Darwin’s secret garden could aid Mars colonization…

Talk about legacies. When it comes to leaving something behind that has lasting consequences, Darwin’s discovery of evolution pretty much makes him the heavyweight champion of the universe.

But news this week arrived that it isn’t just Darwin’s ingeniously elegant explanation of how all of planet Earth’s flora and fauna came to be that he left behind – he also left an insight into how future humans might go about colonizing currently inhospitable planets, like Mars. Seriously, evolution and space farming! What an insufferable show off!

Our story begins 200 years ago on a lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic called Ascension. There’s Darwin, doing his thing, changing the world forever more while suddenly in the middle of it all, a fancy for gardening takes him. Given that Ascension was then a barren volcanic edifice, it wasn’t the most likely of places for Darwin to indulge a sudden and powerful appetite for horticulture, but that’s exactly what he did. Today Ascension’s peaks are blanketed by lush folds of verdant tropical forrest.

But of course we are being flippant in the extreme. Ascension’s transformation was no passing fancy but a calculated experiment to build a completely artificial ecosystem conducted by Darwin, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy. So what does the Red Planet have to do with it all?

Well, first of all, Ascension is not easy to find. It is incredibly remote, located some 1,000 miles from the coast of Africa and 1,400 miles from South America. Its existence is entirely dependent on the mid-Atlantic ridge – a chain of underwater volcanoes formed when the ocean wrenched apart countless years ago. Because Ascension occupies a “hot spot” on the ridge, its volcano is especially busy. Jump back in 1836, the pre-beard Charles Darwin is nearing the end of his five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, voyaging with the Royal Navy’s HMS Beagle.

Upon landing on the burnt cinder of an island, Darwin hatched a plan to create a “Little England” that would rise out of the ashes of the volcano. He told his fellow scientist, the botanist and explorer Joseph Hooker, about this curious place that couldn’t hold on to any rain that fell on it, due to its total lack of trees.

A few years after Darwin’s return, Hooker was off on his own transcontinental jolly, shadowing Darwin’s voyage. He dropped in on Ascension in 1847, where at that time, the Royal Navy had an outpost. On Darwin’s continual prodding, Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion a plan to ship large quantities of trees to the island from Kew Gardens – where Hooker’s father was director.

The idea was disarmingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils, perfect for vegetation to flourish. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all spread rampantly across the island. In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world’s first experiment in “terra-forming”. They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem that would normally have taken millennia to evolve naturally, in a matter of mere decades.

At least that’s the story according to Dr Dave Wilkinson, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, who has written extensively about Ascension Island’s strange ecosystem.

Wilkinson believes that the same gentle principles that have emerged from Darwin and Hooker’s experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. Rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it “find its own way”.

To date, scientists have paid little attention to the parable of Ascension Island. “It’s a terrible waste that no-one is studying it,” remarked Wilkinson to the BBC. Perhaps it’s for the best, who knows what Kew Gardens would charge to send a row of shrubs to Mars – sorry…

Source: BBC

Image credit: Charis Tsevis