Extreme Environments of Latin America: Natural Laboratories for Astrobiology

Hermes Hernan Bolivar-Torres , Javier Eduardo Suárez-Valencia, Cristal Ramos-Madrigal, Julian Andreas Corzo-Acosta, Karen Itzel Reyes-Ayala, Camilo Delgado-Correal, Nicole Jimeno-Ruiz, Laura Romero-Diaz, Ivonne Rodríguez-Ramírez

Extreme environments are places where sustaining life is considered challenging by human standarts due to harmful environmental conditions. In the last decades, these kinds of environments have awakened the interest of planetary scientists due to their similar conditions to extraplanetary bodies. Most of the research done in extreme environments has been conducted in the North American and Eurasian regions, while in Latin America only the most outstanding places have been explored, even though the region hosts numerous and varied extreme environments. The primary aim of this review is to present an extensive catalogue of around 300 extreme environments in Latin America. We classify them into deserts and semi-arid environments, geothermal and hydrothermal environments, glaciers and high mountain environments, and hypersaline environments. Our review found that a great number of those environments remain unexplored or partially studied; however, many of those environments show multi-extreme features, becoming suitable to conduct astrobiology experiments such as biosignatures detection or planetary analogue missions. This review brings to current and future researchers a summary of the environmental properties of each place and their respective locations, to promote astrobiology and planetary science research in Latin America.