This Must Be the Place: Industry and Science Tangle in Ethiopia

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The Danakil is an environmentally outlandish, politically disputed, mineral-rich plain about 124 miles long by thirty-one miles wide in northern Ethiopia, on the border of Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Home to the Afar people, a predominantly Muslim group that lives in the southern point of Eritrea as well as Ethiopia proper, the Danakil is one of the lowest, and (at least in terms of year-round median temperature) hottest places on Earth, dipping down to 410 feet below sea level and sometimes topping 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.

In late January, five teams, about thirty people in all, traveled to the Danakil to conduct field research. These were researchers from Europe and the United States, traveling under the banner of Europlanet 2020—a consortium of Europe's planetary scientists. Some, like Dr. Felipe Gómez, a biochemist at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain, had been to the Danakil more than once. Most had never been to the site; some had never been to Africa. But all were well traveled, with the ruddy energy of adventurers and the competitive instincts of academics, ravenous for credit, prestige, and funding. The Europlanet work in Ethiopia is founded upon three decades of demarcating terrestrial analogue sites, or spots on Earth that most closely approximate the conditions in outer space. Right now, the best place on this planet to understand Mars is the Danakil.

According to Gómez, the Danakil is unique as a terrestrial analogue site because it is the only place with more than one type of extreme environment. Not only is it very acidic with high temperatures and sulfuric water coming out from hydrothermal spouts, it also has metals and salts in deposition. Understanding our capacity to exist at the terminuses is one of the guiding principles of the search for life on Mars, as well as the study of how humans might live there down the line.

Despite all of this, the Danakil is still more unlike Mars than like it. It is much hotter than Mars, which is usually very, very cold, with temperatures as low as minus 195 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. The Danakil, on the other hand, averages almost 94 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. There is something else that guides the work: "Though our focus on Mars is now strongly science- and exploration-driven, there is still a rather grand and poetic awe that imbues the motives of so many Mars researchers," said Dr. Darlene Lim, a geobiologist based at the NASA Ames Research Center. "We seem to still be captivated, and perhaps even more now that the possibility of having humans set foot on Mars is on the horizon."

The Danakil is home to other extremes, too: It is the site of both futuristic science that looks at how humanity might exist after Earth, and of the very earthly matter of grinding poverty and ancient cultures. Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan is the village chief of the sleepy enclave called Hamad-Ile, the last stop where scientists and tourists stay before the tingling expanse of Danakil's salt plains opens out wide. The men who live in Hamad-Ile are salt miners who batter away with handmade pickaxes to cut salt bricks out of the earth that then get transported for sale. Hamad welcomes any interest in the Danakil, whether it be for science, mining, or tourism. It all boosts the local economy, he says. The mining companies built a tarmac road, scientists often bring pens to distribute in schools, and the increase in tourism has brought opportunities for villagers to make beds to sell to campsites.

And yet it's difficult not to think Hamad has chosen this slightly delusional optimism, given the disparity between what's been brought into Hamad-Ile and the scale of what's been taken out. The poverty in Hamad-Ile and its surrounds is great, the information that the Danakil has bequeathed is so valuable, and its land so full of potential for...