User:Pjaml/Biogeochemistry

History

Early History

Early Greeks established some of the core ideas of biogeochemistry, such as nature being comprised of cycles.

17th - 19th Centuries

Eighteenth century agricultural interest in soil chemistry led to better understanding of nutrients and their connection to biochemical processes. This relationship between the cycles of organic life and their chemical products was further expanded upon by Dumas and Boussingault in a 1844 paper that is considered an important milestone in the development of biogeochemistry. Lamarck first used the term biosphere in 1802, and others continued to develop the concept throughout the 19th century. Early climate research by scientists like Lyell, Tyndall, and Fourier began to link glaciation, weathering, and climate.

20th Century

The founder of modern biogeochemistry is considered to be Vladimir Vernadsky, a Russian and Ukrainian scientist whose 1926 book The Biosphere, in the tradition of Mendeleev, formulated a physics of the Earth as a living whole. Vernadsky distinguished three spheres, where a sphere was a concept similar to the concept of a phase-space. He observed that each sphere had its own laws of evolution, and that the higher spheres modified and dominated the lower:

1. Abiotic sphere – all the non-living energy and material processes
2. Biosphere – the life processes that live within the abiotic sphere
3. Nöesis or noosphere – the sphere of human cognitive process

Human activities (e.g., agriculture and industry) modify the biosphere and abiotic sphere. In the contemporary environment, the amount of influence humans have on the other two spheres is comparable to a geological force (see Anthropocene).

The American limnologist and geochemist G. Evelyn Hutchinson is credited with outlining the broad scope and principles of this new field. More recently, the basic elements of the discipline of biogeochemistry were restated and popularized by the British scientist and writer, James Lovelock, under the label of the Gaia Hypothesis. Lovelock emphasized a concept that life processes regulate the Earth through feedback mechanisms to keep it habitable. The research of Manfred Schidlowski was concerned with the biochemistry of the Early Earth.