UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Bradford Foley and Kimberly Lau, both assistant geosciences professors in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, are part of the eight multidisciplinary teams of researchers selected to receive funding in the inaugural year of "Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe," a new research initiative designed to bring the world closer to answering basic questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
This Scialog award will provide Foley, Lau, and their collaborator, Stephanie Olson, assistant professor of planetary science at Purdue University, with $165,000 in funding — $55,000 each — for their project, “Water, Water Everywhere … Drops to Drink but Nothing to Eat? A Model for the Evolution of Ocean Chemistry on Waterworlds.” The awards were announced on Sept. 20 by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA).
The inaugural meeting of Signatures of Life in the Universe was held virtually June 10-11 and brought together 54 Scialog Fellows, early-career scientists from a variety of disciplines. Guided by senior facilitators, who are leading researchers, participants from fields including Earth and planetary science, chemistry and physics, astronomy and astrobiology, microbiology and biochemistry, and data science brainstormed about transformative research projects that could bring the world closer to answering basic questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
The team will investigate conditions for life on planets that are completely covered by water.
“The project will focus on whether chemical reactions between ocean water and seafloor can provide enough nutrients for life on planets where no land is exposed above sea level,” said Foley. “We will combine models of volcanic outgassing, water-rock chemical reactions and ocean chemistry to calculate what conditions would allow planets that are completely covered in oceans to be able to host life.”
“This will expand my current research to develop a framework for biogeochemistry as a lens into habitability on ocean-dominated exoplanets,” said Lau. “We look forward to collaborating across our subfields at the intersection between the dynamics of the solid Earth and the geochemistry of the oceans and atmospheres of these intriguing planets.”
Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog format brings together communities of early-career scientists to advance basic science in areas of global importance and to write proposals for high-risk, high-reward collaborative research.
The program is sponsored by the RCSA, the Heising-Simons Foundation, NASA and the Kavli Foundation.
“As a nation, we are investing considerable resources in the search for life beyond Earth, so it makes sense to identify exciting new research directions in this field by bringing together experts from a range of disciplines,” said RCSA President and CEO Daniel Linzer. “These multidisciplinary discussions, in this case among astronomers, biologists, chemists, geologists and physicists to talk about planets within and beyond our solar system and the origins of life on Earth, is just what Scialog is about.”