Keith’s note: Dale Andersen is preparing for his second expedition to Lake Untersee, Antarctica for 2026. The first 2026 Field season at Lake Untersee was conducted from January – March […]
Water/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Posted inAtmospheres, Climate, Weather
Simulations Of The Evolving Ozone Layer: Implications For The Early Earth, Exoplanets, And The Search For Life
[astro-ph.EP] Over 4 billion years, Earth’s atmosphere has been transformed from a composition devoid of molecular oxygen (O2) to one where O2 is now 21% of our modern atmosphere by […]
![A heterotrophic ecosystem enabled by fermentation on Enceladus. [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Fermentation.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inEnceladus
Fermentation Heterotrophy Can Reproduce Enceladus’s H2 And CH4 Under Limited Serpentinization
[astro-ph.EP] Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is a prime target in the search for life beyond Earth. Abundant H2 and CH4 in Enceladus’s south-polar plume have been shown to be consistent […]
Posted inSample Return
An Interdisciplinary Approach To Sampling Hard Rock Cores Of The Oceanic Crust For Microbiological And Biogeochemical Research
[Scientific Drilling] Studying life in the deep, rocky subseafloor involves many layers of technological and methodological challenges, and each drilling project or expedition must make a series of choices to […]
![Percentage of 1,000 stochastic paths that converge shown as color maps for e “ 0.1, 0.3. The two bracketed values in the title of each sub-figure are the critical deterministic values of S ˚ for convergence and bifurcation given in Table A.2. The white and black horizontal lines are the convergence and bifurcation values respectively. Additional figures are found in the Supplementary Material (Appendix C). -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Stochastic-Snowball.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inBiogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology
Stochastic Snowball States in Planetary Climate
[astro-ph.EP] Motivated by the recent finding of Ji and Abbot (2025) that at moderate eccentricity (0.2–0.3) the planetary Snowball bistability vanishes, we have introduced stochasticity of the orbital eccentricity into […]
Posted inMicrobiology & Virology
Assessing the Preservation of Polysaccharides from a Sea-Ice Bacterium Through Analog Icy Moon Plume Ejection
[Astrobiology (Journal)] Detection of complex organics emitted from Saturn’s moon Enceladus has intensified the search for biosignatures accessible to future missions.
Posted inGenomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics
Global Genome Atlas Reveals Hidden Life In Lakes
[University of Zurich] A single drop of lake water teems with life too small to see: microscopic algae and tiny single-celled organisms such as amoebae. Like our own cells, theirs […]
Posted inBiogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology
Material Cycling Across Earth’s Spheres And Triggers Of Cambrian Explosion: A Tectonic Perspective
[ELSP] A comprehensive model of the Cambrian explosion featuring “multi-factors coupling and multi-sphere driving”. Supercontinent breakup and mantle plume activity served as the initial trigger of environmental change in the […]
Posted inAtmospheres, Climate, Weather
Where Does Earth’s Nitrogen Go? Two Atoms Offer A Clue
[Science] Nitrogen is one of life’s building blocks, but it’s only helpful in the right amounts. Too much nitrogen in water, for example, can lead to poor water quality and […]
![Stability map of the TOI-2211 system in the (Ωc , Ic) plane for the outer planet candidate TOI-2211.02. All other orbital parameters were fixed to the nominal solution from Table A.4. The colour scale shows the adopted stability indicator, with blue regions corresponding to stable configurations and red regions to unstable configurations. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Searching-for.png?resize=1200%2C719&ssl=1)
Posted inWater/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Searching For Hot Water World Candidates With CHEOPS: II. A Low-density Super-Earth Orbiting The K Dwarf TOI-2211
[astro-ph.EP] Small exoplanets on close-in orbits are exposed to high levels of stellar irradiation, which can effectively remove low-mass primordial H/He envelopes through atmospheric escape.