III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

3. Earth Alive: An Ovular GaiaSphere Sustains Her/His Own Viability

Schwartzman, David. Life, Temperature, and the Earth: The Self-Organizing Biosphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. The Howard University astrobiologist proposes a thermodynamically based “geophysiology” whose conditions indicate self-organizing processes at work. Biospheric evolution occurs in part because it is a complex adaptive whole system with material inheritance and self-selection of relative stability. For a 2015 update of his contributions, see The Case for a Hot Archean Climate and its Implications to the History of the Biosphere at arXiv:1504.00401.

Sharma, A. Surjalal. Complexity in Nature and Data-Enabled Science: The Earth’s Magnetosphere. AIP Conference Proceedings. 1582, February, 2014. A paper by the University of Maryland astronomer presented at the International Conference on Complex Processes in Plasma and Nonlinear Dynamical Systems held November 2012 in Gandhinagar, India as an example of a worldwide explanation by way of these theories.

Understanding complexity in nonequilibrium systems requires multiple approaches and the well established approaches of experiment, theory and numerical simulation have led to the key advances. The data-enabled science, referred to as the fourth paradigm, is an inherently suitable framework for the study of complexity in nature. The data-driven modeling of the Earth's magnetosphere, based on the dynamical systems theory, highlights the achievements of this approach in the study of complexity in natural systems.

Skinner, Brian, et al. The Blue Planet. New York: Wiley, 1999. A basic, illustrated text on Earth System Science which includes a look at Gaian propensities.

Smil, Vaclav. The Earth’s Biosphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. A proficient study covering physics, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanography, energy, climatology, and ecology, with an emphasis on symbiosis and the role of life’s complexity in biomass productivity and resilience. The influence of solar radiation and plate tectonics is discussed along with the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolisms.

Sole, Ricard and Simon Levin. Preface. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 357/617, 2002. As an introduction to a special theme issue: “The Biosphere as a Complex Adaptive System.”

Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems. As such, they display a number of recognizable, large-scale features that result from their dynamics being far from equilibrium…..suggestive of universal principles of organization. (617)

Sowinski, Damian, et al. Exo-Daisy World: Revisiting Gaia Theory through an Informational Architecture Perspective.. arXiv:2411.03421. As the quote notes, University of Rochester astroecologists including Adam Frank propose an expanded version of this thought model set in a celestial realm so to gain further appreciations of how biospheres tend to self-regulate and maintain their organic viability.

The Daisy World model has long provided a frame for understanding the self-regulation and feedback mechanisms of planetary biospheres. In this study, we extend the classic version through the lens of Semantic Information Theory (SIT), so to include the information flow between the biosphere and Earthly environment. Our aim is to develop novel methodologies to analyze the evolution of coupled planetary systems, with implications for astrobiological observations. Our Exo-Daisy World model reveals how correlations between the biosphere and environment intensify with rising stellar luminosity. Finally, we discuss the broader implications of our approach for developing detailed ExoGaia models of inhabited exoplanetary systems.
(Abstract)

Staley, Mark. Darwinian Selection Leads to Gaia. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 218/1, 2002. The adaptation to organisms to their environment leads in turn to an influence on their biotic niche.

Steffen, Will, et al. The Emergence and Evolution of Earth System Science. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 1/1, 2020. In this inaugural issue of a new Nature journal, eight veteran Earth scientists including Jane Lubchenco, Hans Schellnhuber, and Tim Lenton provide a status report from V. Vernadsky’s biosphere to J. Lovelock’s Gaia alive model and onto current needs to foster an ecosphere vitality. See also Genealogies of Earth System Thinking by Giulia Rispoli in the same issue.

Earth System Science (ESS) is an emerging transdisciplinary endeavour aimed at appreciating the structure and function of the Earth as a complex, adaptive system. Here, we discuss this integral merit of ESS, and it’s value for understanding global change. Inspired by early work on biosphere–geosphere interactions and by novel perspectives such as the Gaia hypothesis, ESS emerged in the 1980s to meet the need for a new ‘science of the Earth’. ESS has produced new concepts and frameworks which much serve environmental issues, such as the Anthropocene phase, tipping points and planetary boundaries. Moving forward, the grand challenge for ESS is to integrate biophysical processes with populous human dynamics to attain a truly unified vision of the Earth System. (Abstract)

Stewart, Iain and John Lynch. Earth: The Biography. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007. A well done coffee table book as if the common cognitive intellect of Earthkind awakens to witness, with wonder and worry, its cosmic environs, harrowing past, and life’s perilous prognosis.

Stueken, Eva, et al. Did Life Originate from a Global Chemical Reactor? Geobiology. 11/2, 2013. As “bioinformatics meets geochemistry,” astrobiologists from the University of Washington, McGill University, and NASA Exobiology, including William Brazelton and John Baross, describe an early earth scenario that seems primed and favorable for living systems to rise and prosper. Main prerequisites are: energy, organic carbon compound synthesis, catalysis, concentration, magma-hydrothermalism, metamorphic terrains, and more, as if an innate incubator.

Many decades of experimental and theoretical research on the origin of life have yielded important discoveries regarding the chemical and physical conditions under which organic compounds can be synthesized and polymerized. However, such conditions often seem mutually exclusive, because they are rarely encountered in a single environmental setting. As such, no convincing models explain how living cells formed from abiotic constituents. Here, we propose a new approach that considers the origin of life within the global context of the Hadean Earth. We review previous ideas and synthesize them in four central hypotheses: (i) Multiple microenvironments contributed to the building blocks of life, and these niches were not necessarily inhabitable by the first organisms; (ii) Mineral catalysts were the backbone of prebiotic reaction networks that led to modern metabolism; (iii) Multiple local and global transport processes were essential for linking reactions occurring in separate locations; (iv) Global diversity and local selection of reactants and products provided mechanisms for the generation of most of the diverse building blocks necessary for life. We conclude that no single environmental setting can offer enough chemical and physical diversity for life to originate. Instead, any plausible model for the origin of life must acknowledge the geological complexity and diversity of the Hadean Earth. (Abstract)

Envisioning the origin of life in a global context is advantageous because it makes prebiotic chemistry more plausible and because the global context is an inescapable reality. Origin of life research is often discussed in terms of a dichotomy: productive chemical reactions vs. environmental relevance. We have argued that thinking about prebiotic processes in a global context eliminates the dichotomy and opens the possibility that the relevant chemical reactions are also the most productive. (119)

Stueken, Eva, et al. Mission to Planet Earth: The First Two Billion Years. Space Science Reviews. 216/Art. 31, 2020. As if some global cognitive faculty has landed on this world and is retrospectively trying to learn how it all came to be, nine astroscientists with postings in Scotland, Austria, Germany, Japan, and the USA, including Helmut Lammer discuss features such as From Magma to a Water Ocean, Onset of Plate tectonics, and more.

Solar radiation and geological processes over the early million years of Earth’s history, along with the origin of life, steered our planet towards a long evolutionary course of habitability and the emergence of complex life. Crucial aspects included: (1) the redox state and volatile content of Earth’s geology, (2) the timescale of atmospheric oxygenation; (3) the origin of autotrophy, biological N2 fixation, and oxygenic photosynthesis; (4) strong stellar UV radiation on the early Earth, and (5) photochemical effects on Earth’s sulfur cycle. The early Earth presents as an exoplanet analogue that can be explored through the existing rock record, allowing us to identify atmospheric signatures diagnostic of biological metabolisms that may be detectable on other inhabited planets with next-generation telescopes. (Abstract excerpt)

Tamura, Yoshihiko, et al. Advent of Continents: A New Hypothesis. Nature Scientific Reports. 6/33517, 2016. The entry reports three papers over ten years that quantify how unique is our planetary mantle of one-third mobile land forms amidst oceans over the crustal sphere beneath. This 2016 lead from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology cites a latest version. Formation and Evolution of the Continental Crust by the University of Grenoble geoscientist Nicholas Arndt in Geochemical Perspectives (2/3, 2013) is an 130 page essay fully available online. And thirdly, Evolution of the Continental Crust by the British earth scientists C. Hawkesworth and A. Kemp in Nature (443/811, 2006).

The straightforward but unexpected relationship presented here relates crustal thickness to magma type in the Izu-Ogasawara (Bonin) and Aleutian oceanic arcs. Volcanoes along the southern segment of the Izu-Ogasawara arc and the western Aleutian arc (west of Adak) are underlain by thin crust (10–20 km). In contrast those along the northern segment of the Izu-Ogasawara arc and eastern Aleutian arc are underlain by crust ~35 km thick. According to the hypothesis presented here, rising mantle diapirs stall near the base of the oceanic crust at depths controlled by the thickness of the overlying crust. Where the crust is thin, melting occurs at relatively low pressures in the mantle wedge producing andesitic magmas. The implications of this hypothesis are: (1) the rate of continental crust accumulation, which is andesitic in composition, would have been greatest soon after subduction initiated on Earth, when most crust was thin; and (2) most andesite magmas erupted on continental crust could be recycled from “primary” andesite originally produced in oceanic arcs. (Tamura)

In the Archean, like now, the granitoids that constitute the core of the continental crust formed in subduction zones. Hydrous basaltic magmas from the mantle wedge rose to the base of the crust where they fractionally crystallised or remelted underplated rocks to yield more evolved granitic magmas. From the end of the Archean to the late Proterozoic, the continental crust grew in a series of major pulses, each triggered by accelerated mantle convection. The arrival of large mantle plumes displaced material from the upper mantle, accelerating the rate of subduction and causing a pulse of crustal growth. The Hadean crust was mafic and it underwent internal partial melting to produce the granitic melts that crystallised the Jack Hills zircons. This crust was disrupted by the Late Heavy Bombardment and from then on, since about 3.9 Ga, plate tectonics has operated. (Arndt)

The continental crust covers nearly a third of the Earth's surface. It is buoyant—being less dense than the crust under the surrounding oceans—and is compositionally evolved, dominating the Earth's budget for those elements that preferentially partition into silicate liquid during mantle melting. Models for the differentiation of the continental crust can provide insights into how and when it was formed, and can be used to show that the composition of the basaltic protolith to the continental crust is similar to that of the average lower crust. From the late Archaean to late Proterozoic eras (some 3–1 billion years ago), much of the continental crust appears to have been generated in pulses of relatively rapid growth. Reconciling the sedimentary and igneous records for crustal evolution indicates that it may take up to one billion years for new crust to dominate the sedimentary record. (Hawkesworth)

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