Is it just because English isn't my first language, or does that sentence sound weird to native speakers too? Like the extremophiles contain "caves as large as cathedrals"
Should be "...team have spent years looking for extremophiles, exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua, which contain caves as large as cathedrals."
Or split into two sentences.
Here's how I would word it:
Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years looking for extremophiles in the Naica Mine. The mine, located in Chihuahua, Mexico, contains caves as large as cathedrals.
The punctuation - or more specifically, the commas, their placement or absence in certain places - is the last thorn my brain hurts over when reading and writing English. I read a sentence, and I feel like I'd trip each time I see a comma where there shouldn't be any. Like walking a rocky road or something.
Quotation marks differ because the transition from handwriting to printed letters solidified different shapes like ", «, „ or “, depending on how the strokes were jotted down in handwritten text.
There's a popular meme about it:
Geology has a certain reputation for its vocabulary https://xkcd.com/1829/
It should rather be "Looking for extremophiles Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years exploring Mexico's Naica Mine in Chihuahua, which contains caves as large as cathedrals." and even then it's quite cumbersome to read because there are too many modifiers.
Sentences like that should simply be split up in order to avoid such problems and to be more comprehensible. Unfortunately, many writers seem to equate long sentences with sounding intelligent (speaking from personal experience here ... school and academia can teach you bad writing habits that take some time to unlearn).
But yeah, the sentence is too long, with too many modifiers.
Edit: grammar
(I think so, at least. Not too sure.)