Rare Earth: early Earth warm not frozen (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, October 09, 2016, 01:27 (2757 days ago) @ David Turell

Life started very early on Earth, and during a time when the sun was weaker it should have been frozen over, but it wasn't:-https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161007090659.htm-"For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn't. Scientists thought they knew why, but a new modeling study from the Alternative Earths team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute has fired the lead actor in that long-accepted scenario.-"Humans worry about greenhouse gases, but between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago, microscopic ocean dwellers really needed them. The sun was 10 to 15 percent dimmer than it is today -- too weak to warm the planet on its own. Earth required a potent mix of heat-trapping gases to keep the oceans liquid and livable.-"For decades, atmospheric scientists cast methane in the leading role. The thinking was that methane, with 34 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide, could have reigned supreme for most of the first 3.5 billion years of Earth history, when oxygen was absent initially and little more than a whiff later on. (Nowadays oxygen is one-fifth of the air we breathe, and it destroys methane in a matter of years.)-***-"... "You can't get significant methane out of the ocean once there is sulfate."
Sulfate wasn't a factor until oxygen appeared in the atmosphere and triggered oxidative weathering of rocks on land. The breakdown of minerals such as pyrite produces sulfate, which then flows down rivers to the oceans. Less oxygen means less sulfate, but even 1 percent of the modern abundance is sufficient to kill methane, Olson said.-***-"Seawater sulfate is a problem for methane in two ways: Sulfate destroys methane directly, which limits how much of the gas can escape the oceans and accumulate in the atmosphere. Sulfate also limits the production of methane. Life can extract more energy by reducing sulfate than it can by making methane, so sulfate consumption dominates over methane production in nearly all marine environments.-The numerical model used in this study calculated sulfate reduction, methane production, and a broad array of other biogeochemical cycles in the ocean for the billion years between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago.-***-" These papers describe geochemical signatures in the rock record that track extremely low oxygen levels in the atmosphere, perhaps much less than 1 percent of modern values, up until about 800 million years ago, when they spiked dramatically.
Less oxygen seems like a good thing for methane, since they are incompatible gases, but with oxygen at such extremely low levels, another problem arises.-"'Free oxygen [O2] in the atmosphere is required to form a protective layer of ozone [O3], which can shield methane from photochemical destruction," Reinhard said. When the researchers ran their model with the lower oxygen estimates, the ozone shield never formed, leaving the modest puffs of methane that escaped the oceans at the mercy of destructive photochemistry.-***-"With methane demoted, scientists face a serious new challenge to determine the greenhouse cocktail that explains our planet's climate and life story, including a billion years devoid of glaciers, Lyons said. Knowing the right combination other warming agents, such as water vapor, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide, will also help us assess habitability of the hundreds of billions of other Earth-like planets estimated to reside in our galaxy.-Comment: Methane is a product of living metabolism, a very powerful heat trapper. And in the early years all life was in the oceans, which is why this study looked at ocean methane. But this study suggests we find another reason for warmer earth while life was evolving.Seems our planet got special treatment in the atmosphere it developed. God?