Privileged Planet: continental subduction allows life (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 23:10 (1368 days ago) @ David Turell

A review of this vital process:

https://evolutionnews.org/2021/02/what-subduction-teaches-about-intelligent-design/

"In brief, what happens is that organisms in the oceans consume elements vital for life — carbon, phosphorous, nitrogen, sulfur — and then they die and sink to the bottom of the oceans where they get buried in sediment. If this process continues unabated then over time, ocean sediment will become a sink that accumulates life-necessary elements. Over time these elements will be segregated from the biosphere, no longer available for living organisms to use and thrive.

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"Thankfully, there is a solution for this problem on earth, and it’s called plate tectonics — or more specifically, subduction. In plate tectonics, ocean sediment is dragged down through subduction deep into the earth on the surface of the subducting slab. When material on the slab reaches a certain depth, part of the slab melts (especially the sediments on top of the slab), and the elements travel back up to the earth through plumes of magma. There they are finally released back into earth’s surface environment through volcanoes.

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"Our results suggest that subduction, worldwide, hosts large sources of deep H2 and abiotic CH4, potentially providing energy to the overlying subsurface biosphere in the forearc regions of convergent margins. … Geochemical data from forearc mud volcanos and hydrothermal seeps suggest that life exists as deep as 15 km below the surface at convergent margins and that the essential carbon to sustain deep microbiological habitats in the forearc of convergent plate margins is provided by the metamorphic recycling of subducting slabs. … [O]ur results suggest that high-pressure serpentinization is potentially an important source of reduced volatiles to the deep subsurface biospheres of convergent margins. Considering that low temperature and pressure serpentinization also takes place at subduction zones in the shallow forearc mantle and in obducted ophiolites, we propose that convergent margins may have represented the major source of H2 and abiotic CH4 from different depths to the surface biosphere."

Comment: A highly informative article I've greatly condensed. We can't live into the future without this process continuing. Any other planetary system must have this process for life to exist, based on our knowledge of our Earth. Design must be recognized.