AbSciCon 2019 Session: Alive or not?

https://agu.confex.com/agu/abscicon19/prelim.cgi/Session/67151

Submission deadline: 23 January 2019 23:59 EST

We would like to invite colleagues to submit abstracts to a session that concentrates on the search for life and the abiotic conditions that may favor its evolution (habitability). Despite significant scientific and technological progress, a significant obstacle in our search for life beyond Earth is that we still lack a clear understanding of how to recognize its presence beyond the terrestrial evolution context, nor do we fully know how to disentangle its signatures from the myriad of abiotic geochemical processes at play.

This session will address constraining the formation of biosignatures across space and time, and will explore new strategies, techniques, and instruments for recognizing them from abiotic environmental noise. We welcome contributions on experiments where abiotic and biotic factors are considered, field studies in analogue environments and early Earth deposits, as well as flight technologies/instruments for detecting biosignatures from “life as we know it” and “life as we don’t know it”.

Co-conveners: Dragos Zaharescu, Jorge Nunez, Kathleen Craft, Jennifer Glass, Rebecca Lybrand & Steffen Buessecker