Understanding the interaction between life and its abiotic life-support system on modern and early Earth, and detecting signals of life in the billions of potential Earth-like worlds in the galaxy requires new observational, experimental and numerical approaches to seek, identify, calibrate and model biosphere processes with greater and greater resolution.

I have developed a modular experimental system comprising of a series of “rockubators”, which allow in a simplified and controlled way to test how a planet’s solid, fluid and gaseous reservoirs work together to sustain developing biota, and to refine theoretical tools that can separate biotic effects from the myriad of processes at play. The experiment is hosted in the Desert Biome at Biosphere-2, in Tucson, Arizona, and it is a science front-row seat for the curious public daily.

The rockubators have been used to model Earth system processes in a number of experiments and will be further tuned to experimentally probe surface processes on other worlds in the solar system and beyond.