Chott el Jarid: Mars on Earth?

Mankind has a crush on Mars. Maybe because of the nearness, we never think about other planets as we think about our red neighbor. And while we don't get into there, the Earth has some places that look like Mars, such as a strange region named Chott el Jerid in Tunisia.

That's a seasonal lake that is completely dry for most of the year. Its sun-baked surface, composed of a hard crust of sodium chloride, conceals sources of underground water and the area has a vivid red colour due to the high iron content – very similar to the layered deposits of chloride salts discovered at Martian high latitudes by recent missions.

The Europlanet Research Infrastructure, a project which links planetary scientists from more than 100 centers around Europe, has conducted studies to analyze Chott el Jerid over the last years, in preparation for future missions to the red planet. They aim both to test instrumentation for the missions and to understand more about how geological systems observed on places like Mars are formed and evolve.

Three-dimensional maps of the sub-surface water, for instance, are being traced to examine the biological cycles and the geology at the site, while soil samples have been collected to be analyzed at European laboratories. But Chott el Jerid is far from being the only place of interest to Europlanet. Further expeditions to the Popigai meteorite crater in Siberia, and to Kamchatka Peninsula, also in Siberia – which can serve as analogue for the surfaces of Titan, Saturn's bigger moon – are some of the places to be visited by the scientists.