“The lower ocean crust is one of the last frontiers of the exploration for life on Earth.”
life as we know it
Posted inNews
Interstellar Visitors Could Export Terrestrial Life to Other Stars
A handful of interstellar objects and long-period comets could have scooped up microorganisms from Earth and carried them to worlds around other stars.
Posted inFeatures
Three Times Tectonics Changed the Climate
Fifty years after the birth of modern plate tectonics theory, a group of researchers highlights three key examples of how our planet’s shape-shifting outer layer has altered our climate.
Posted inGeoFIZZ
Extreme Life and Where to Find It
Life finds a way in the most extreme environments on Earth and sparks the imagination about far-off places where we may yet find it.
Posted inNews
Newly Discovered Fossil Species Named After Star Wars Starship
The 500-million-year-old species is a distant relative of today’s crabs, spiders, and insects.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Researchers Bring Early Martian Water Chemistry to Life
Lab experiments constrain conditions necessary for a key mineral to have formed in ancient lagoons and a crater lake.
Posted inNews
Brine Pools Emerge as a New Place to Search for Life on Mars
Some pools of salty water on the Red Planet could contain enough dissolved oxygen for microorganisms and sponges to survive, new calculations suggest.
Posted inNews
Huge Blades of Ice May Partially Cover Jupiter’s Moon Europa
Conditions are right for “penitentes” up to 15 meters high to form on the Jovian moon, new research shows. The spires might prevent a lander from exploring Europa’s equatorial region.
Posted inNews
How Well Can the Webb Telescope Detect Signs of Exoplanet Life?
Recent research suggests that NASA’s next-generation space telescope will be good—but not the best—at finding life-sustaining levels of oxygen in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.
Posted inNews
Scientists Discover an Environment on the Cusp of Habitability
A volcanically heated Costa Rican lake hosts only one type of organism, suggesting that its Mars-like environment is just barely capable of supporting life.