FANTASTIC ACCESS
Gareth Davies (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) reports on Europlanet’s Transnational Access programme, which provides free access to facilities and field sites around the world.
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T
ransnational Access (TA) is a cornerstone of all research infrastructure projects funded by the European Commission. By enabling researchers from one country to visit facilities in another, with all travel and service costs covered, the Commission aims to maximise the efficiency and quality of science produced, bridge the gap between highly developed and lesser-developed regions, support international collaboration and train the next generation of researchers.
Europlanet’s TA programme dates back to 2009, initially offering free access to five planetary analogue field sites – places on Earth that resemble environments found on other planetary bodies – and eleven state-of-the art laboratories. The programme has evolved and expanded over the past 13 years to include seven field sites and over 40 laboratories spread across four continents, providing a rich resource for planetary scientists and engineers to draw on. Research on topics as diverse as the interior of Venus and the atmospheres of icy moons has been supported, as well as non-planetary projects that include cultural heritage and Earth sciences (see page 15).
New Solutions for a Changing World
The Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI), which received €10 million funding from the European Commission (EC) between 2020 and 2024, allocated over a third of its budget to supporting its TA programme. The project aimed to fund over 2000 days of access for TA visitors – more than the combined total offered by both previous Europlanet RI projects. Three full calls for applications were issued between 2020 and 2022, as well as a ‘Fast Track’ call introduced towards the end of the pandemic (October 2021) to support early careers and time-critical research. Together, these calls attracted a total of 323 applications. The Covid-19 pandemic caused serious disruption to the programme, requiring the EC to grant a six-month extension to allow facilities to work through the backlog of TA visits. However, of the 211 TA projects approved for funding, 197 were actually carried out, involving 293 researchers and 2077 days of access. Thus, despite all the challenges over the past four years, Europlanet 2024 RI has exceeded its target. Moreover, the diverse science supported by the TA programme has led to several high-impact publications and new collaborations.
The suite of TA facilities offered through Europlanet has expanded globally during the course of the project. New field sites have included planetary analogues in the high Argentinian Andes that offer dry, cold environments in the Puna region, plus much wetter cold regions of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. These ‘extreme’ environmental conditions are good targets for exploring how microbial life can adapt to environmental challenges, as well as how biosignatures are generated and preserved within sediments and sedimentary rocks. Access was also offered to visit the Qaidam Basin in China, which has many ancient lakes, sedimentary deposits and rich geomorphological features that provide an excellent analogue environment of Mars.
Through a successful pilot arrangement with the Korean Basic Science Institute, teams of European researchers have been able to access 13 laboratory facilities in Korea, with reciprocal access to Europlanet’s field sites and laboratories offered to Korean researchers.
The other main innovation since the onset of the pandemic has been the development of virtual TA visits. While there are clear disadvantages to virtual visits, in that training opportunities, personal relationships, collaborations and synergies cannot be as fully developed, in many cases, virtual visits are proving highly successful. The benefits include reducing the amount of travel and carbon footprints, as well as opening up access to members of our community that can’t travel for physical reasons or who have caring responsibilities.
Here, we find out about the experiences of some of the researchers that have taken part in recent physical or virtual visits to laboratories and field si es through the Europlanet 2024 RI TA programme.
Going with the Flow in Mars Conditions
Lonneke Roelofs (Utrecht University, Netherlands), visited the Mars Chamber at the Open University, UK, from 29 September – 6 October 2021.
Like similar systems on Earth, martian gullies are found on steep slopes, with branched ‘alcoves’ at the top funnelling into narrow channels that lead to fan-shaped deltas at the base. Suggestions for the formation of these features include the action of liquid water and brines, the effects of sublimating carbon dioxide ice, or a combination of these processes.
Recent activity on Mars, and detections of new flow deposits, have shifted the leading hypothesis from water-based flows to carbon dioxide-driven flows, as it is hard to reconcile present activity with the low availability of atmospheric water under today’s martian conditions. However, direct observations of flows driven by sublimating carbon dioxide on the surface of Mars are nonexistent, and our knowledge of carbon dioxide-driven flows under martian conditions remains limited.
With our TA research visit to the Mars Chamber at the Open University in the UK, we aimed to start deciphering how sublimating carbon dioxide could affect mass-flow dynamics and deposits in martian gully systems. We wanted to specify to what degree and in what quantities the sublimation of carbon dioxide ice could induce fluid mass flows in present-day martian gullies.
During the first two days of our visit, we connected and inserted a flume set-up, built at Utrecht University, into the Mars Chamber. After a few days of fixing some electrical and mechanical problems, we did something no one else has ever done before: we created the first carbon dioxide-driven granular flow under martian atmospheric conditions.
During the rest of our visit, we performed 126 experiments, with varying ratios of carbon dioxide to sediment, at varying slope angles and with different types of sediment. With the results of all these variations, we will be able to better understand carbon dioxide-driven flows, constrain the environments and locations where they can occur on Mars and, ultimately, better understand the processes that shape the surface of Mars today.
Martian Mounds at Makgadikgadi
Mebatseyon Shawel (Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia) visited the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans in Botwana from 6-13 July 2023 to investigate geomorphic features in the Ntwetwe pans using Ground Penetrating Radar.
The Makgadikgadi Basin in Botswana, covering an area of 16,000 square kilometres, is the largest salt pan in the world. Its formation is related to a tectonic episode in the Tertiary Period possibly linked to the East African Rift System, which caused the subsidence and infilling with water and sediments. Changes in climate and tectonics eventually led to the drying up of the ancient lake, leaving behind the expansive salt pans we see today.
The basin consists of two major pans, Sua and Ntwetwe, with a combined area of approximately 8,400 square kilometres. These pans are mostly flat but feature distinct elements, such as mounds and shoreline features, that can be easily identified through satellite imagery. In the western part of the Ntwetwe pan, there are numerous mounds with an east-facing convex side and an average height of 5 metres. These mounds are primarily composed of sand and occasionally contain bivalve shells. While several theories have been proposed regarding their origin, the internal sedimentary structure of these features remains unknown. On Mars, conical mounds have been observed and mapped in various regions. Climate change on Mars 3.8-3.5 billion years ago resulted in the deposition of crudely layered sediments in the equatorial region, where fluctuations in groundwater played a crucial role. These layered sediments, known as Equatorial Layered Deposits (ELDs), contain numerous mounds that were exposed by impact craters. The objective of this study was to investigate the internal structure of mounds in the Ntwetwe pan using geophysical methods, particularly Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), with the ultimate goal of understanding the formation and preservation of similar structures on the martian surface.
Several sites within the Ntwetwe pan were selected for GPR survey, primarily along east-west and north-south profiles. These sites are located in the northwest, northeast, and central parts of the pan. Over a period of six days, approximately 23 kilometres of GPR data were collected. Preliminary results indicate clear imaging of the top 15 metres over the mounds and delta sites. However, reflections away from these structures appear to be weaker, possibly due to the high moisture content of clays on the pan floor, requiring further processing work to achieve better results.
From Greenland to Ganymede
Costanza Rossi (INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Padova, Italy) and Paola Cianfarra (Università degli Studi di Genova) visited the Kangerlussuaq site in Greenland.
In July 2021, together with two other research groups, we took part in a field research trip in the Kangerlussuaq area of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Our group of two geologists was looking for glacial deformation structures (such as fractures, faults and crevasses) that we could relate to deformation structures observed on icy moons of giant planets, such as Ganymede, Europa or Enceladus.
Most of these icy moons show widespread tectonic deformation, which is revealed through kilometric-scale linear or curving fractures and faults that shape the moons’ surfaces. These structures provide insights into crustal evolution and underlying oceans, which help us to unravel the tectonic activity of these icy bodies.
Fractures also represent a way of transporting material between the surface and the liquid layer beneath, and are preferential pathways for fluids to escape, as we observe in the ‘Tiger Stripe’ plumes at Enceladus’s south pole. Detection of fractures and faults is, therefore, important for advancing our knowledge of icy satellite geology. However, analysis of observations from remote-sensing planetary missions, like Cassini or JUICE, can be supported by making field studies of analogue sites on Earth that share many of the properties of icy moons.
The Greenland Ice Sheet, which we visited for our project, UPSIDES, is one of the most interesting terrestrial analogues for icy moons. Glaciers represent active bodies that are driven by gravity flows and deform due to their own weight. They present specific and predictable deformation patterns, depending on the area of the glacier, because of the stress that is exerted on them.
UPSIDES focused on the identification, detection and measurement of the deformation structures in the Isunguata Sermia and Russell Glaciers in the western margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Our aim was to relate our studies of local-scale structures and outcrops with regional-scale and remote analysis using data from satellites. We carried out a campaign to measure in-situ the structures and their attributes, such as their horizontal and vertical displacement, orientation, height, spacing, distribution and crosscutting relationships. We then compared the collected outcrop data with images from remote-sensing satellites to understand the consistency of measurements made at the two different scales of investigation.
The fieldwork is important for constraining the interpretation of the tectonics of remote and unreachable surfaces such as those of the icy moons. The comparison of local-scale and regional-scale data on outcrops at the Isunguata Sermia and Russell analogues will allow us to better understand the tectonics and give us insights into deformation structures on icy moons observed by past and future missions.
Virtual Access from Europe to Asia
Denice Borsten and Jochem Sikkes are part of a group of Master’s students from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) who study the changing geological and environmental conditions across the Great Oxidation Event that occurred on Earth ~2.4 Billion years ago. From late September to November 2021, they carried out remote Secondary Ionisation Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) measurements under the guidance of Keewook Yi at the Korea Basic Science Institute (KIST) for projects supervised by Fulvio Franchi from BIUST Botswana & Gareth Davies (VUA).
The Great Oxidation Event saw a major rise in levels of oxygen in the early Earth’s atmosphere and was a pivotal event that ultimately led to the planet becoming habitable. Our specific project is to evaluate the tectono-magmatic evolution of the regional geology in Botswana during the Archaean to mid- Paleoproterozoic eons (~3.2-2.0 billion years ago). Using uranium-lead radiometric dating and lutetium–hafnium isotope analysis we aim to create better constraints of the geological timeframe and provide insights into the formation of the Kanye sedimentary basin in eastern Botswana, which contains some of the best-preserved rocks from this key period in the Earth’s history.
In autumn 2021, we had the opportunity to remotely-access the Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe (SHRIMP IIe/MC) mass spectrometer in South Korea on several occasions, to date uranium-lead ratios in zircons retrieved from Botswana.
It was very exciting for us, as Master’s students, to use these cutting-edge techniques to analyse our samples and to collaborate with the team of Dr Keewook Yi of the Korean Basic Science Institute (KBSI). It has been a wonderful learning experience particularly the prospect of preparing a joint publication.
Find out more
Browse the Europlanet 2024 RI pages to find out about more information on the TA facilities, case studies, and resources to help plan applications and visits.
An older version of this article was published in Issue 2 of the Europlanet Magazine
This article is featured in the Europlanet 2024 RI Special Issue of the Europlanet Magazine
