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201313Jun20:20

How sta­ble is the Earth sys­tem – is answer close?

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 13 June 2013 | mod­i­fied 30 May 2014
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Abundance of lifeResearchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton have pro­posed an answer to the long-​running debate as to how sta­ble the Earth sys­tem is.

The Earth, with its core-​driven mag­netic field, oceans of liq­uid water, dynamic cli­mate and abun­dant life is arguably the most com­plex sys­tem in the known Uni­verse. Life arose on Earth over three and a half bil­lion years ago and it would appear that despite plan­e­tary scale calami­ties such as the impacts of mas­sive mete­orites, run­away cli­mate change and increases in bright­ness of the Sun, it has con­tin­ued to grow, repro­duce and evolve ever since.

Pretty much what­ever we do, life on Earth will carry on, just as it did for the pre­vi­ous 3.5 bil­lion years or so. It is only by dis­cov­er­ing the mech­a­nisms by which our liv­ing planet has evolved in the past can we hope to con­tinue to be part of its future.
Dr James Dyke, Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton »

Has life on Earth sim­ply been lucky in with­stand­ing these events or are there any self-​stabilising processes oper­at­ing in the Earth sys­tem that would reduce the sever­ity of such per­tur­ba­tions? If such plan­e­tary processes exist, to what extent are they the result of the actions of life?

Forty years ago, James Love­lock for­mu­lated his Gaia Hypoth­e­sis in which life con­trols aspects of the planet and in doing so main­tains con­di­tions that are suit­able for wide­spread life despite shocks and per­tur­ba­tions. This hypoth­e­sis was and remains con­tro­ver­sial in part because there is no under­stood mech­a­nism by which such a plan­e­tary self-​stabilising sys­tem could emerge.

In research pub­lished on 16 May in PLOS Com­pu­ta­tional Biol­ogy, Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton lec­turer Dr James Dyke and PhD stu­dent Iain Weaver detail a mech­a­nism that shows how when life is both affected by and alters envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions, then what emerges is a con­trol sys­tem that sta­bilises envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions. This con­trol sys­tem was first described around the mid­dle of the 20th Cen­tury dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the cyber­net­ics move­ment and has until now been largely neglected. Their find­ings are in prin­ci­ple applic­a­ble to a wide range of real world sys­tems — from micro­bial mats to aquatic ecosys­tems up to and includ­ing the entire biosphere.

Dr Dyke says: “As well as being a fas­ci­nat­ing issue in its own right, we quite des­per­ately need to under­stand what is cur­rently hap­pen­ing to the Earth and in par­tic­u­lar the impacts of our own behaviour.”

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton news release, 10.06.2013)

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