[Climate of the Past] It is believed that the atmospheric circulation on Snowball Earth produced a net ablation zone exposing bare sea ice.
Water/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Posted inWater/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Iron Helped Scientists Trace Earth’s Oxygen. Now It’s Telling A Bigger Story
[Michigan State University] For decades, scientists have studied iron preserved in ancient rocks to reconstruct how Earth’s oceans and atmosphere became rich in oxygen. A new study suggests iron has […]
Posted inArctic / Antarctic / Alpine
Icy Ocean Planet Research: NASA ROSES-25 Amendment 71: New Opportunity A.16 Cryosphere
[NASA]. A.16 Cryosphere solicits high-impact efforts focused on sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers. The expectation is that proposed investigations will use the wealth of data from NASA satellites and […]
Posted inExtremeophiles and Extreme Environments
Rethinking The Origin Of Life At Seafloor Hydrothermal Vents
[PNAS] Alkaline vents have dominated a class of hypotheses for the origins of life since their discovery a quarter of century ago, but advances in understanding the nature of these […]
Posted inBiosignatures & Paleobiology
Proto-Biosignatures and Planetary Geochemical Metabolism: A Thermodynamic Screening Model of Prebiotic Geochemical Organization
[Life (Basel)] Astrobiological observations usually return atmospheric, mineralogical, molecular, isotopic, or textural states rather than organisms.
Posted inWater/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Ocean World Exploration: 2026 American Samoa ROV + Mapping Exploration
[NOAA]. Most of the 13,581-square-mile National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa lies far below the sunlit coral reefs visible from shore. Its protected waters include deep seamounts, abyssal plains, deep-sea […]
![Global maps of predicted pigment concentrations (left column) and pigment-to-chlorophyll-a ratios (right column) for May 2010 generated using the Random Forest model. Panels (a–f) show fucoxanthin, peridinin and zeaxanthin.-- [q-bio.OT]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/beyond.png?resize=1200%2C717&ssl=1)
Posted inBiosignatures & Paleobiology
Beyond Chlorophyll: Machine Learning Estimates Of Diagnostic Phytoplankton Pigments From Multispectral Ocean Colour Data
[q-bio.OT] Phytoplankton play a central role in marine ecosystems and the global carbon cycle, with different groups contributing differently to ocean biogeochemical processes.
![Normalized magnetospheric standoff distance rM/rpl as a function of the planetary magnetic field and the total stellar pressure for Modern Earth (left panel) and Early Earth (right panel) across the HZ of the host star. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/The-impact-of.png?resize=1200%2C714&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
The Impact Of Tidal Locking On Earth-like Planetary Dynamos
[astro-ph.EP] We investigate how tidal locking affects the planetary dynamo and the magnetospheres of Earth-like planets orbiting the habitable zones of M dwarfs.
Posted inTricorders & Sensors
New UC Riverside Lab Focuses on Cutting Edge Astrobiology Tools
[UC Riverside] The Planetary Geochemistry and Astrobiology Laboratory is led by Assistant Professor Fabian Klenner, a new faculty member in UCR’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. His research focuses […]
Posted inWater/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
MBARI Ocean World Expedition: Movement In The Deep
Editor’s note: When we start to mount Astrobiology missions to explore ocean worlds we’ll need ways for our robotic submersibles to observe and interact with whatever life forms they may […]