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The Gaia Hypothesis - Fact or Fancy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2009

J.C.A. Craik
J.C.A. Craik
Affiliation:
Grendon, Barcaldine, Oban, Argyll, PA37 1SG
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Extract

Many large-scale properties of the biosphere are affected or determined by the activities of living organisms and are maintained at remarkably constant values over long periods. For example, the oxygen content of the atmosphere appears to have been maintained near its present value for hundreds of millions of years, despite the rapid flux of oxygen between production by plants and consumption by animals and decomposing microorganisms. (In this article, I shall use 'biosphere' to denote the whole of the concentric shell of the planet Earth which holds life, and 'biota' to mean all living organisms. Others have sometimes used 'biosphere' to mean the latter.) Lovelock was the first to show clearly how the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, unlike that of Mars or Venus, was held well away from thermodynamic equilibrium by the activities of living organisms (Lovelock, 1983). Other biospheric properties, such as temperature and oceanic pH and salinity, have similarly remained fairly constant despite the existence of large perturbing influences (Lovelock, 1979).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , November 1989 , pp. 759 - 768
Copyright
Copyright © Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 1989

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