In the past 540 million years, the Earth has endured five mass extinction events, each involving processes that upended the normal cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans. These globally fatal perturbations in carbon each unfolded over thousands to millions of years, and are coincident with the widespread extermination of marine species around the world.
“Mars is the most habitable planet in our Solar System besides Earth,” said Laura Kerber, Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist at JPL with interests in the ancient Martian climate and extraterrestrial environments. “But it remains a hostile world for many kinds of life. A system for creating small islands of habitability would allow us to transform Mars in a controlled and scalable way.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
NASA is keeping a space-based eye on the Himalayas, Karakoram, Hindu Kush –The glaciers and snowpack of Asia’s three high mountain ranges harbor the largest volume of freshwater outside the polar ice sheets, leading hydrologists to dubb this region The Third Pole. One-seventh of the world’s population depends on rivers flowing from these mountains for water to drink and to irrigate crops.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
We didn’t know what the Sun looked like in its first billion years, and it’s super important because it likely changed how Venus’ atmosphere evolved and how quickly it lost water, said Prabal Saxena, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It also probably changed how quickly Mars lost its atmosphere, and it changed the atmospheric chemistry of Earth.”
