The November NASA Astrobiology Newsletter showcased two articles for the Alternative Earths team—the overarching motivation behind the team and early earth modeling in a research highlight: " One Planet But Many Different Earths" " Methane Muted: How Did Early Earth Stay Warm" Read More
Institutional PI Noah Planavsky (Yale) won the 2016 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering to study Earth's early oceans. "My goal is to ... track the dynamics of marine primary productivity from Earth’s earliest history to the very recent past," Planavsky told "YaleNews." Read More
"It’s one planet, but it’s silly to think of it as one planetary regime. Each of our past chapters is a potential exoplanet," Tim Lyons recently told 'Many Worlds' about the driving concept behind the Alternative Earths team. Read More
The Alternative Earths Team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute finds that, contrary to popular climate models for the distant past, methane could not be the gas that kept the oceans liquid and livable. Image: This artist's depiction of an ice-covered planet in a distant solar system resembles what early Earth might have looked like if...
Alternative Earths postdoctoral fellow Dan Gregory (UCR) was part of a research group awarded the Multidisciplinary Science Category in the 2016 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes--or "Oscars of Australian science." Research led by Professor Ross Large (University of Tasmania) involved using pyrite to correlate selenium in the ocean with major extinction and growth events in geologic...
A new PNAS publication describes challenging consequences of low oxygen to animal life. In the time leading up to the emergence of animals, from about 1.8 billion to 600 million years ago, the oxygen distribution in the oceans would have been extremely patchy, and even well-ventilated, shallow-water oases near the coasts would have been seasonally...
A new paper by Alternative Earths Co-I Jun Korenaga, "Can mantle convection be self-regulated?" was published this month in "Science Advances." Research suggests that simply being in the habitable zone isn’t sufficient to support life. For decades, it was thought that planets are able to self-regulate their internal temperature via mantle convection. A planet might...
More than a dozen Alternative Earths Co-Is and their graduate students gave talks at the annual Goldschmidt Conference in Yokohama, Japan (June 26 - July 1). Principal Investigator Tim Lyons was invited for a keynote lecture and received the Ingersoll Award. Two sessions featured the Alternative Earths name, focus, and team member co-chairs.
Professor Lyons recently served on the Science Organizing Committee for the NExSS/NASA Astrobiology Exoplanet Biosignatures Workshop Without Walls. This WWW was a high priority for the Alternative Earths team and the search for life on distant worlds. It is conceivable that each of Earth's widely varying planetary states translates to a particular atmospheric composition that...
Alternative Earths undergraduate research assistant and outreach intern Brandy Coats is one of ten UCR students to intern at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory this summer. Students were selected and funded through the FIELDS Program at UCR. Read More
Work led by Alternative Earths graduate student Devon Cole (Yale) and her advisor Noah Planavsky (Yale), working together with Chris Reinhard (Georgia Tech) and Tim Lyons (UC Riverside), among others, has produced a transformative chromium isotope record through Earth’s early history. Read More
PhD student Xolani "X" Mhlanga completed research at the University of California Riverside in the Lyons Biogeochemistry Lab for four months. X's supervisor, Professor Hari Tsikos (Rhodes University), is an international collaborator for the Alternative Earths team. Professor Tsikos received the 2015 University’s Internationalisation Committee award for "international exchange and allied collaborative research" in his...
Tim Lyons (UCR) commented on the new research, "[It] is a viable additional piece in the long-scattered puzzle of how adequate supplies of biologically available nitrogen and a warm atmosphere were maintained during Earth’s earliest history," in a recently published "Earth and Space Science" article. Read More
"[This study has] possibly shown us that there might be a lot of oxygen that has nothing to do with what we’re looking for - the presence of life producing that oxygen," Tim Lyons told the "Daily Mirror." Read More
Tim Lyons (UCR) discusses the possibility of false positives in detecting oxygen from distant planets' atmospheres in a recently published article in "National Geographic." Read More
Researching conditions of early Earth's atmosphere will help guide the search for habitability beyond our solar system, according to Lyons (UCR). Read More
Stephen Kane will give a public talk on Monday, May 9 at the UCR Extension Center from 6 to 7 p.m. Kane researches planets around other stars and will discuss the relationship between Mercury and exoplanet transit. Professor Bahram Mobasher (UCR) will host a public telescope viewing of the transit on Monday, May 9 at...
Alternative Earths members joined the UCR Earth Sciences Department, Physics & Astronomy Department and Riverside STEM Academy in welcoming visiting high school students from Sendai, Japan. The event focused on interactive STEM learning, including a solar telescope and a "Sensing the Universe" station. Read More
