HABITABILITY AND LIFE ON EARTH
Earth is the only planetary body known to support life. Understanding what makes our planet habitable, and where and how life originated and evolved, requires examining Earth’s records of habitability and life through time and across its myriad different environments. Scientific ocean drilling provides access to the subseafloor environment, providing materials critical to advance understanding of the requirements for and limits of life on Earth.Â
The resources within this section will foster the exploration of ocean cores, the history of the life within them as well as the environments in which they lived. Cores contain details about how life in the ocean and on land has reacted to past abrupt environmental changes, the environmental parameters that led to mass extinctions, the conditions that fostered evolution of our own species, and the global drivers of production, biodiversity, radiation, and extinction.Â
Key Words: biology, microbiology, evolution, hydrothermal vents, ocean sediments, metabolism, biodiversity, chemistry, extinction
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