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the resurrection of acraman Christoper Cokinos NONFICTION© todd kemper/todd kemper photography 143 On any clear night, under a dark enough sky, we can see shooting stars. We wish upon them, even if we don’t quite know what they are—of course they’re not really stars—and even if we don’t know where they come from or what they might tell us about the universe. It’s as if we’re eager to pin our chances on something strange and sudden, something beautiful beyond our ken. Across cultures and time, we have written ourselves into the sky. We create constellations, transforming the random spatter of stars into shapes and stories. We name planets after gods. And we associate meteors and meteorites—the light of dust or rocks burning passage through the air and the stones that, after such fire, sometimes fall to earth—with the most elemental aspects of our lives: good luck, ill fortune, and even death. These bits of former asteroids have rained devastation in the past and threaten to do so in the future. Impact sites such as Arizona’s Meteor Crater drive home the relationship between falling rocks from space and a fiery inferno that kills every living thing over hundreds of miles—or more. We watch movies with killer asteroids. We can surf the Internet and find sites devoted to the odds of the planet being hit by one earth-crossing rock after another. Clearly, rocks from space are killers, the silent brutes of the solar system just waiting for a chance to sock us. We worry that just as 144 Ecotone: reimagining place the dinosaurs were clobbered sixty-five million years ago by a cosmic impactor, we’ll be clobbered, too. While that’s a legitimate worry—scientists are seeking ways to nudge or explode earth-crossing space rocks away from possible impacts—most people don’t know that meteorites, small and large, are also implicated in helping, not destroying, life on earth. A certain class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites brim not with living organisms but with water and amino acids, some of the essential stuff for the start of life itself. These meteorites have been falling on our planet since the formation of the solar system, four and a half billion years ago. Even the massive meteorites—iron behemoths the size of train cars, stone monsters the size of cities—even these, after their initial hole-blasting, fire-starting, windstorm-swirling destruction, have created the conditions for life to thrive and to change. After all, it was the demise of the dinosaurs that cleared ecological niches for a previously minor group of critters called mammals. Thus here we are. And impact craters themselves can become habitats for all kinds of animals. Millions of years ago an impact carved out the Ries Basin in present-day Germany and destroyed an entire region. But in just a century life returned. The crater became a lake teeming with pelicans and snails. The shores became home to bats, hedgehogs, and cattails. Today, researchers in Canada studying Haughton Crater, which formed after a meteorite impact thirty-nine million years ago, have discovered that the stress of the impact created tiny habitats in the form of hydrothermal vents and microscopic fissures. Meteorites are the alpha and omega of geology. These rocks— mere rocks—encompass the origins of life and the fact of death on our planet. And the most profound lesson in all of this is that meteorites (and comets) don’t always bring death. In fact, one might say: Impact + Heat + Water = Habitat. Call it the Oz equation. Canadian researcher Gordon Osinski—“Oz” to everyone in the meteorite community—has spent several summers with field teams in the Arctic, on Devon Island, where Haughton Crater is yielding clues to how craters can be refuges for microbial life. “Impact craters,” he says, “still deserve their reputations as scenes of devastation, but as they cool, they become ideal spots for life to reemerge. And this has led some people to wonder if impact craters on the early earth provided the environment for life to emerge in the 145 first place.” Oz notes that some of the...

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