Editor’s note: the two large rovers NASA has in operation on Mars utilize AI – or Machine Learning – both on Earth and in some cases inside a rover itself […]
About 183 million years ago, volcanic activity in modern South Africa unleashed an estimated 20,500 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the ocean-atmosphere system over a period of 300 to […]
The Pilbara in northwestern Australia exposes some of the oldest rocks on Earth, over 3.6 billion years old. The iron-rich rocks formed before the presence of atmospheric oxygen, and life […]
Building from his PhD work at Arizona State University, Jon Lima-Zaloumis is developing methods to look for signs of active life occurring in extreme environments, namely in the Earth’s atmosphere […]
Researchers have discovered a clue in Italian limestone that helps explain a mass extinction of marine life millions of years ago, and may provide warnings about how oxygen depletion and […]
For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth — a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as […]
Ammonites were not in decline before their extinction, scientists have found.
![Pyrite sulfur δ34S values as a function of the natural logarithm of pore water sulfate concentration (r2 = 0.52). Colors correspond to TOC concentration. The solid black line is the line of best fit, with the equation y = −8.4ln([SO4]) − 3.4. The two dashed black lines are parallel to the line of best fit and run 20 ‰ above it and 16 ‰ below it. -- Johns Hopkins University](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/An-Unlikely-Hero-In.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
One of Earth’s most consequential bursts of biodiversity—a 30-million-year period of explosive evolutionary changes spawning innumerable new species—may have the most modest of creatures to thank for the vital stage […]
Stromatolites are the earliest geological record of life on Earth. These curious biotic structures are made of algae carpets growing toward the light and precipitating carbonates.
As life on Earth rapidly expanded a little over 500 million years ago during the “Cambrian explosion,” Earth had tectonic plates slowly crashing into each other, building mountains and starting […]
