ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 5, 1996 TAG: 9609050078
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV_1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
In a way, Dwight Holland feels as though he has been to Mars already.
He was in Antarctica in 1984 when scientists recovered the now-famous Martian meteorite, which may contain fossil remains of micro-organisms that lived 3.6 billion years ago.
"I wasn't on the team that discovered it, but I wasn't far away," recalled Holland, who lives in Roanoke and is working at Virginia Tech under a fellowship. "People didn't think that this came from Mars until 1991. ... Somebody said, 'My God, this looks like what we found on the Mars landers.'"
It was also in 1984 that researchers found a hole in Earth's protective ozone hole over Antarctica, leading to curbs on the use of ozone-depleting chemicals. Holland, a graduate student at Virginia Tech at the time, spent three months as a technical engineer and field geophysicist with the U.S. Antarctic Research Program.
"I was in the right place at the right time with the right training," he said. Ed Robinson, his faculty adviser in geophysics at Virginia Tech, recommended him. Holland was a pilot, a skill needed by Antarctic researchers. And someone who had been scheduled to go quit three months before departure.
From 80-degree weather at the team's jumping-off point in New Zealand, Holland met weather with a wind chill of 40 degrees below zero in Antarctica. "The first thing I thought was 'I'm gonna freeze to death in this place!'" he said.
"I never was really warm," he said, living mostly in tents where fires were forbidden. Fire is the biggest concern in the research stations, which have extinguishers everywhere. "If a fire starts, it's hard to put it out in Antarctica because water's so scarce and it's so dry."
He had to undergo survival training before heading out into the field, including building an igloo - which takes four men all day - and avoiding places where a crevasse could swallow someone. "You get real good at detecting the slightest little bit of surface feature that might be a crevasse," he said. "It really is dangerous."
Holland spent much of his time hopping from one place to another on a twin-engine Otter aircraft, loading and unloading equipment three or four times a day, sometimes in waist-deep snow. Once, the plane's navigation system failed and it had to land and taxi until some snowmobile tracks led the way back to the base.
Antarctica has 98 percent of the world's fresh water, mostly frozen. "After two months, water in your mind becomes a solid," Holland said. "In Antarctica, snow is all shades of white and blue. ... There's 10,000 shades of white and blue."
Some of it melted when Antarctic spring arrived, revealing brown rock-covered volcanic ground. "This was the day I realized Antarctica was a great model for Mars," Holland said, because if the ground had been reddish instead, it would have looked exactly like pictures sent from Mars by the Viking landers.
"It's about as cold as Mars. It's very dry like Mars. ... It's the most Martian place on the face of the Earth," he said.
Plastic space shuttle models, a Planetary Society file card case and an autographed astronauts' photo from a shuttle mission are scattered around Holland's study. He has written several papers on long-duration space flight studies.
"We haven't yet proved that people can get along in a tin can ... for the length of the mission that we're talking about, which is two or three years," he said. "I mean, people go to the South Pole and they stay for a year and sometimes they won't even fly out on the same plane with each other. ... We're going to have to be careful and very selective with respect to the people we send."
But space research may be vital to our long-term survival, he said, because an asteroid strike is believed to have caused the conditions that killed off Earth's dinosaurs. Humans need to visit near-Earth asteroids to see if they can be guided away or broken up if they threaten Earth, he said.
"Nobody knows that," he said. "Human life is pretty fragile. ... The dinosaurs were here for 200 million years and they got killed off in a short time." Humans have only been around for 50,000 to 100,000 years. "We've got a lot to prove in terms of survival. We don't know if we're capable of that."
It may have been an asteroid strike 16 million years ago that jarred loose the piece of Martian debris which crashed into Antarctica 13,000 years ago. Holland has another idea: It might have been spewed out of a Martian volcano like Olympus Mons, which rises some 14 miles above the surrounding Martian plain - nearly 21/2 times as high as Earth's Mount Everest - with a base that could cover Missouri.
He got the idea from Mount Erebus, an active volcano in Antarctica, from which he brought back a "volcanic bomb" - a rock spewed high into the atmosphere by the volcano before falling back. With the bigger volcanoes and lesser gravity and atmosphere on Mars, he said, such a rock actually might have escaped into space.
In any case, it wound up in one of the few places on Earth where it would be preserved for thousands of years. "It's a miracle. We haven't even gone there and brought a sample back, and we have one delivered to our doorstep," he said. "What are the odds of that happening?"
To confirm that the so-called Martian microfossils represent life, he said, scientists will be looking for cell membranes, proteins and amino acids and a DNA or RNA replication code - not easy processes, considering the sample. "The size of the microfossils is a nanometer, which is one-hundredth to one-thousandth the diameter of a hair. ... It's really, really small," he said.
"Look inside, that's the key. That'll settle it for me," he said. "Then I'd say, yeah, that's life ... I'm cautiously optimistic."
Such a discovery would be a watershed in human history, he said.
"In 1492, Columbus set off for the New World and people were still arguing over whether the Earth was flat or not. ... In our century, in 1996, we're arguing still as a society whether and to what degree evolution occurred here, much less on Mars," he said. "If nothing else, this proves that there was organic material on Mars. ... We'd never had any confirmation of that until now."
LENGTH: Long : 114 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. PAUL DELLINGER Dwight Holland of Roanoke, holding aby CNBpiece of volcanic rock from Antarctica, and with other rocks and
fossils on the table on front of him. 2. DWIGHT HOLLAND. Holland
says the climate and landscape of Antarctica, seen from an aerial
shot, is about as close as you get to that of Mars. color.