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The Emerging Science of Biospherics
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19861 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
2,739 Words |
| Author
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Mark Nelson
Mark Nelson is chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics in the
United Kingdom and director of space applications at Space
Biospheres Ventures in Oracle, Arizona. |
A little over a hundred years ago, Eduard Suess, an Austrian geologist, coined the word biosphere, which has commonly been inadequately defined as "the thin layer of life that surrounds the surface of the Earth." At first glance, it may seem obvious that planet earth, with its surface features of rocks, soil, air, and water, provides the proper environment for life, a collective body of discrete organisms that occupies a thin layer on the surface of the planet. Yet modern science recognizes a much grander meaning to biosphere, in which the environment has been greatly changed by the action of the biosphere over more than 3 billion years. Life is not simply the "lucky passenger" on a hospitable planet but is actively engaged in modifying conditions, including controlling the atmospheric composition.
The earth's biosphere, then, is "a stable, complex, adaptive, evolving life system operating as the major biological force transforming the planet's crust" by converting solar energy and material elements from the environment into ever-higher levels of organization. The earth's biosphere has been the source of energy allowing humans to develop their entire technological infrastructure, from cities to roads to industrial and agricultural impact.
Since the global biosphere is fundamentally our life-support system, developing a science to understand its processes and the impact of man's activities upon it becomes an issue of urgency.
The modern science of the biosphere was greatly influenced by the work of Vladimir Vernadsky. A Russian geochemist who everywhere found the "traces of bygone biospheres" that had transformed the entire surface of earth with their relentless cycling and deposition of material. In 1926 he published The Biosphere, which outlines the biosphere's role as the apparatus that converts cosmic energy, the radiant energy of our sun, into an engine of transformation and evolution that has operated on earth for nearly four billion years. Vernadsky saw that the biosphere has acted to include an ever-increasing amount of material and that life, which began in water, has continued to evolve to conquer new habitats--as witnessed by the expansion of life onto the land, into the air with woody plants and birds, even into the harshest arctic or desert realms.
Vernadsky's tradition of biosphere research has remained active in the Soviet Union, but because his major works were not translated until quite recently, he is but little known in the West. Vernadsky foresaw a new era in the biosphere, necessitated by the enormous
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