{"id":373842,"date":"2026-04-11T01:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T01:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/373842\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T01:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T01:48:09","slug":"doomsday-asteroids-could-have-kickstarted-life-on-our-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/373842\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Doomsday’ Asteroids Could Have Kickstarted Life on Our Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doomsday meteors get a bad rap. For decades, these poor rocks have been tarnished in the press<\/a> and demonized in major Hollywood productions<\/a> over the relatively limited<\/a> number that have caused extinction-level events on our planet<\/a>. But what about the meteors that could have created life on Earth?!? Do you ever hear about those?<\/p>\n

Well, you will now. Two marine researchers have released a comprehensive review of scientific studies investigating three of the planet\u2019s largest meteor impact sites: Lonar Lake in India, the Haughton impact structure in Canada, and the infamous dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact crater along the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula. Each of these fiery collisions generated so much heat, for so long, that they incubated long-lasting hydrothermal vent ecosystems<\/a> \u201cthat persisted for centuries,\u201d the researchers argue<\/a> in their new paper.<\/p>\n

In brief, the potentially life-giving impact of a large meteor strike can be attributed to intense heat and significant mass displacement. The surrounding rock melted by this type of collision contributes to a hot, mineral-rich environment that produces the chemical conditions for new microbial life, as water pours into the new crater.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a lake surrounding a very, very warm center,\u201d as the review\u2019s lead author, Shea Cinquemani, explained<\/a> in a statement. \u201cAnd now you get a hydrothermal vent system, just like in the deep sea, but made by the heat from an impact.\u201d (And, as with deep-sea hydrothermal vents, these ecosystems can thrive without energy derived via photosynthesis from the Sun.)<\/p>\n

A meteoric rise <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have talked for many years about the possibility that life may have originated at deep-sea hydrothermal vents,\u201d according to oceanographer Richard Lutz, whose earliest postdoctoral research in the late 1970s led to the discovery<\/a> of the undersea life thriving near these vents.<\/p>\n

Cinquemani was an undergraduate student of Lutz\u2019s at Rutgers last year\u2014where a class assignment arguing that microbial life may have arisen near ancient hydrothermal vents on Mars evolved into a fully fledged peer-reviewed journal article.<\/p>\n

Of the craters Cinquemani and Lutz examined, the Haughton Impact Structure in the Canadian Arctic is perhaps the most instructive. The 14-mile (23-kilometer) diameter crater, smashed into existence roughly 31 million years ago, generated its own heat for \u201cseveral thousand years\u201d before dissipating below the 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) needed to maintain its self-generated system of hydrothermal vents, according to the study.<\/p>\n

\u201cDespite the decreased temperature from being closer to the poles, the magnitude of the heat given off by the impact and stored inside the resulting structure would have kept the crater lake from freezing or dissipating,\u201d the authors wrote in the study.<\/p>\n

Haughton\u2019s geological record, in fact, is replete with sediment-packed fragments of broken rock known as breccia, along with veins formed by underground waterways and other signs of hydrothermal mineral deposition, including celestite, barite, and fluorite. It\u2019s powerful evidence that the right meteor can create a long-lasting system of hydrothermal vents even when surrounded by frigid, hostile terrain.<\/p>\n

\"ImpactAbove, a sample of the breccia created by the Haughton impact in the Canadian Arctic. Credit: James St. John, via Flickr, CC 2.0 license <\/p>\n

Any hypothetical asteroid strike early in Earth\u2019s history might have had an even better chance of fostering hydrothermal vents closer to the heat of the equator. It\u2019s worth noting that, while the Chicxulub impact crests on land, its ground zero is actually located offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. With 70% of our planet\u2019s surface covered by water, the odds are high that any meteors to hit the young Earth had an ocean splashdown.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may never know exactly how we began, but we can try our best to understand how things might have occurred,\u201d Cinquemani said.<\/p>\n

Just venting? <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is also the possibility that similar processes can\/could have occurred on other terrestrial bodies,\u201d Cinquemani and Lutz wrote. Plumes of heat recorded by spacecraft orbiting Jupiter\u2019s icy moon Europa and Saturn\u2019s Enceladus, they noted, suggest \u201cunderwater hydrothermal activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Planetary scientists could apply techniques similar to the research done on Earth\u2019s terrestrial hydrothermal vents, they suggested, \u201ccreating a way to not only predict how life may form on these planetary bodies but also catch a glimpse of what a young Earth may have looked like.\u201d<\/p>\n

True to her original class paper, Cinquemani also hopes that evidence of long-since dried-up hydrothermal vents on Mars, \u201cimpact melt breccias and hydrothermal deposition in Martian craters\u201d dating back over 3.7 billion years ago, gets thoroughly investigated for signs of life also.<\/p>\n

Maybe, after all this work is done, we\u2019ll start thinking of big scary meteors as nurturers of life as well as killers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Doomsday meteors get a bad rap. For decades, these poor rocks have been tarnished in the press and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[134326,195050,22153,111,139,69,195051,147,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-373842","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-alien-life","9":"tag-hydrothermal-activity","10":"tag-meteors","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-primordial-soup","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}