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And life created continents...
24 March 2006
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
Myles McLeod
LIFE on Earth may have driven the evolution of the planet itself. The idea is that ancient microbes provided the chemical energy to create the Earth's continents - a nod to the Gaia hypothesis, in which life helps create the conditions it needs to survive.
The theory would solve the puzzle of why the Earth's continental crust appeared when it did, and explain the presence of granite, a substance not found anywhere else in our solar system.
The Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, coalescing as a homogeneous mass that in time separated into the discrete layers we know today: the core, mantle and crust, plus oceans and atmosphere. However, during the first 600 to 800 million years of Earth's existence there were no stable continents. The oldest vestiges of continental crust, which date from the Archaean aeon about 4 billion years ago, are in Acasta in north-west Canada.
These rocks are made from granite or a similar material, which is unique to Earth. It is created when basalt rock melts and reforms, becoming enriched in silica, aluminium and certain metals as it reacts with compounds in water. Granitic rocks are less dense than basalt, so they rise to the surface, forming a stable continental crust.
The ingredients for granite were there before the Acasta rocks, yet in all that time it didn't form. Now a team of geologists led by Minik Rosing of the Geological Museum and the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, says the appearance of photosynthetic life might have given this process the kick-start it needed.
Rosing's team was struck by how the appearance of the continental crust coincided with the rise of photosynthesis. The fossil record for the time is patchy at best, because microbes are small and fragile, but there is some geological evidence that photosynthesis might have arisen 3.8 billion years ago. Today, photosynthetic organisms, which convert solar energy into usable chemical energy, contribute three times as much energy to the Earth's overall geochemical energy cycle as geological activity driven by the Earth's interior.
The first photosynthetic life forms would have made solar energy available for chemical changes, cranking up the Earth's energy cycle and altering its geochemistry, Rosing's team believes (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, vol 232, p 99). "The energy capture from photosynthesis is used to keep oceans and atmosphere out of chemical equilibrium with the rock," says Rosing.
This tension enhances weathering cycles, causing more chemical breakdown in the crust compared with physical processes or the limited impact of more obscure organisms, such as microbes that thrive around thermal vents. Such breakdown of basalt produces smectite and illite clays, which in turn play a role in the creation of granite.
"The key point is that melting of basalt makes basalt again, while the melting of weathered basalt produces a small amount of granite," says Rosing. "Life might, in the end, be responsible for the presence of continents on Earth."
Other geologists agree that this is a novel and imaginative idea. But, they say, the evidence is still weak. For instance, the apparent rarity of granite may be due to other factors, says Martin Line of the University of Tasmania, Australia, such as the size of the Earth, the relative abundance of water on the Earth's surface, or simply because we have only sampled a few rocks on other solar bodies, such as the moon or other planets.
From issue 2544 of New Scientist magazine, 24 March 2006, page 12
Methane bugs warmed the young planet
Climate-changing microbes that produced methane may have been around 700 million years earlier than thought. These "methanogens" could have helped regulate the climate, providing greenhouse gases and staving off freezing conditions that would have stifled the development of life on Earth.
Until now, no direct geological evidence for methanogens has been found in the Archaean aeon, stretching from Earth's formation until about 2.5 billion years ago, although there is circumstantial evidence they may have existed 2.8 billion years ago.
Methane comes from three principal sources: the thermal decomposition of organic material, non-biological reactions of simple inorganic compounds and metabolic activity of methanogenic microbes. In each case, the resulting methane contains distinctive levels of the isotope carbon-13.
Now a team led by geologist Yuichiro Ueno of Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, has found the depleted carbon-13 signature of methanogens in rocks 3.46 billion years old (Nature, vol 440, p 516). The researchers examined veins of quartz and hydrothermal dykes, which are vertical intrusions of precipitates from hydrothermal water, in the Pilbara craton in Western Australia. Cratons are chunks of continental crust that represent the last vestiges of Archaean continents that still exist relatively undisturbed by geological processes.
"This study supports conjectures that methanogenesis was one, if not the, primordial form of metabolism powering the earliest organisms on Earth, and lends further credence to the idea that methane was an important greenhouse gas at a time when the sun was much less bright than at present," says Roger Buick of the University of Washington in Seattle, a specialist in the origin and earliest evolution of life.
bron: http://www.kijk.nl
Een Deense geoloog stelt dat het leven op aarde wel eens verantwoordelijk geweest kan zijn voor het ontstaan van de continenten.
De redenering van deze Minik Rosing begint met graniet, een gesteente dat ontstaat uit gesmolten basalt en andere materialen en dat voor zover we weten alleen op aarde voorkomt. Omdat graniet een kleinere dichtheid heeft dan basalt, komt het naar boven, om daar een belangrijk bestanddeel van de continentale korst te worden.
De vraag is alleen waarom dit graniet pas honderden miljoenen jaren na het ontstaan van de aarde vormde, terwijl de ingrediënten ervoor altijd al aanwezig waren. Rosing denkt nu dat fotosynthetisch leven, dat opkwam in ongeveer dezelfde periode als het graniet ontstond, hier verantwoordelijk voor was. Heeft hij gelijk, dan hebben we dus onze continenten aan deze vroege aardbewoners te danken.
“De energie die organismen door fotosynthese uit het zonlicht vrijmaakten, zorgde ervoor dat oceanen en atmosfeer niet in chemisch evenwicht waren met het gesteente op aarde,” legt Rosing uit. Hierdoor vond er meer verwering plaats, waardoor graniet kon ontstaan. “Cruciaal is dat gesmolten basalt weer basalt oplevert, maar gesmolten verweerd basalt geeft je graniet,” zegt Rosing. Kortom, zonder leven geen graniet, en zonder graniet geen continenten. Een intrigerend idee is het zeker. -JPK