Chapter 1
A Changing Planet
Outline:
1. Earth's Beginnings
2. Early Primitive Life
3. Evolution of Earth's Atmosphere
4. Aerobic Life
5. Earth's Changing Climate
6. Earth's Energy Endowment
7. The Human Era
1. Earth's Beginnings
The Solar System started as a vast cloud of interstellar gas and dust some 4.6 billion
years ago. Most of the material in the cloud was hydrogen and helium, with smaller
amounts of the other elements
Gravitational attraction between the gas and dust particles that made up the cloud
caused it to shrink and rotate. As it rotated, it flattened into a disk, with all the
matter in essentially the same plane
The disk's center, under the crushing pressure of gravitational attraction, became
so hot and liberated vast amounts of energy: the Sun was born
Farther out in the disk, dust particles collided and stuck together, exerting stronger
gravitational forces, so they attracted additional matter and grew larger to
eventually form the planets
In the young Earth, heavier elements sank toward the center, forming Earth's core,
and lighter elements floated to the surface, eventually forming a solid crust. Gases
escaped from the interior to form a primitive atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide
and nitrogen
About 4 billion years ago the Earth cooled, and water vapor condensed to form
primeval oceans
The center of the Earth is a solid inner core,
mostly iron, at a temperature of many thousands
of degrees Celsius. Surrounding this is an outer
core of liquid iron. Covering the core is the
mantle (a hot, thick layer that's solid on short
timescales but fluid over millions of years). On
top of the mantle sits the thin solid crust on
which we live.
Figure 1.1. Structure of Earth’s interior.
The crust is not shown to scale; its thickness
varies from about 5 to 70 kilometers.
The distances indicated are radii measured
in km from Earth’s center.
2. Early Primitive Life
Sometime between 4.2 and 3.5 billion years ago primitive life emerged on Earth,
with the oldest unambiguous evidence for life consists of fossil algae from 3.5
billion years ago.
2.1. Photosynthesis
The earliest organisms extracted energy from their chemical surroundings, energy
that was ultimately geothermal, meaning it came from Earth's interior heat. But at
some point, organisms near the ocean surface developed the ability to capture
sunlight energy and store it in organic molecules built from carbon dioxide (CO2)
and water (H2O). This is the process of photosynthesis
The stored energy in these molecules was available to the photosynthesizing
organisms and to others that preyed on them. Photosynthesis released a new
chemical compound, the gas oxygen (O2), into Earth's atmosphere.
3. Evolution of Earth's Atmosphere
Gases released from Earth's interior gave the young planet an atmosphere that was
largely carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and nitrogen (N2), with trace amounts of methane
(CH4), ammonia (NH3), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and hydrochloric acid (HCl)
Earth's gravity was not sufficient to hold onto hydrogen and helium, so these lighter
gases escaped to space. Water vapor (H2O) was probably a significant atmospheric
component very early on, before most of it condensed to form the oceans
It is believed that geochemical and biological removal accounted for the decline in
atmospheric CO2:
• In the geochemical process, CO2 dissolves in atmospheric water droplets to
form carbonic acid (H2CO3). This acid reacts with exposed rocks and the effect
is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it (store and isolate it in
Earth's crust)
• In biological removal, early photosynthetic organisms at the ocean surface
took CO2 from the atmosphere and, when they died and sank to the deep
ocean, sequestered the carbon in sediments
It's clear that over billions of years CO2 went from being a major atmospheric
component to a gas present only in trace amounts
Atmospheric nitrogen in the form N2 is largely nonreactive, so it did not experience
significant removal. As a result, Earth's atmosphere from about 3.5 to 2.5 billion
years ago was largely nitrogen
As CO2 declined, atmospheric oxygen was increasing as photosynthetic organisms
released O2 gas
• At first the rise in oxygen was slow because the highly reactive O2 combined
with iron and other substances, a process called oxidation
• Around 2 billion years ago Earth's exposed surface had become almost fully
oxidized, and atmospheric oxygen began to increase significantly
• By 1.5 billion years ago, atmospheric oxygen may have reached its current
concentration of around 21 %. Nearly all the rest was, and still is, nitrogen
In our Solar System, only Earth shows significant atmospheric oxygen. Both the
origin and continued existence of our oxygen-rich atmosphere are the work of
living organisms. This global modification of Earth's atmosphere ranks as one of
life's most profound impacts on our planet.
3.1. Structure of the Atmosphere
Earth's atmosphere has several distinct layers
At the bottom is the troposphere where most weather
phenomena occur. The height of the troposphere ranges
from 18 km in the tropics to 6 km in the polar regions, with
an average of 13 km. The temperature generally declines
with increasing altitude. A fairly sharp transition, the
tropopause, marks the upper limit of the troposphere
Above this is the stratosphere, which extends upward to
some 50 km. The stratosphere is calmer and more stable than
the troposphere. It contains the well-known ozone layer that
protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation
The troposphere and stratosphere suffer significant impacts
from human activity, and these two layers also play the dominant
role in Earth's climate
Above the stratosphere lie the mesosphere and thermosphere, where the
atmosphere thins gradually into the near vacuum of space.
4. Aerobic Life
The evolution of life and atmosphere are intimately linked. Although oxygen was
toxic to the life forms that originally produced it, evolution soon led to new life
forms that could use oxygen in their energy-releasing metabolic processes
In the new oxygen-based metabolism, the process of aerobic respiration combines
organic molecules with oxygen, producing CO2 and water, and releasing energy.
Aerobic respiration helped facilitate the evolution of larger, more complex, and
more mobile life forms exhibiting new behaviors
About 850 million years ago, the first multicelled organisms appeared. The period
from about 540 to 490 million years ago then produced a tremendous
diversification of multicelled life forms
Around 400 million years ago plants had begun to colonize the land, beginning
another of life's major alterations to the planet. Amphibians, reptiles, birds, and
mammals all appeared in the last 400 million years
360 to 300 million years ago, prolific growth of the forests led to the burial of
carbon that eventually became fossil fuels
Human ancestors of the genus Homo evolved in about the last 2 million years, and
we Homo sapiens have been around for only 200,000 years.
5. Earth's Changing Climate
Climate describes the average conditions that prevail in Earth's atmosphere
(temperature, humidity, cloudiness) and the resulting conditions at Earth's surface
Climate is distinct from weather, which describes immediate, local conditions.
Weather varies substantially from day to day, and changes regularly with the
seasons. Climate, an expression of average weather, changes on longer timescales
Many factors go into determining Earth's climate, but the two most important are
light from the Sun and the composition of Earth's atmosphere. Sunlight provides
the energy that warms our planet and drives the circulation of atmosphere and
oceans
Sunlight and atmosphere interact to establish Earth's climate:
1. Sunlight brings energy to Earth, warming the planet
2. Earth returns that energy to space, establishing an energy balance that
maintains a fairly constant average temperature
3. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere act like a blanket, blocking the outgoing
energy and making Earth's surface temperature higher than it would be
otherwise
Change either the rate at which Earth receives solar energy, or the concentration of
atmospheric greenhouse gases, and you change Earth's climate
A long-term record of the
average temperature at Earth's
surface shows that our planet
has been warmer than it is
today.
6. Earth's Energy Endowment
Earth's energy sources take two forms: flows and fuels
Energy flows are streams of energy that arrive at or near Earth's surface at a more
or less steady rate, bringing energy whether it's needed or not
Fuels, in contrast, represent energy that's stored in one form or another, most
commonly in the chemical bonds of molecules or in atomic nuclei. Fuel energy
usually remains stored energy until a deliberate act liberates it.
6.1. Energy Flows
The dominant energy flow is sunlight. It represents 99.98% of energy arriving at
Earth, and except for a nearly infinitesimal portion, it gets returned to space:
• 30% of the incident solar energy is reflected immediately back to space, from
clouds, ice, snow, light-colored deserts, and other surface features
• 46% turns directly into thermal energy (i.e. heat) that gets radiated to space
• 23% of the solar energy goes into evaporating water, where it's stored in the
atmosphere as latent heat (energy absorbed or released during a state change)
• 1% ends up as the energy of winds and ocean currents
• 0.08% is captured by photosynthetic plants and becomes the energy stored in
organic matter and fossil fuels
Figure 1.8. Earth’s energy flows,
nearly all of which are from the
Sun. Other flows are geothermal
and tidal energy. In addition,
energy is stored in fossil and
nuclear fuels. The 70 percent of
incoming sunlight that’s absorbed
in the Earth-atmosphere system is
almost perfectly balanced by the
same amount of infrared radiation
returned to space.
Earth's interior is hot (thousands of degrees Celsius at the core), and the internal
thermal energy causes the temperature to increase with depth (near the surface
the rate of rise is typically about 25°C per km). This temperature difference
between Earth's interior and surface drives a steady flow of energy to the surface
as geothermal heat that accounts for 0.025% of the energy reaching the Earth’s
surface
Another energy flow is tidal energy, which comes from the gravitational effects of
Earth and Moon. The energy associated with the tides is dissipated, eventually
ending up as heat, as the moving water interacts with the shores. That energy
accounts for 0.0017 % of the energy flowing to Earth.
6.2. Fuels
Fuels are energy sources that Earth contains, in the form of substances whose
molecular or nuclear configurations store energy
Most familiar are the fossil fuels, which supply the vast majority of the energy that
drives human society. These substances (coal, oil, and natural gas) formed over the
past few hundred million years from organic matter that was buried before it had a
chance to decay. They contain the solar energy that ancient photosynthetic
organisms had captured
Nuclear fuels provide energy through nuclear reactions of some radioactive
elements such as uranium and thorium. Uranium is used to generate ~11% of
electrical energy worldwide.
7. The Human Era
Energy consumption is unquestionably a major factor in the advancement of
human civilization. Measures of human well-being and high standards of living
often correlate closely with energy consumption.
7.1. A Global Impact
The same energy consumption that enables us to enjoy an unprecedented level of
comfort and well-being also threatens natural Earth systems that maintain a
supportive environment
Although our ancestors did plenty of local environmental damage (polluting waters,
denuding hillsides, burning forests, etc.), it's only in the past century that we
humans have become so extravagant in our energy consumption that we've begun
to alter Earth's environment on a global scale
The human-induced change is unprecedented in extent and speed. We have to be
mindful as our advanced human society cannot afford rapid environmental change,
which is just what our very advancement has made increasingly likely.
