PLACES

How does life begin and evolve, does life exist elsewhere in the universe, and what is the future of life on Earth and beyond? These basic questions of astrobiology will be addressed in the project PLACES. The project focuses on the co-evolution of biosphere and geosphere on very long time and spatial scales and pursues two main directions. The first aim is to model and analyse the limits of self-regulation under extreme forcing and internal variability in the past and future of planet Earth by refining our coupled biosphere-geosphere model. The second aim is to investigate extrasolar Earth-like planets by simplifying our model and varying planetary properties.