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The Extreme Biology of Meteorites: Their Role in Understanding the Origin and Distribution of Life on Earth and in the Universe

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Adaption of Microbial Life to Environmental Extremes

Abstract

Meteorites have captured our fascination since our early history – they have evoked awe, fear, an irresistible curiosity, and numerous lively debates. Former historians have indicated that many of the ancient cultures and civilizations in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Inuit, and the native Indians in America regarded both the meteorite and the location of their fall as sacred. Thus, they used the meteorites as religious objects or for craft design like jewelry, weapons, or even practical things like tools and horse shoes. Today, meteorites continue to capture our fascination through popular cultural formats such as science fiction and also as a scientific window that reveals the secrets of the Solar System formation. Within academia, meteorites have always fomented keen scientific debate. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the cosmic origin of meteorites, i.e., being truly not tellurian, was approved by the scientific community after the late eighteenth-century work of Ernst F. Chladni (1794). This implied for the first time that there are other smaller bodies in the sky besides the Moon. After this, several other lively debates followed on controversial findings and hypotheses around the role of meteorites in the universe and for the evolutionary course of life on Earth, often in connection with the profound difficulties to approach this subject in an adequate scientific way. Principally the different types of meteorites (asteroids, meteors, etc.) can be viewed as a most extreme or exotic substrate, habitat, and transport mode of chemicals and possibly even of cell-based life forms for several reasons:

  1. (i)

    They have experienced a remarkable history since their origin as condensates from the Solar Nebula, more or less metamorphosed or molten fragments of asteroids, or rocks from Mars or our Moon.

  2. (ii)

    The meteorites have been exposed to multiple extreme conditions ranging from milliseconds to billions of years duration when traveling through the interplanetary space, until they fell down on an astronomical body like Earth.

  3. (iii)

    Once on Earth, the meteorites get exposed to different weathering conditions, which often makes it a challenge to retrieve their former history in an unambiguous way.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Umeå University, SE-901 87, Umeå, Sweden

    Natuschka N. Lee

  2. Biochemical Imaging Centre and the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Umeå University, SE-901 87, Umeå, Sweden

    Natuschka N. Lee

  3. Saalbau Weltraum Projekt, Liebigstrasse 6, 64646, Heppenheim, Germany

    Jörg Fritz

  4. NASA Johnson Space Center, Mail Code XI2, Houston, TX, USA

    Marc D. Fries

  5. Department of Plant Biology, Linnean Centre for Plant Biology, Uppsala BioCentre, SE-75007, Uppsala, Sweden

    Jose F. Gil

  6. Botanische Staatssammlung München, D-80638, Munich, Germany

    Andreas Beck

  7. Department of Physics, Umeå University, S-901 87, Umeå, Sweden

    Asta Pellinen-Wannberg

  8. Swedish Institute of Space Physics, SE-981 28, Kiruna, Sweden

    Asta Pellinen-Wannberg

  9. Department of Physics, Lund University, SE-22100, Lund, Sweden

    Birger Schmitz

  10. Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC, 20015, USA

    Andrew Steele

  11. Natural History Museum Bern, Bernastrasse 15, CH-3005, Bern, Switzerland

    Beda A. Hofmann

  12. Institute of Geological Sciences, University of Bern, CH-3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Beda A. Hofmann

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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Natuschka N. Lee .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. FB Molekulare Biologie, Universität Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

    Helga Stan-Lotter

  2. Bioresource Centre & Advanced Research Association, Bucharest, Romania

    Sergiu Fendrihan

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Lee, N.N. et al. (2017). The Extreme Biology of Meteorites: Their Role in Understanding the Origin and Distribution of Life on Earth and in the Universe. In: Stan-Lotter, H., Fendrihan, S. (eds) Adaption of Microbial Life to Environmental Extremes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48327-6_11

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