Hello, dear Take in Mind readers. Here is a question: How big is the ecosystem in which we live? Can we define the boundary and confidently assert that everything that happens inside affects our life, and everything outside this boundary – does not? Or, could it be that the entire universe is a unified system in which all the components are connected, and these components influence each other?
Let’s try to figure it out step by step. An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system [i]. The simplest examples are forest or a pound with all its inhabitants.
The main characteristic of an ecosystem is the presence of relatively closed, stable in space and time flow of matter and energy between the biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) parts of the ecosystem.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. After all, such abiotic factors as temperature, humidity, pressure, gas composition of the air, etc. depend on processes that often occur very far from the given ecological system.
Take, for example, a pond in Britain. This is a well-defined and clearly bounded system. However, the temperature in Britain in general, and in this pond in particular, depends on many factors which among others include a significant contribution by the Gulf Stream – a warm and swift current in the Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream, in turn, is the result of salinity and temperature gradients in the Atlantic Ocean (thermohaline circulation). If somewhere on Earth, for some reason, these parameters are changed due to a decrease in the activity of the sun or volcanic eruptions, then the Gulf Stream may slow down or stop, as it already happened between the XIV and XIX centuries (the Little Ice Age). Thus, living conditions, and life itself in a small pond in Britain, depends on the activity of volcanoes somewhere on the other side of the globe.
This means that our ecosystem is at least the entire Earth because any living creature in any place on Earth is influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by everything that happens in all other corners of our planet.
There are many historical examples of this: Take for example the extreme weather events of 535-536. Their effects were widespread, causing unseasonable weather, crop failures, and famines in Europe and worldwide, as well as significant migrations of the population, and wars. The root cause of these extreme weather events was a powerful eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia [ii].
Another example is the “Year Without Summer” in 1816 – an extremely cold year in Europe and North America, that resulted in catastrophic crop failure and the worst famine of the XIX century in Europe. The global temperatures dropped by 0.5° C, which in turn caused the death of more than 90,000 people worldwide. The reason for all that was a powerful eruption of the Tamborа volcano in Indonesia [iii].
But having the Earth as our ecosystem is just the beginning… The main source of energy for living organisms on Earth is the Sun, located 150,000,000 kilometers away from Earth. Any variations in the activity of the Sun (for example, Maunder Minimum) immediately lead to global climate changes on Earth. Thus, our ecosystem is the entire solar system.
Wait, there is more. We are also influenced by the deep space through cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are a stream of charged particles (mainly protons and alpha particles – helium nuclei) that move at a speed very close to the speed of light and have tremendous energy, millions of times bigger comparing to the energy achievable at the most powerful particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. The source of these ultra-high-energy particles is in deep space, outside our solar system, and sometimes, even outside our galaxy.
Cosmic rays come to us from deep space and their role in our life is vast:
First, cosmic rays are responsible for the appearance of stable isotopes of chemical elements such as lithium, beryllium, and boron. The point is that in the process of “ordinary” stellar nucleosynthesis, the formation of elements during the evolution of stars, these elements cannot be formed in any significant amounts.
The process of thermonuclear fusion in stars goes through the following chains: hydrogen -> helium, helium -> carbon, carbon -> oxygen, and so on till iron and nickel. Heavier elements are formed during supernova explosions. Those chains lack such light elements as lithium, beryllium, and boron. They are formed in interstellar gas and Earth’s atmosphere because of the “Cosmic rays spallation” process when some nucleons are expulsed from oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon during the collision with cosmic rays. Without these elements, the world around us would be very different – there would be no such minerals as emerald, beryl, and many others.
Moreover, cosmic rays are responsible for the abundance of Carbon 14 (C14) – a radioactive carbon isotope with a half-life of 5730 years, which is extensively used to determine the age of artifacts in archeology (radiocarbon analysis). In other words, if C14 had formed together with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, it would have decayed a long time ago. It turns out that cosmic rays are responsible for the constant concentration of C14 on Earth! It is they, the cosmic rays, who maintain (at least for the last 100,000 years) the C14 amount of 70 tons per year in the Earth’s atmosphere. This allows archaeologists to compare the relative concentrations of C14 and C12 (a stable isotope of carbon) and determine the age of an artifact in the range of 50,000 years [iv].
Maybe surprising of all, cosmic rays are also responsible for the occurrence of lightning – through the so-called “runaway breakdown” which we have already described in detail in our article “The Mysteries of Lightning“. This fact is especially interesting because modern theories of the origin of life on Earth [v] assume the key role of lightning in the production of the first organic molecules on Earth. This theory was experimentally confirmed in the famous experiment of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in 1952, in which organic molecules such as amino acids, sugars, lipids and precursors of nucleic acids were formed from methane, ammonia, hydrogen and carbon monoxide dissolved in water under the influence of electric discharges [vi].
Besides, cosmic rays make a significant contribution to the background radiation – from 13% at sea level to 35% in the highlands. It should be noted that the higher above sea level, the more the radiation level increases due to cosmic rays: the crews of airliners, for example, will receive a double dose of radiation since they spend a lot of time at an altitude of about 10,000 meters above sea level.
In other words, cosmic rays are necessary for life, and at the same time, they are destructive. This situation is typical for nature: Nature needs an equilibrium – not too little, but not too much.
Let’s figure out together what mechanisms make it possible to keep the intensity of cosmic rays near the Earth’s surface at the level necessary for biological life. The intensity of cosmic rays in interstellar space is so high, that it could destroy life on Earth in a few hours.
The first level of protection (or the last – depending on which side to count from) is the Earth’s atmosphere. Cosmic rays, consisting mainly of high-energy protons, passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, collide with air molecules and slow down, forming a cascade of secondary particles. In the end, only the radiation weakened by the atmosphere reaches the Earth’s surface.
The second level is the Earth’s magnetic field. The geomagnetic field, due to its configuration, creates magnetic traps that capture particles of the solar wind and, partially, particles of cosmic rays, which are collected in the so-called radiation belts. That is, the magnetosphere does not allow streams of cosmic particles to approach Earth.
The third level is the solar wind. The solar wind is a stream of ionized particles ejected from the solar corona into outer space at a tremendous speed. It’s very dangerous for biological life on Earth, but thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects or captures most of the particles of the solar wind, its effect on Earth manifests itself only in the form of non-life-threatening geomagnetic storms and auroras, caused by the movement of ionized particles along the Earth’s magnetic field force lines.
At the same time, the solar wind plays a key role in protecting Earth from cosmic rays. The stream of particles from the solar wind collides with the stream of particles coming from other stars in our galaxy, and the stream of cosmic rays in an area called the heliopause, and thus blocks a significant part of it from penetration into the solar system. This phenomenon was discovered in 2007, when Voyager 2, having passed the boundary of termination shock far beyond Pluto’s orbit, recorded a sharp increase in the intensity of cosmic rays. That is, the solar system is surrounded by a kind of protective sphere made from the solar wind, “created” by the Sun itself.
Putting all the above facts together, it turns out that our galaxy and other sources of cosmic rays far beyond our galaxy, together with the Sun, the geomagnetic field, and the earth’s atmosphere, are regulators of the abiotic and, therefore, biotic factors of all ecosystems on Earth.
It turns out that life on Earth depends on the processes taking place on other stars and even in other galaxies. That is, our ecosystem is the entire Universe!
Taking into account the fact that Earth is not the center of the Universe, from all of the above, comes a very interesting conclusion: The Universe is a complex system in which all its components are connected and affect each other.
i Denis Frank Owen. “What is ecology?”, Oxford University Press, 1980
ii Wohletz, Ken, Were the Dark Ages Triggered by Volcano-Related Climate Changes in the 6th Century? Los Alamos National Laboratory LA-UR 00-4608
iii Stommel, Henry (1983). Volcano weather: the story of 1816, the year without a summer. Seven Seas Press. ISBN 0915160714.
iv Kovaltsov, Gennady A.; Mishev, Alexander; Usoskin, Ilya G. (2012). “A new model of cosmogenic production of radiocarbon 14C in the atmosphere”. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 337–338: 114–20
v Witzany, Guenther (2016). “Crucial steps to life: From chemical reactions to code using agents” . Biosystems. 140: 49–57.
vi Hill HG, Nuth JA (2003). “The catalytic potential of cosmic dust: implications for prebiotic chemistry in the solar nebula and other protoplanetary systems”. Astrobiology. 3 (2): 291–304
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