On Jan. 11, 2016, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) research scientist David J. Smith reported finding that air samples collected atop a research station at Mount Bachelor, Oregon at an elevation of 9,000 feet contained living organisms.

More than 27 percent of the bacterial samples and more than 47 percent of the fungal samples were still alive. Ultimately, the team detected about 2,100 species of microbes, including a type of Archea that had only previously been isolated off the coast of Japan.

Airborne microbes potentially have huge impacts on our planet. Some scientists attribute a 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in Britain to a giant storm in north Africa that carried dust and possibly spores of the animal disease thousands of miles north only a week before the first reported cases.

Bluetongue virus, which infects domestic and wild animals, was once present only in Africa. But it’s found now in Great Britain, likely the result of the prevailing winds. Scientists examining the decline of coral reefs in near-pristine stretches of the Caribbean are pointing at dust and accompanying microbes, stirred up during African dust storms and carried west, as the culprit. A particular fungus that kills sea fans first arrived in 1983, researchers say, when a drought in the Sahara created dust clouds that floated across the Atlantic.

What’s clear is there are far more viable microbes in far more inhospitable places than scientists expected. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, supported by a NASA research grant, examined air samples collected by a plane flying during hurricanes miles above Earth. They found that living cells accounted for about 20 percent of of the storm-tossed microbes.