Exploring Chemical Disequilibrium Biosignatures in Icy Moon Oceans with
Antarctic Subglacial Lake Analogs
Abstract
Chemical disequilibrium, or the long- term coexistence of two or more
incompatible species, may be a useful metric for finding life. The
presence of CH4 and O2 (that ought to react) in Earth’s atmosphere is an
example and indicates biogenic sources of these gases. It is reasonable
to think that life on an exoplanet or an icy moon would influence
chemical disequilibrium because terrestrial life influences chemical
disequilibrium by cycling almost all the bulk atmospheric gases. A
chemical disequilibrium biosignature is appealing because it does not
make assumptions about underlying biochemistry, unlike a search for
biomolecules (e.g. DNA). Krissansen-Totton et al. (2016) calculated the
atmosphere or atmosphere-ocean chemical disequilibrium of several
planets and moons in our solar system. The metric used was the Gibbs
free energy released when all chemical species are reacted together to
an equilibrium state. They found that Earth’s atmosphere-ocean system
has significantly more disequilibrium than any other planet due to
biogenic fluxes. They propose high atmosphere-ocean chemical
disequilibrium as a biosignature for exoplanets similar to the modern
Earth, with photosynthetic biospheres. While disequilibrium is promising
for detecting life on photosynthetic worlds, it remains to be determined
how this metric applies to oceans in icy moons such as Europa and
Enceladus. Indeed, an argument exists that purely chemosynthetic life
will tend to destroy disequilibrium through its metabolism and produce
anomalous equilibrium (Sholes et al., 2018). Thus, disequilibrium may
have different interpretations: (1) High disequilibrium (uneaten food)
on a dead world is an anti-biosignature. (2) High disequilibrium on a
photosynthetic world would come from biogenic gases. (3) Low
disequilibrium on a chemosynthetic world would be caused by biological
consumption of chemical energy. We investigate the chemical
disequilibrium biosignature for oceans on icy moons using analog
environments: Antarctic subglacial lakes. First, we compute the
disequilibrium in an observed “living” and modeled “dead” Antarctic
subglacial lake. For a “living” subglacial lake, we use the aqueous
composition of Subglacial Lake Whillans (SLW), located in Western
Antarctica (Christner et al., 2014). For a “dead” subglacial lake, we
model the steady-state chemistry of SLW if there was not life
influencing chemical cycling. The disequilibrium calculation of both
environments indicate that the “dead” lake has more available Gibbs
energy than the “living” lake, suggesting that in purely
chemosynthetic environments, anomalous chemical equilibrium is a sign of
life, or inversely, that large chemical disequilibrium is an
anti-biosignature. Our work on subglacial lakes can be considered within
the context of measurements of Enceladus’ plumes by the Cassini
Spacecraft. Plume measurements indicate relatively high available Gibbs
energy in Enceladus’ ocean which may indicate low biomass, if life
exists.