Exploring Habitability through Hypersaline Analogue Environments – An Interdisciplinary Study of the La Mancha region in Spain

The study of hypersaline environments allows us to characterise the boundaries of life on Earth and the identification of metabolic processes that fuel biogeochemical cycling under conditions analogous to early Mars. The La Mancha region contains small, seasonal lagoons that are hypersaline, alkaline and sulfate rich, akin the Hesperian-era Mars. Through geochemical, mineralogical, microbiological and isotopic data from these lagoons from 2022 and 2025 we can discern the metabolisms that can support growth, their influence on the environment, and their physicochemical evolution. This will generate a fundamental insight into the extent to which desiccation is progressing in these sites and their status as potential temporal analogues

Speakers: Michael C. Macey and Velislava Ilieva.