The stratosphere lives – Diepresse.com
Invisible life is still 35 kilometers above the ground. In the middle of a wealth of harmless microorganisms: pathogens.
It must have been a strange sight for hikers who come by at the French Alpengletscher Mer de Glace on this a nice summer day in 1860. At a height of two thousand meters, the then 37-year-old Louis Pasteur stretched a long-necked glass bulb high above his head. With his free hand he grabbed a pliers and broke off the tip. Now Pasteur let the icy air flow into it before sealing the glass again. The physicist and chemist’s experiment, which was to invent the first rabies vaccination 25 years later, was one of the first successful attempts to capture microscopic life in the sky. The pioneer of microbiology and namesake of pasteurization was at the beginning of a long series of researchers who showed the smallest organisms in the air.
Nowadays it is no longer about those microbes that buzzing close to our heads, but about those at the highest heights. Recently researchers around Jérôme Kasparian from the University of Geneva and Katia Gindro from the Swiss Center for Agricultural Research (Agroscope) presented a promising and favorable device for sampling in the stratosphere at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna (Abstracts EGU253756).
