To serve the society has always been the main goal for all the scientific research of geosciences,which is of particular significance in the globalization contexts.Paleontology,an important conventional academic disciplinary branch of geology,has already developed into a new stage of geobiology,which greatly expands the application fields closely related to the development of the society.In this paper,it presents an overview of the innovation and expansion of the application fields,including the expansion in the geobiological application of global change and fossil fuels,and the geobiological innovation in critical zones and deep Earth.Microbial lipids can be used not only as the proxies of paleo-temperature,but also as the indicators of paleohydroclimate, which makes it possible to independently reconstruct the paleo-temperature and paleo-hydrology in Earth history, a critical issue of the past global change.Geobiological archives could also help decipher the environmental settings of both the origin of life and the biotic evolution,and in particular geobiological records could help identify the biotic impact on environmental conditions.Geobiological methods could be applied to evaluate the hydrocarbon source rocks and the reservoir strata which were less explored by paleontology.Geobiology can be of great help in the investigation of non-conventional petroleum and gas,including the microbially-induced nanometer pores and minerals such as quartz and feldspar in gas-bearing shales.Molecular and isotopic geobiological techniques and methods are now used to investigate the causal relationship between carbon cycle and water cycle in a variety of critical zones of Earth surface systems.The investigations on the distribution of some geomicrobial functional groups in the critical zones will help understand the distribution of the environments polluted and help recover the polluted areas.Recently-proposed Deep Earth Plan aims to extend the habitable underground space,and this expansion awaits the investigations on deep subsurface microbial communities which may greatly ameliorate or even deteriorate the underground environments.