by Tina Hilding

At first glance, Soap Lake doesn’t seem to offer much to 21st-century science.

Amidst a largely treeless primeval landscape, the lake is surrounded by stark shores and sheer rock walls.

A few lakeside resorts and cabins dot its shores, where Native inhabitants once came for beneficial mineral baths. The adjacent town of Soap Lake, Washington, located 20 miles north of I-90 near Moses Lake, is one-fourth the size of its earlier heyday, when people came for treatment of a malady similar to gangrene.

But landscape rather than history prevails. Civilization seems a mere blip on the area’s timescale. Even the water itself seems never to change. The lake is permanently stratified, so that its two layers have not mixed for at least 2,000 years, the longest documented stratification of any lake on earth.

It’s Soap Lake’s unchanging nature that attracts researcher Brent Peyton, associate professor of chemical engineering at Washington State University. In a place that time seems to have forgotten, Peyton is working to learn about tiny microorganisms that could be key to solving 21st-century problems in areas from pharmaceuticals to environmental cleanup. The lake may even be of help in the search for extraterrestrial life-forms.

Peyton is examining the tiny bacteria that make their home in Soap Lake, a harsh environment that is toxic to most higher life-forms. The microorganisms are called extremophiles, because they live in highly unpleasant places where few others can live, like the bottoms of oceans, dry desert salt flats, or ice-covered lakes in Antarctica. The water at the bottom of Soap Lake, for example, is five times saltier than ocean water, and contains high, naturally occurring concentrations of carbonate, chloride, sulfate, and sulfide. Because extremophiles spend their lives in such inhospitable places, they have developed unique and potentially useful biological processes. The enzymes they produce, for instance, are tougher and more stable than typical enzymes, and could be used in chemical reactions that take place under harsh conditions.

Peyton spent several years trying to solve environmental problems on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation—in particular, the movement of contaminated groundwater that someday may make its way to the Columbia River. In his research, he used commonly found bacteria to precipitate uranium and other heavy metals out of groundwater and to lock them up as solids in the soil. He was one of four WSU researchers, in fact, to receive a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in a multi-disciplinary project to work on the bioremediation of chromium.

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