Unraveling the complex life-environment interactions provides critical insights into selection and adaptation of early life and informs exploration strategies for other potentially habitable worlds. Particularly, the Archean-Proterozoic interval saw major environmental transitions alongside extensive microbial diversification, reshaping atmospheric-oceanic redox and nutrient cycles, and ultimately enabling animal life. Beyond constraints from biogeochemical proxies, modern natural environments—anoxic lakes and ocean basins, desert landscapes, glacial systems, submarine and continental hydrothermal systems, among others—serve as valuable analogs for ancient Earth and potentially extraterrestrial habitable worlds, providing opportunities for direct observations and process-based understanding. This session welcomes contributions on the dynamic interplay between life and Earth’s environment during the Archean and Proterozoic, and on modern analogs that illuminate strategies of biological adaptation and evolution and thereby inform our ability to reconstruct our past. We encourage submissions that span field observations, laboratory experiments, and modeling approaches to advance a comprehensive understanding of these processes.

• EP - Earth and Planetary Surface Processes
• PP - Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology