Swansong Biospheres: Refuges for life and novel microbial biospheres on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes

TL;DR

This study models Earth's future climate to identify potential refuges for unicellular life in the planet's distant future, providing insights into the evolution of habitability on Earth and exoplanets as their stars age.

Contribution

It introduces a climate model to predict long-term habitability and refuges for unicellular life on Earth and similar exoplanets near the end of their habitable lifetimes.

Findings

Unicellular life could persist in high-latitude refuges for up to 2.8 Gyr.

Climate refuges include mountain regions and cold-trap caves.

Habitability evolution depends on stellar aging and local environmental conditions.

Abstract

The future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular microorganisms. Unicellular life was probably present for at least 2.5 Gyr before multicellular life appeared and will likely be the only form of life capable of surviving on the planet in the far future, when the ageing Sun causes environmental conditions to become more hostile to more complex forms of life. Therefore, it is statistically more likely that habitable Earth-like exoplanets we discover will be at a stage in their habitable lifetime more conducive to supporting unicellular, rather than multicellular life. The end stage of habitability on Earth is the focus of this work. A simple, latitude-based climate model incorporating eccentricity and obliquity variations is used as a guide to the temperature evolution of the Earth over the next 3 Gyr. This allows inferences to be made about potential refuges for life, particularly in mountains and cold-trap (ice) caves and what forms of life could live in these environments. Results suggest that in high latitude regions, unicellular life could persist for up to 2.8 Gyr from present. This begins to answer the question of how the habitability of Earth will evolve at local scales alongside the Sun's main sequence evolution and, by extension, how the habitability of Earth-like planets would evolve over time with their own host stars.