma to very high temperatures. Despite this, some microorganisms live in the water. The Spirit rover has discovered minerals on Mars, indicating that the red planet had the same hydrothermal environment as Bumpass Hell.

5. Tinto River in southwestern Spain.

The increased acidity of the waters and the high content of iron oxides in it gave the river such an unearthly, Martian look. For most organisms, such an environment is lethal, but the river is inhabited by living microorganisms - extremophiles, including algae and fungi.

6. Lake Simba is located at an altitude of 5872 m in the Chilean Andes.

Volcanic lakes are still the most mysterious objects on Earth. The red color of the lake is given by algae floating close to the surface of the water. They contain special pigments to protect against high UV radiation. Scientists believe that similar lakes existed on Mars 3.5 billion years ago.

7. Lake Mono in California.

The water in it is 2-3 times saltier than in the ocean, and the high content of calcium carbonate gave the lake a mystical otherworldly look.

8. Glacier on Ellesmere Island in Canada.

The water that flows from the top of the glacier is like a chemical mixture with high sulfur content. However, living microorganisms were also found in it. Astrobiologists use the studies of these glaciers in order to study the potential life on the moons of Jupiter.

9. Underwater cave or "blue hole" in the Bahamas.

For more than a billion years, Earth's oceans are believed to have been devoid of oxygen. In the sea rocks, which are billions of years old, fossil remains of purple bacteria have been preserved, which, during the process of photosynthesis, release not oxygen, like modern plants, but sulfur. Astrobiologists are currently studying these bacteria.