More than 3.5 billion years ago, the Earth was not the hospitable world we know today. The atmosphere lacked oxygen, the seas ...

The Living Worlds Working Group proposes a revolutionary approach to finding life on distant planets. The paper, part of the ...

Ancient microbial activity preserved in deep seafloor sediments challenges assumptions about where fragile traces of early ...

Far below the surface of the western Pacific Ocean, scientists have uncovered a geological system that reshapes how you may ...

Deep-sea sediment layers show rare microbial wrinkle structures that formed in environments far beyond the reach of sunlight. Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University ...

Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was walking through the Dadès ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was walking through the Dadès Valley in the Central High Atlas Mountains of Morocco ...

They’ve been called “bubble chasers,” and “seep seekers,” though they sometimes call themselves “flare hunters.” They’re a ...

Deep beneath the ocean, scientists uncovered thriving microbial life in one of Earth’s harshest environments—an area with a pH of 12, where survival seems nearly impossible. Using lipid biomarkers ...

1 Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States 2 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San ...

Introduction: Hydrothermal vents are among Earth’s most extreme ecosystems, characterized by high temperatures, elevated metal concentrations, and steep chemical gradients that sustain specialized ...

Earth was not always the blue-green world we know today: the early Earth's oxygen levels were about a million times lower than we now experience. There were no forests and no animals. For ancient ...