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Paper Number: 182
Planetary
and astrobiological significance of Canary Islands (Spain): review,
state-of-the-art and future developments
Martínez-Frías,
J.1, Medina, J.2, Rodríguez-Losada,
J.A.3, Rull, F.2, Mogessie,
A.4, Mateo-Mederos, M.E.5, Lunar,
R.1,6, Gamsjaeger, M.4, and Lalla,
E.7
1Instituto
de Geociencias, IGEO (CSIC-UCM), Spain. j.m.frias@igeo.ucm-csic.es,
2Universidad de Valladolid, Spain. 3Universidad de
La Laguna, Spain. 4Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria.
5Cabildo
de Lanzarote, Spain. 6Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
Spain.7Extreme Light Infrastructure, Nuclear Physics,
IFIN–HH, Romania
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So far, we do not know of a place on Earth which is truly like Mars
or any other planet or moon in our solar system. Nevertheless, it is
possible to identify terrestrial analogue sites, where environmental
conditions approximate, in some specific ways, those possibly
encountered on other celestial bodies, at present or earlier in their
geological history. These sites are also privileged areas to define
scientific models and testing new instrumentation, paving the way for
understanding lunar and planetary processes and habitability
conditions.
The Canary Archipelago (Spain) is one of the main and most geodiverse
and interesting chain of oceanic islands worldwide, displaying a long
history of eruptions and a huge variety of volcanic and plutonic
rocks. The islands are dominated by basaltic rocks, but show a great
petrologic and geochemical diversity including alkaline basalts (some of
them showing tholeiitic tendencies), trachybasalts, basanites,
tephrites, rhyodacites, rhyolites, trachytes, phonolites and
carbonatites.
Several areas of the Canary archipelago have been (and are) used as
analogue sites for performing scientific and engineering studies, in
relation with the exploration and research of Mars and the Moon. They
include:
geological, mineralogical and geochemical studies of volcanic
rocks, rock-fluid interactions and mineralization processes;
operational and instrumentation activities, such as field testing
of rovers and the use of portable spectroscopic prototypes (e.g. Raman),
and
the use of volcanic materials (e.g. basaltic rocks and soils) for
the fabrication of asteroidal, lunar and Martian regolith
simulant.
This contribution provides a review and state of the art of the
previous works which were carried out, until now, at Tenerife, La
Gomera and El Hierro Islands and the future plans and developments,
mainly focused on Lanzarote (Lanzarote and Chinijo Islands Geopark) as
a potential location for developing Mars analogue studies and
geoeducational and geocultural activities).
