Unigue Facts about the Globe: Biosphere

Biosphere

Earth is the only place in the universe where life is known to exist. The planet's lifeforms are sometimes said to form a "biosphere". This biosphere is generally believed to have begun evolving about 3.5 billion (3.5×109) years ago. The biosphere is divided into a number of biomes, inhabited by broadly similar flora and fauna. On land, biomes are separated primarily by latitude. Terrestrial biomes lying within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles are relatively barren of plant and animal life, while most of the more populous biomes lie near the Equator.

From the broadest geophysiological point of view, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere (rocks), hydrosphere (water), and atmosphere (air). Earth is the only place where life is known to exist. This biosphere is generally thought to have evolved beginning, through a process of biogenesis or biopoesis, at least some 3.5 billion years ago.

The term "biosphere" was coined by geologist Eduard Suess in 1875. The concept thus has a geological origin and is an indication of the impact of Darwin on the earth sciences. The biosphere's ecological context comes from the 1920s, preceding the 1935 introduction of the term "ecosystem" by Sir Arthur Tansley. Vernadsky defined ecology as the science of the biosphere. The biosphere is an important concept in astronomy, geophysics, meteorology, biogeography, evolution, geology, geochemistry, and, generally speaking, all life and earth sciences.

Some life scientists and earth scientists use biosphere in a more limited sense. For example, geochemists define the biosphere as being the total sum of living organisms (the "biomass" or "biota" as referred to by biologists and ecologists). In this sense, the biosphere is but one of four separate components of the geochemical model, the other three being lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The meaning used by geochemists is one of the consequences of specialization in modern science. Some might prefer the word ecosphere, coined in the 1960s, as all encompassing of both biological and physical components of the planet.

The Second International Conference on Closed Life Systems defined biospherics as the science and technology of analogs and models of Earth's biosphere; i.e., artificial Earth-like biospheres. Some also include the creation of artificial non-Earth biospheres—for example, human-centered biospheres or a native Martian biosphere—in the field of biospherics.

Some theorists have postulated that the Earth is poorly suited to life, although nearly every part of the planet, from the polar ice caps to the Equator, supports life of some kind. Indeed, recent advances in microbiology have demonstrated that microbes live deep beneath the Earth's terrestrial surface, and that the total mass of microbial life in so-called "uninhabitable zones" may, in biomass, exceed all animal and plant life on the surface.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "biosphere".