McMurdo Dry Valleys

Designated an Antarctic Specially Managed Area in 2004 after decades of continuous scientific research since the 1950s, the McMurdo Dry Valleys form the largest ice-free system on the Antarctic continent, a polar desert so extremely cold and dry — with some areas showing no record of precipitation in millions of years — that NASA has repeatedly used it as the closest terrestrial analogue to Martian conditions for testing instruments and life-detection protocols for space missions. The only native land fauna able to survive there are microscopic cryptobiotic nematodes, capable of suspending their metabolism almost entirely through years of extreme freezing and reactivating when conditions turn favourable again.