Key points

• Energy flows through an ecosystem and is dissipated as heat, but chemical elements
are recycled.

• The ways in which an element—or compound such as water—moves between its

various living and nonliving forms and locations in the biosphere is called
a biogeochemical cycle.

• Biogeochemical cycles important to living organisms include the water, carbon,

nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur cycles.

Introduction

What is your body made of? Not to put too fine a point on it: atoms. Lots and lots of them.
About 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to be precise.^11start superscript, 1, end
superscript Where did all of those atoms come from?

If we really walk it backwards, most of the elements that make up our bodies—and those of
every other living thing!—were born in dying stars billions of years ago. That's pretty cool,
but it doesn't capture the whole picture. What have the atoms of your body been doing
more recently, during their time on Earth?

Energy flows, but matter is recycled.

Energy flows directionally through Earth’s ecosystems, typically entering in the form of
sunlight and exiting in the form of heat. However, the chemical components that make up
living organisms are different: they get recycled.

What does that mean? For one thing, the atoms in your body are not brand new. Instead,
they've been cycling through the biosphere for a long, long time, and they've been part of
many organisms and nonliving compounds along the way. You may or may not believe in
reincarnation as a spiritual concept, but there's no question that atoms in your body have
been part of a huge number of living and nonliving things over the course of time!
In this image, the flow of energy is shown with yellow and red arrows. Yellow indicates
usable energy and red indicates energy lost in the unusable form of heat. Green arrows
show the continual recycling of chemical nutrients. Image credit:

The six most common elements in organic molecules—carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen,
phosphorus, and sulfur—take a variety of chemical forms. They may be stored for long or
short periods in the atmosphere, on land, in water, or beneath the Earth’s surface, as well
as in the bodies of living organisms. Geologic processes—such as weathering of rocks,
erosion, water drainage, and the subduction of continental plates—all play a role in this
recycling of materials, as do interactions among organisms.

The ways in which an element—or, in some cases, a compound such as water—moves

between its various living and nonliving forms and locations is called a biogeochemical
cycle. This name reflects the importance of chemistry and geology as well as biology in
helping us understand these cycles.

Which biogeochemical cycles are key to life?

Water, which contains hydrogen and oxygen, is essential for living organisms. That places
the water cycle pretty high on the list of cycles we care about!

The hydrosphere—the set of places where water can be found as it cycles on Earth—is
large and diverse. Water is present as a liquid on the Earth's surface and underneath the
ground, as ice in the polar ice caps and glaciers, and as water vapor in the atmosphere. For
more information about how water cycles among these forms, check out the water
cycle article.
Water makes up more than half of our bodies, but humans cannot live by water alone.
Instead, there are some other key elements that keep our bodies running and are part of
biogeochemical cycles:

• Carbon is found in all organic macromolecules and is also a key component of fossil
fuels. See the carbon cycle article for more info.

• Nitrogen is needed for our \text{DNA}DNAstart text, D, N, A, end

text, \text{RNA}RNAstart text, R, N, A, end text, and proteins and is critical to
human agriculture. See the nitrogen cycle article for more info.

• Phosphorus is a key component of \text{DNA}DNAstart text, D, N, A, end

text and \text{RNA}RNAstart text, R, N, A, end text and is one of the main
ingredients—along with nitrogen—in artificial fertilizers used in agriculture.
See phosphorus cycle article for more info.

• Sulfur is key to protein structure and is released to the atmosphere by the burning
of fossil fuels.

These cycles don't happen in isolation, and the water cycle is a particularly important
driver of other biogeochemical cycles. For example, the movement of water is critical for
the leaching of nitrogen and phosphate into rivers, lakes, and oceans. The ocean is also a
major reservoir—holding tank—for carbon.

Though each element or compound takes its own route, all of these key chemical nutrients
cycle through the biosphere, moving between the biotic—living—and abiotic—nonliving—
worlds and from one living organism to another.