![]() Over time, however, scientific opposition to Gaia waned. “Am I the only biologist to suffer a nasty twitch, a feeling of unreality, when the media invite me yet again to take it seriously?” The microbiologist John Postgate was especially vehement: “Gaia - the Great Earth Mother! The planetary organism!” he wrote in New Scientist. “I would prefer that the Gaia hypothesis be restricted to its natural habitat of station bookstalls, rather than polluting works of serious scholarship,” the evolutionary biologist Graham Bell wrote in 1987. Conceived by the British chemist James Lovelock in the early 1970s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the living and nonliving elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.”Īlthough this bold idea found an enthusiastic audience among the general public, many scientists criticized and ridiculed it. The history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth.įaced with this preponderance of evidence, it is time to revive an idea that was once roundly mocked: the Gaia hypothesis. In truth, we are far from the only creatures with such power, nor are we the first species to devastate the global ecosystem. “ I don’t believe it,” President Trump said in response to one of his administration’s reports on anthropogenic climate change. One of the many obstacles to reckoning with global warming is the stubborn notion that humans are not powerful enough to affect the entire planet. By spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we have drastically altered the planet’s response to solar radiation, spiking global temperatures, raising sea levels and intensifying storms. Humans are the most extreme example of a creature transforming Earth. We now have compelling evidence that microbes are involved in numerous geological processes some scientists think they played a role in forming the continents. Much of this ecology has only recently been discovered or understood. The Amazon’s rain ritual is just one of the many astonishing ways in which living creatures transform their environments and the planet as a whole. Some scientists have concluded that through long-range atmospheric ripple effects the Amazon contributes to rainfall in places as far away as Canada. All of the water that gushes upward from the Amazon forms an enormous flying river, which brings precipitation to farms and cities throughout South America. Forests are vital pumps of Earth’s circulatory system. ![]() The Amazon sustains much more than itself, however. ![]() With so much water in the air and so many minute particles on which the water can condense, rain clouds quickly form. The wet breath of the forest, peppered with microbes and organic residues, creates ideal conditions for rain. The wind sweeps bacteria, pollen, leaf fragments and bits of insect shells into the atmosphere. Trees saturate the air with gaseous compounds and salts. All of that lush vegetation releases 20 billion tons of water vapor into the sky every day. Life in the Amazon does not simply receive rain - it summons it. Rain forests happen where it happens to rain.īut that’s only half the story. Intense equatorial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean, and bordering mountains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense. This deluge is partly due to geographical serendipity. For more information, go to year the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon rain forest and all the creatures that depend on them are drenched in seven feet of rain - four times the annual rainfall in London. This product can expose you to chemicals, including Cumene and Toluene which are known to the State of California to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm.
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