Posted by tourdemars to Life on Mars at October 5, 2003 12:00 PM

Drilling five-hundred feet into a Spanish red river (Rio Tinto), astrobiologists from the US and Spain are developing techniques to look for underground life forms. The highly acidic, wine-colored river is inhospitable to most microbes except the most robust that can live off the iron and sulfur minerals which give Rio Tinto its unusual tint.