Overview
- This book spans a range of disciplines, from planetary sciences to the bio aspects of astrobiology that is rare in the literatu
- The editors and authors report findings at lesser-known sites on the American continent, from the US to the Andes
- The volumes explores habitability from many points of view, from exoplanets to actual sites on Earth
Part of the book series: Cuatro Ciénegas Basin: An Endangered Hyperdiverse Oasis (CUCIBA)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book focuses on particularly interesting sites such as Andean lake microbialites, a proxy of early life since they are characterized by very high UV light, while Alchichica and Bacalar lakes are characterized by high-salt and oligotrophic waters that nurture stromatolites. However, it is only the oasis of Cuatro Ciénegas Basin in México that stored past life in its marine sediments of the Sierra de San Marcos. This particular Sierra has a magmatic pouch that moves the deep aquifer to the surface in a cycle of sun drenched life and back to the depths of the magmatic life in an ancient cycle that now is broken by the overexploitation of the surface water as well as the deep aquifer in order to irrigate alfalfa in the desert. The anthropocene, the era of human folly, is killing this unique time machine and with it the memory of the planet.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Antígona Segura has a bachelor’s degree in Physics, a master’s in Astronomy and a PhD in Earth Sciences. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California, where she worked with the Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL) led by Dr. Victoria Meadows. She is now a researcher at the Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her research focuses on understanding the habitability potential of rocky planets around low mass stars (red dwarfs).
Jamie S. Foster is a Professor at the University of Florida Space Life Science Laboratory. Her research interests are astrobiology, microbial ecology, and host-microbe interactions during spaceflight. Her current research activities include examining the processes by which biological ecosystems co-evolve with their environment, thereby driving the evolution of life and influencing Earth’s habitability. Her group works to delineate and characterize the reciprocal interactions between microbialite-forming communities and their environment to improve our understanding of how these feedbacks help shape community structure and ecosystem function. Professor Foster also examines the impact of the space environment, specifically microgravity, on microbe-animal interactions.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Astrobiology and Cuatro Ciénegas Basin as an Analog of Early Earth
Editors: Valeria Souza, Antígona Segura, Jamie S. Foster
Series Title: Cuatro Ciénegas Basin: An Endangered Hyperdiverse Oasis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46087-7
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life Sciences, Biomedical and Life Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-46086-0Published: 15 July 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-46089-1Published: 15 July 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-46087-7Published: 14 July 2020
Series ISSN: 2523-7284
Series E-ISSN: 2523-7292
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 232
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations, 38 illustrations in colour
Topics: Evolutionary Biology, Astrobiology, Planetary Sciences