Our Maine Street's Aroostook Issue 26 : Fall 2015 | Page 69

Adventurer scientist returns
from driest place on Earth
By The University of maine at Fort Kent

Professor Peter Nelson, a lichenologist who teaches at the
University of Maine at Fort Kent, returned in April from a
research trip to study the organisms in the Atacama Desert
in Alto Patache, Chile.
It was a round trip journey of over 12,000 miles and
occurred during the same time that torrential rains were
flooding vast areas of Chile south of Alto Patache. Yet while
Chile was seeing ten years worth of rain covering parts of
the countryside in just a few days, hundreds of miles up
the west coast of South America, Nelson was conducting
research in a place so dry that the last time it rained was
in 1997. “In the interior of the Atacama Desert, there has
never been recorded precipitation, ever,” he said.
Yet some organisms are able to thrive in the region, and one
group is a special class of organism that most people easily
mistake for a plant. A lichen is actually a combination of
up to three organisms - algae, cyanobacteria, and fungus that form a composite organism that relies on a symbiotic
relationship to survive, according to Dr. Nelson.
The team, which included primary investigator Daniel
Stanton from the University of Minnesota and Chilean
lichenologist Reinaldo Vargas, used a $15,000 grant from
the National Geographic Committee on Research
and Exploration to study how the shapes of
lichens regulate water.
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