Link established with emerging microbial activity on the primitive Earth

In favour of the interdisciplinarity which the University PSL is committed to, and which is reflected in the creation in 2015 of the interdisciplinary research project "Origins and conditions of the appearance of life" (OCAV), researchers from the Paris Observatory - PSL, from the ENS - PSL within the Institute of Biology, and from the CNRS within the UMI iGLOBES at the University of Arizona, have pooled their own expertise and simulation methods relating to planetary modelling on the one hand and ecological systems on the other.

This highly interdisciplinary work, identified since the beginning of the OCAV project as a unique contribution of PSL on this theme, consisted in coupling these two approaches to obtain the coupled evolution of atmospheric composition, climate, and biological activity. The first methane consuming and producing ecosystems, supposed to have appeared on Earth before photosynthesis more than 3.5 billion years ago, represent the elementary system for validating the relevance of this new approach to quantify the mutual impact of biological activity on climate and atmospheric composition.

This study shows that between 3.5 and 4 billion years before our era, the evolution of primitive ecosystems based on the production and consumption of methane, an atmospheric gas with a strong greenhouse effect, influenced, in connection with the carbon cycle, the terrestrial climate, the glacial cycles and thus the habitability of our planet. Biological activity thus exerted strong control over the atmosphere and climate very early in the history of our planet, several hundred million years before the appearance of the first oxygenated photosynthetic organisms led to the emergence of oxygen as a major gas in our atmosphere.

This general approach is now being applied to quantify the possibility of methanogenic activity at the heart of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn for which the Cassini probe measured the composition of the jets ejected at the surface, and on Mars, whose deep ground may have been habitable and inhabited throughout the last 4 billion years. The atmospheric biosignature of these ecosystems being very specific to them, this study suggests that the detection of methanogenic activity could be envisaged beyond our solar system, for Earth-like exoplanets that would offer conditions similar to those of the primitive Earth.

"Co-evolution of primitive methane-cycling ecosystems and early Earth’s atmosphere and climate"
Article published in Nature magazine, June 1, 2020.	by Boris Sauterey (post-doctoral student at IRIS Ocav) in collaboration with Benjamin Charnay (CNRS researcher), Antonin Affholder (doctoral student ENS - PSL, Paris Observatory - PSL), Stéphane Mazevet (OCAV project leader and CNRS research director at the Paris Observatory - PSL) and Régis Ferrière (ENS Institute of Biology - PSL).

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Dernière modification le 21 décembre 2021