Juxtaposed trajectories: Weird relations, temporality, and life in Lake Salda and Jezero Crater

Conceived as an analog environment to early Mars, Lake Salda, a large, shallow tectonic lake located in southwestern Turkey, known for its stunningly clear azure waters, white sands, and unique geomorphological formations, is one of the few known lakes on Earth that scientists believe contain carbonates and depositional features like those found at the Jezero Crater on Mars. Between 2020 and 2021, NASA’s geobiologists studied microbial fossils in Lake Salda to prepare for the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, which aimed to search for ancient life on Mars. This extended photo essay pushes against dichotomies of familiar and alien, relation and separation, past and present, in order to trace the weird encounters and disjointed temporalities that characterize the biogeological and geopolitical relations and separations between Mars and Earth. In doing so, the essay points at the impossibility of working through a logic of past/present, geological/astronomical, and familiar/alien dichotomies, and a cosmic demand for facing ambiguity and disjointed, even anachronistic temporalities when it comes to non-anthropocentric imagination about life and living on other planets. In the disjointed temporal, political, and biogeological relations, or modes of time-telling between Salda and Jezero, where agnostic musings over life and anachronistic political relations might flourish, we might find weird openings. The juxtaposed trajectories of the blue and red planets force us to confront our assumptions regarding life and non-life, past and present, possible and impossible.