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When Microbes Ate the Ocean
museumpeace writes "When /. discussed a story about microbes that could break down water as a hydrogen source, many commentors went off on a tangent joking about runaway germs eating the oceans. Now, prof Joe Kirschvink and students at CalTech propose that indeed, the worst iceage ever, which nearly ended life on earth 2.3 billion years ago, was the result of algae evolving the ability to break down water and flooding the atmosphere with oxygen. The absence of oxygen consuming organisms at that time is said to have lead to destruction of atmospheric methane which had hitherto warmed the earth. The professor concludes: 'We haven't had a Snowball in the past 630 million years, and because the sun is warmer now it may be harder to get into the right condition. But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.'"
It didn't end all life on Earth, and it probably wouldn't if it happened again.
While this sounds pretty bad, it seems that this was nature's way of "terraforming" our planet. It seems these bacteria might be handy for naturally creating other worlds we can inhabit. After all, we already have organisms that breathe oxygen.
...is to just rename the planet. If we start calling Earth by a new name, say "Hoth" for example, the Earth will become an ice planet. Just get a significant number of the inhabitants of the planet to believe anything and it will come to pass. The boiling point of water for instance could easily be lowered or raised if we all, as a collective, just believed it to be possible for water to boil at, say... 90 degrees F. It's simple really. Just basic quantum fizziks with a little new ageyness thrown in for good measure. We now return you to your regularly scheduled propaganda.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I gotta get out more... I read the headline as when Microsoft Ate the Ocean.
UGH. *scratches another mark on the wall to keep track of how many times people have confused Orson Welles with H. G. Wells*
Kids, Orson Welles did not write War of the Worlds. H. G. Wells did, in 1898. Orson Welles just made a dumb little radio adaption of it.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Determing the cause of a global freeze which we think happened 2.3 billion years ago has got to be pretty tough. Their actual article is not linked, so does anyone have a link or an idea about how they determined this?
But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.
There's one unwavering faith I have in the human race: The ability to destroy things. That evil algae doesn't stand a chance!
Bill Paxton as the divorced Oceanographer who's trying to balance being a father to his 18 year-old son with his job.
Susan Sarandon as the head of the Governments Task Force on the Environment. She's tough and passionate but is there anything she can do?
Alec Baldwin as the President whos up for re-election. Can he fend off the powerful lobbyists yet still keep his office?
Jennifer Lopez is the scientist with a solution, but no one will listen due to her reputation as being an alarmist.
Wil Wheaton with a cameo as The Beaver.
Steven Spielberg is rumored to be interested.
Definitely must be Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle!
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
Did you study arts at college? Whether something burns depends on the heat you expose it to, the type of material itself, and also (yes) the availability of oxidiser (O2 in the air). Methane gas, coal, and all your other favourite fossil fuels will burn in 19%-O2 air just fine. They might produce marginally more carbon monoxide, but they wouldn't just stop.
If combustion was that sensitive, I think most candles wouldn't burn because they'd use up the oxygen around them to quickly. And blowing gently on a flame would always put it out rather than increase it, because there's less O2 (about 16%?) and more CO2 in your exhaled breath.
This is not a sig
I believe! I believe! Aw crap! my blood's boiling!
As I understand it, you are saying we will destroy ourselves by changing the ecosystem and allowing previously insignificant but dangerous organisms to become significant and kill us off (normally I would have glossed over your poetic post, but it was modded as insightful so I read it more carefully).
e vent). IMO this is probably true, but not as bad as it sounds. Many of the species that are dying off are not important to the big scheme of things, and the complicated interweb of life will compensate. The mass extinction is sad, but probably won't be the end of humans.
I don't really get how that will happen. Yes, I agree that we treat this planet pretty badly, but I think the planet and humans are tough enough to take it.
You may have a point, though. Many scientists postulate that humans are currently creating a mass extinction, similar to what killed off the dinosaurs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction_
The article points out that if Earth was a bit farther away from the Sun, then the Carbon Dioxide would have frozen out of the atmosphere, thus preventing that particular greenhouse gas from bringing on a subsequent warming period. Mars has almost exactly that situation. One or the other of the poles is always cold enough to freeze Carbon Dioxide out of its atmosphere. Too little greenhouse gas ==>>planet stays too cold==>> water permenantly locked up as ice.
With the discoveries of the last couple of years we know Mars has lots of water and Carbon Dioxide, and Methane to boot! AND we know that temperatures permitted liquid surface water in the distant past.
Is this reasonable? Could cyanobacteria have doomed Mars? anyone?
Evreything is indirectly solar power.
you forget radio nuclide decay heat...currently estimated to be about 1/2 of the heat in the earth.
It's been known for a long time that the oxygen in earth's atmosphere first arose as the result of microbial action. It's pretty self-evident that that must have gone along with major climatic changes. What appears to be new about this story is that they link a particular glaciation event to this change in the planet's atmosphere.
The scientific details aside, this story is an important reminder: our global climate is not necessarily stable. Earth could become a frozen snowball again, or it could become like Venus. Furthermore, we don't know what would trigger either transition (it's possible, for example, that short term global warming leads to long-term freezing).
The best way of preventing that for the time being is to drastically reduce our changes to the planet's atmosphere because we know that, without human intervention, the global climate has at least supported higher life forms for hundreds of millions of years.
The absence of oxygen consuming organisms at that time is said to have lead to destruction of atmospheric methane which had hitherto warmed the earth.
So if I am generating methane I'm really saving the planet? Will someone explain this to my wife?
FLR
The difference, of course, is that mold isn't smart enough to know when it has to change its actions.
Given what I've seen so far, neither are humans, apparently.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
And where do you think those radionucleotides came from?
That's right. They were created when some distant star went supernova. It's all due to solar power...
The only difference is that, instead of Vogons, now it's algae
So you're into the explain-your-obvious-joke-immediately-afterwards school of humor, eh? Then here's one for you!
Q. What's the difference between Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson?
A. Whereas Neil Armstrong did the earthwalk on the Moon, Michael Jackson molested small children.
The funny part is where you expect it to be said that Michael Jackson does the moonwalk on the Earth, but instead, something completely unexpected is written (not that the moonwalk and child molestation differ in many ways).
is that these organisms, being carbon-based lifeforms, consist of more than just water, so they need to consume nutrients besides water to multiply, and probably just to survive at all.
As long as those nutrients remain available, the organisms can go on converting water, but as soon as the available amount of nutrients starts falling, the population growth will decrease as well.
Even if we suppose for the moment that the organisms are immortal and are able to survive on water and solar energy alone, they can never multiply beyond a certain point, at which the nutrients required to multiply are exhausted. The water conversion rate will then be proportional to the size of the (stable) population. It is not hard to imagine a process countering the water conversion taking hold at that time.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Arthur: What does it say?
Brother Maynard : It says: "I believe! I believe! Aw crap! my blood's boiling!"
Arthur: What?
Brother Maynard : my blood's boiling!
Sir Bedemere: What, he's dead?
Brother Maynard: He must've died while posting it.
Arthur: Oh, come on!
Brother Maynard: Well that's what it says.
Arthur: Look, if he was dying he wouldn't bother to type "my blood's boiling!" He'd just say it.
Brother Maynard: Well that's what's posted on Slashdot.
Sir Lancelot: Perhaps he was dictating.
Arthur: Oh, shut up.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
"Those crazy microbes are going to blow up the ocean!"
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Why are you so quick to denounce researchers investigating global warming? Why would they not have paleoclimatologists among their numbers?
In the past 30 odd years that I'm running around on this globe, this planet has been threatened so often with destruction that I'm not remotely worried about it anymore.
o re folks - really can't get excited about it. And don't want to get excited about it, frankly. If we got up in arms about this crap half as often as all these chicken littles wanted us to be each and every one of us would've dropped from stress-induced heart failure years ago.
The alarmists aren't happy unless they're running around screaming "the sky is falling!". They're only really satisfied if they can convince you to do the same. Of course, if you don't they can always take the consolation prize of claiming that you're morally bankrupt for not panicking in the manner in which they approve.
Thing is, it's so bloody common for little groups here and there to make a fuss about the sky falling that the rest of us - the calm, the sane, the rational, and the just plain tired-of-this-shit-and-don't-want-to-hear-it-anym
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Hey editors, Google is your friend!
mt
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams
Sig
According to what I learned in college: "If oxygen were to reach a value of 30% of atmospheric gas composition, fires would occur whenever a lightning bolt hit humid vegetation."u rrent/lectures/Gaia/#EXAMP
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/c
So there is some truth to that.
This is what happens when consumer journalists are allowed to write stories about real science.
Newsflash: nearly all autotrophic life on earth (read: photosynthetic life, commonly known as plants) breaks down water when it creates glucose. Basically what the students have figured out is that cyanobacteria came up with a significant part of the chemical reactions that just about every plant on earth uses now, rather than those reactions evolving further down the chain.
The fact that this occured isn't new. at all. originally it was thought that the O2 that plants make came from the C02 they take in, but it was demonstrated quite some time ago that the plants actually split water and use the oxygens from that for the 02.
conclusion: cnet writers are idiots.
Wikipedia. Volcanoes. Easy to read about it.
Quote: "Volcanic activity now releases about 130 to 230 teragrams (145 million to 255 million short tons) of carbon dioxide each year."
Sometimes much higher if there is a extremely large eruption.
I have this vision of a raging fireball in an epic battle with unending floods, courtesy of one percent more oxygen and 3 feet higher oceans. Perhaps I could turn that in to direct to DVD movie. Thanks /.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
I demand that the government employ thousands of (** remove** astronomers) biologists to blanket the (** remove** sky ) ocean watching out for these killer (** remove** aseroids ) microbes. At the moment we can only observe .00001% of the (** remove** sky ) marine biosphere. We need this protection now!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Equal Rights for Vocanoes !!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Global_Carbon_E mission_by_Type.png
Yeah, I know you tried to be funny, nevertheless CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is well over 6000 million tons per year or about 20-30 times that what volcanos produce.
You are partially correct. The cooling at the top of a mountain is due to the expansion of the air at high elevation. This takes energy and the energy is lost as heat.
However the trapping of the energy at the top of a mountain is what I am talking about. There is a greater amount of solar energy at the top of a mountain that at the sahara dessert for instance. This can easily be seen. The air absorbs solar energy. The solar constant in orbit is about 1.3 kw/m^2 and at sea level it is about 1.0 kw/m^2
The difference is what is absorbed by the atmosphere. And these numbers are from memory.
At the top of a mountain you have two processes working:
1) the energy is reflected back into space
2) there is not much up there to trap it
The lack of water vapour at high elevation is a critical factor. Get rid of the mountains and you have a number of factors that work together to warm up the planet.
I guess I am going to "troll to your troll."
The point of the Mann "Hockey Stick" is not so much as that there were warm and cold periods in the past beyond the horizon of human history. The point is that the climate has been dead flat for 1400 years and only in the last 100 or even 50 years has the climate warmed, suggesting an anthropogenic source. The other part of the Hockey Stick is that the Medievel Warm Period and Viking Greenland colony days were local and not global effects.
Trouble with the Hockey Stick is that the times past data is from tree rings and other proxies and has really big error bars. The recent past data is from meteorolgical temperature records with all of the attendent problems of heat islands and the like. The reason you don't do proxies for the recent past is that the numbers would be all over the place and wouldn't show the blade of the Hockey Stick. The reason you smooth the heck out of the proxy data is that, well, they are so noisy.
Then you have those two Canadians who pointed out that the flat part of the Hockey Stick may be an artifact of data handling, but, wouldn't-cha-know-it, the Canadians are not climate scientists, so we can safely disregard everything they point out.
Apart from the Hockey Stick, there are the climate modelers. I believe that their deal is that yes, water vapor is the main greenhouse gas, but the tropics are at 100 percent humidity anyway, so you won't get any more of it, so CO2 is the "swing vote on the court" if you will. They are also assuming strong positive feedback mechanisms -- is it that warming will release more CO2 from reservoirs? Is it that warming will release more H2O at higher lattitudes. I am kind of shakey on that part.
You know, I have heard it argued that it is not entirely clear that the rise in CO2 is anthropogenic. Yes, CO2 is rising as we cut down the rain forests and burn fossil fuel, but at only half the rate, and the rest must be going into sinks. Or maybe the sources and sinks are the dominant effect, and the increase in CO2 with civilization may only be correlative and not causitive. But there are an awful lot of people who are sure of themselves.