It was in about the fifth grade I first went on a bit of a tear through the classics of science fiction: War of the Worlds, War in the Air, Off on a Comet!, Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and, of course, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, which might be the most famous of Verne’s many science-adventure stories. Most of us who read about that strange adventure into Earth’s interior, which proves to be an entire hidden world, are captured by the vivid depictions and the persistent suggestion that there could be enclaves of life on our own world which remain unexplored, relics of bygone eras. It is the same power at work in stories like The Lost World and Jurassic Park.
All this means the authors of “A long-lived impact-generated hydrothermal system at the Chicxulub impact structure” missed a fantastic public relations opportunity to gain attention for their paper by titling it something pithier about how life didn’t just survive the impact which killed most of the dinosaurs, but was preserved in an enclave generated by the impact itself for some eight million years. Space.com certainly leant into the latter approach with its article on the paper, titled “The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have created a vast underground habitat for life that lasted 8 million years.”
Of course, the reality is not what the latter headline might lead us to imagine, especially those of us who’ve read A Journey to the Center of the Earth. This was no secret cavern full of dinosaurs lasting long past the demise of the rest of their kind. Rather, the paper explores how the energy associated with asteroid impacts generates hydrothermal environments which are ideal for the sustainment of life, and specifically how the asteroid impact associated with the Cretaceous mass extinction event may have generated a particularly long-lived instance of one of these hydrothermal environments. There is also a possible implication for this mechanism supporting some of the early evolutionary steps involved in biogenesis.
I have no deep takeaway from this paper, other than to share it with you because I found it interesting, but I will add one last thing, which is that I think it would make for a fascinating story idea. Take the notion of asteroid impacts creating enclaves for life (to varying degrees of realism with the renderings in the paper) and make it a core idea in your story. If you write something like that, I look forward to reading it.
IGC Publishing 