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Science

When Microbes Ate the Ocean 318

Posted by Zonk from the wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka dept.
museumpeace writes "When /. discussed a story about microbes that could break down water as a hydrogen source, many commentors went off on a tangent joking about runaway germs eating the oceans. Now, prof Joe Kirschvink and students at CalTech propose that indeed, the worst iceage ever, which nearly ended life on earth 2.3 billion years ago, was the result of algae evolving the ability to break down water and flooding the atmosphere with oxygen. The absence of oxygen consuming organisms at that time is said to have lead to destruction of atmospheric methane which had hitherto warmed the earth. The professor concludes: 'We haven't had a Snowball in the past 630 million years, and because the sun is warmer now it may be harder to get into the right condition. But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.'"
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When Microbes Ate the Ocean More

When Microbes Ate the Ocean

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  • Correction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Propaganda13 ( 312548 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:24PM (#13265965)
    It didn't end all life on Earth, and it probably wouldn't if it happened again.

    • Re:Correction (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spikexyz ( 403776 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:33PM (#13266003)
      Yes, See SLIMES (subsurface lithoautrophic microbial ecosystems) that exist deep in the earth *completely* disconnected from surface activity. They get heat from the earth's core and food from breaking down rocks; these would probably survive and in time could recolonize the surface.

      See: Wilson, E.O. The Future of Life, 2002

    • Re:Correction (Score:5, Funny)

      by SlashdotOgre ( 739181 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:40PM (#13266028) Journal
      Well the microbes might not, but my Ice-Nine will!
      • Well the microbes might not, but my Ice-Nine will!
        Oh sure, all of Slashdot is one big Grandfalloon... as is the human race...

      • Re:Correction (Score:4, Funny)

        by The Fun Guy ( 21791 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @10:30PM (#13266607) Homepage Journal
        Ice-Nine

        Good lord, a literary reference [vonnegutweb.com] on /.? Without being worked into a goatse, "in Soviet Russia" or "4. Profit!" gag?

        I salute you, sir/madam!
        • i figured he was refering to this
          http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=041028

          who would think that he would refer to something other than one of the better web comics out there.

          • Re:Correction (Score:3, Interesting)

            by The Fun Guy ( 21791 )
            We're deeply offtopic here, but if you take a look at the title of that day's webcomic, it reads "Episode 476: Red Mage in the Cradle", obviously a reference to the book "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut. This novel, written in 1963, is where Ice-9 is orignally introduced as a theoretical form of water which solidifies at room temperature, and is thermodynamically preferred over normal ice. Since contact with it would cause all water everywhere to solidify instantly, Ice-9 has the potential to freeze the wor

    • Re:Correction (Score:4, Funny)

      by Bi()hazard ( 323405 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:14PM (#13266138) Homepage Journal
      How are you gentlemen!!

      In a little while you'll notice that several test tubes containing water-processing microbes have gone missing from laboratories around the world. Well, it's in safe hands. If you want them eliminated, you'll have to pay me...one million dollars!

      Gentlemen, you have five days to come up with one million dollars. If you fail to do so, we'll set loose the microbes and destroy the world.

      Gentlemen, silence! I didn't spend six years in evil medical school to make things so easy for you. The million dollar payment must be delivered to us in the space shuttle Discovery, with a crew of operators who will join our organization. To ensure that pirates (we are all well aware that pirates are the greatest threat of the digital age) do not hijack the shuttle, it must be loaded with an arsenal of fully functional nuclear weapons.

      Upon taking possession of our one million dollars and its vessel, we will compensate the cooperative nations of the world by eliminating terrorism once and for all-by monopolizing it. Just as the FCC is eliminating dangerous rogue broadband providers, we will eliminate rogue terrorists and consolidate operations into a single, efficient, capitalistic evil organization. Cooperation is the only option. The power of Capitalism compels you! The power of Capitalism compels you! I trust you will do the right thing, gentlemen. So long.
    • Nice way to package up a theory that there was life on mars and simultaneously answer the "what happened to all the water" question.
    • i took histrorical geologly in uni, and the "snowball earth" is just a theory and a poor one at that. Its centers aroudn some event setting off a runaway glaciation untill the entire earth was covered in snow.

      If it DID happen and all life was extingiushed, and the entire world was coverd in snow/ice, the snow would reflect sunlight and lower the tempatures even more, also block sunlight from heating the oceans and lower temps yet again.

      you would never beable to get out of the iceage again or something like

      • Re:Correction (Score:5, Informative)

        by maxpublic ( 450413 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @09:50PM (#13266451) Homepage
        you would never beable to get out of the iceage again or something like that.

        That conundrum was solved over 30 years ago. As glaciation reaches the equator and covers the oceans (not to mention all other forms of liquid water) precipitation drops to virtually zero - much like the conditions you see at Amundsen-Scott in Antarctica. That means that carbon dioxide, which is usually washed out of the atmosphere via rain, slowly accumulates over time. And I do mean slowly, since the primary form of input is through volcanic eruption.

        In any event, there's eventually enough carbon dioxide in the air that sunlight reflecting from the ice gets trapped between the ice and the carbon dioxide layer in the atmosphere. This heats up the atmosphere, which starts to melt the ice, which means less sunlight is reflected from the ice and more is trapped in the atmosphere, which means things get hotter and more ice melts, etc. etc. Your snowball world begins to melt and things start swinging wildly towards the other end of the spectrum: a Venus-like hothouse.

        What's to stop a runaway greenhouse effect? Well, with the ice melting and free water making a reappearance you once again get clouds. And that means rain. And that means that some of the carbon dioxide gets washed out of the atmosphere. The more ice that melts the more rain there is the more the carbon dioxide layer begins to fail.

        Snowball Earths can't be sustained indefinitely, nor can greenhouse Earths, so long as there's active volcanism.

        Max

  • Terraforming and the beginning of life (Score:4, Interesting)

    by loggia ( 309962 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:26PM (#13265969)
    While this sounds pretty bad, it seems that this was nature's way of "terraforming" our planet. It seems these bacteria might be handy for naturally creating other worlds we can inhabit. After all, we already have organisms that breathe oxygen.
  • ...is to just rename the planet. If we start calling Earth by a new name, say "Hoth" for example, the Earth will become an ice planet. Just get a significant number of the inhabitants of the planet to believe anything and it will come to pass. The boiling point of water for instance could easily be lowered or raised if we all, as a collective, just believed it to be possible for water to boil at, say... 90 degrees F. It's simple really. Just basic quantum fizziks with a little new ageyness thrown in for good measure. We now return you to your regularly scheduled propaganda.

  • Who Ate the Ocean? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:29PM (#13265985)
    I gotta get out more... I read the headline as when Microsoft Ate the Ocean.

    • Re:Who Ate the Ocean? (Score:5, Funny)

      by fossa ( 212602 ) <pat7@gmx. n e t> on Sunday August 07, 2005 @09:08PM (#13266342) Journal

      I read once read an eastern (China?) story about a couple brothers with super powers. One of the brothers could swallow the sea. A prince or someone important made him swallow the sea, then went into the dry sea bed to collect treasures. The brother began to get tired, and motioned the prince to return. The prince ignored him and was eventually drowned when the brother had to spit the sea back out... The brothers were then beheaded or something for killing the prince (I think they get away in the end, can't really remember). Not sure why I wanted to share that.

      • I believe you are looking for "The Five Chinese Brothers" by Claire Huchet Bishop. This was one of my favorite stories as a small child. And by the way, it was just a little boy that he was helping to fish - not a prince - that was drowned. The other brothers then trade places when they try and execute the first brother (one couldn't be beheaded, one couldn't be drown, and one couldn't be burned). At least this is how I remember it, I could be wrong on some of the brothers. Anyway, I thought I'd reply

  • Science is hard (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ndansmith ( 582590 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:33PM (#13266005)
    Determing the cause of a global freeze which we think happened 2.3 billion years ago has got to be pretty tough. Their actual article is not linked, so does anyone have a link or an idea about how they determined this?
    • Here is a link to their paper:

      http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0504878102v1.pdf [pnas.org]

    • Re:Science is hard (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Quadraginta ( 902985 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:47PM (#13266275)
      I don't have a subscription to PNAS, so I could only read the abstract, but for what it's worth I think it goes like this:

      All the evidence seems to be geochemical, e.g. they look at the chemical composition of rocks of a certain age and, knowing the chemical reactions that produce that composition, infer the chemical composition and temperature of the atmosphere at the time. This is not unlike the way the Mars Rovers are using the chemical composition of rocks on Mars to acquire evidence for or against the prior existence of liquid water.

      They take for granted that everyone agrees there was a massive glaciation (the "snowball") at a certain time long in the past, and that the early atmosphere was reducing (high in methane, ammonia and water, low in oxygen and CO2), but underwent at another certain time, long in the past, and because of the evolution of photosynthetic organisms (the cyanobacteria), a fairly rapid change to an oxidizing system (high in free oxygen and CO2, low in methane and ammonia).

      What they suggest is that the two events are not unconnected. By discarding certain evidence and adducing other, they argue the two events may be close in time. Hence there might be some connection.

      The connection they suggest revolves around the facts that methane is a known powerful greenhouse gas, and the Sun was cooler in those days than it is now. I speculate they suggest the early Earth was unglaciated because large amounts of methane gave a strong greenhouse effect that compensated for the lower solar illumination.

      But then the evil cyanobacteria (cue Imperial March music) evolved and started producing free oxygen like crazy, which reacted with the methane to produce water and CO2. Away goes the methane, away goes the greenhouse effect (since CO2 is less effective as a greenhouse gas than methane), and the Earth plunges into the deepfreeze.

      Later, the Sun heats up a bit, so less greenhouse effect will keep the temps up, and also aerobic organisms start exhaling CO2 and farting a bit of methane, and all is once again serene.

      The "close call" is because if the Earth were further from the Sun, like near the orbit of Mars, then there wouldn't be any replacement CO2 greenhouse effect, because the CO2 would just freeze out as dry ice.
    • If I recall correctly, weren't they linked to manganese nodules in shallow oceans?

  • Who will do the destroying? (Score:5, Funny)

    by unorthod0x ( 263821 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:37PM (#13266018)
    But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.

    There's one unwavering faith I have in the human race: The ability to destroy things. That evil algae doesn't stand a chance!

  • I smell a Blockbuster... (Score:5, Funny)

    by FrankieBoy ( 452356 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:43PM (#13266034)
    Bill Paxton as the divorced Oceanographer who's trying to balance being a father to his 18 year-old son with his job.

    Susan Sarandon as the head of the Governments Task Force on the Environment. She's tough and passionate but is there anything she can do?

    Alec Baldwin as the President whos up for re-election. Can he fend off the powerful lobbyists yet still keep his office?

    Jennifer Lopez is the scientist with a solution, but no one will listen due to her reputation as being an alarmist.

    Wil Wheaton with a cameo as The Beaver.

    Steven Spielberg is rumored to be interested.

  • I read that story... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phorest ( 877315 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:44PM (#13266036) Journal
    Definitely must be Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle [amazon.com]!

    • Re:I read that story... (Score:4, Informative)

      by delibes ( 303485 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:57PM (#13266083)
      Yes, a good bit of sci-fi really. But without giving too much away, it was "Ice 9" and not some algae/bacteria that caused the trouble. On another tangent to the tangent, Ice 9 is a great Joe Satriani track.

      Oh wow! I just checked the Wikipedia article - "The book is currently being adapted into script form by Richard Kelly, the writer and director of Donnie Darko.". Yay!

  • ....in Stephenson's Zodiac?
  • But if it ever happens, all life on Earth would likely be destroyed.

    In the past 30 odd years that I'm running around on this globe, this planet has been threatened so often with destruction that I'm not remotely worried about it anymore. On the scale of the universe we're nothing, both in size and in age.

    That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to keep the planet in the best possible shape of course!
    • In the past 30 odd years that I'm running around on this globe, this planet has been threatened so often with destruction that I'm not remotely worried about it anymore.

      The alarmists aren't happy unless they're running around screaming "the sky is falling!". They're only really satisfied if they can convince you to do the same. Of course, if you don't they can always take the consolation prize of claiming that you're morally bankrupt for not panicking in the manner in which they approve.

      Thing is, it's so

  • I wonder... (Mars climate evolution) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by scotty777 ( 681923 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:14PM (#13266134) Journal
    Did this happen to Mars?

    The article points out that if Earth was a bit farther away from the Sun, then the Carbon Dioxide would have frozen out of the atmosphere, thus preventing that particular greenhouse gas from bringing on a subsequent warming period. Mars has almost exactly that situation. One or the other of the poles is always cold enough to freeze Carbon Dioxide out of its atmosphere. Too little greenhouse gas ==>>planet stays too cold==>> water permenantly locked up as ice.

    With the discoveries of the last couple of years we know Mars has lots of water and Carbon Dioxide, and Methane to boot! AND we know that temperatures permitted liquid surface water in the distant past.

    Is this reasonable? Could cyanobacteria have doomed Mars? anyone?

    • Re:I wonder... (Mars climate evolution) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:44PM (#13266259) Homepage
      I think that it is more likely that Mars was doomed by its relatively small mass. Its escape velocity is only 5 km/s, and it doesn't have a strong magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind. This means that the atmosphere will rapidly leak into space.

      • Now that is one interesting question, worthy of a back of the envelope calculation. Does the lower escape velocity of Mars (5 km/s) versus Earth (11 km/s) really doom Mars to far less atmosphere than the Earth?

        If we integrate the Maxwell-Boltzmann probability distribution of the speed of gas molecules from the escape velocity of a planet to infinity, we get the fraction of gas molecules that at any instant are going faster than the escape velocity. Presumably if this fraction is higher than some limi

  • Wonder what would happen if we eliminated 'overpopulation' of the human species? Perhaps the lack of oxygen consuming beings would cause an ice age? Would that be a kicker.

  • important reminder (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cahiha ( 873942 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:31PM (#13266205)
    It's been known for a long time that the oxygen in earth's atmosphere first arose as the result of microbial action. It's pretty self-evident that that must have gone along with major climatic changes. What appears to be new about this story is that they link a particular glaciation event to this change in the planet's atmosphere.

    The scientific details aside, this story is an important reminder: our global climate is not necessarily stable. Earth could become a frozen snowball again, or it could become like Venus. Furthermore, we don't know what would trigger either transition (it's possible, for example, that short term global warming leads to long-term freezing).

    The best way of preventing that for the time being is to drastically reduce our changes to the planet's atmosphere because we know that, without human intervention, the global climate has at least supported higher life forms for hundreds of millions of years.

    • No, the best plan is to work to produce self sustaining off planet / underwater / deep-antarctic colonies. That way when the climate changes it'll just be expensive rather than fatal to the species.

  • Saving the Planet? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cytlid ( 95255 ) * on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:31PM (#13266206)
    The absence of oxygen consuming organisms at that time is said to have lead to destruction of atmospheric methane which had hitherto warmed the earth.

      So if I am generating methane I'm really saving the planet? Will someone explain this to my wife?
  • Title would be "Amoebic Shark". :)
  • is that these organisms, being carbon-based lifeforms, consist of more than just water, so they need to consume nutrients besides water to multiply, and probably just to survive at all.

    As long as those nutrients remain available, the organisms can go on converting water, but as soon as the available amount of nutrients starts falling, the population growth will decrease as well.

    Even if we suppose for the moment that the organisms are immortal and are able to survive on water and solar energy alone, they can

  • It has to be said (Score:3, Funny)

    by worst_name_ever ( 633374 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @09:49PM (#13266448)
    "Those crazy microbes are going to blow up the ocean!"
  • How do bacteria get the energy to break H and O apart? It's a difficult chemical reaction (the atoms are tightly bound). All of that energy has to come from somewhere (the sun?).

  • much better article (Score:3, Informative)

    by uncadonna ( 85026 ) <`mtobis' `at' `gmail.com'> on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:00PM (#13266736) Homepage Journal
    here [astrobio.net].

    Hey editors, Google is your friend!

  • typical wired pseudo-journalism... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tongue ( 30814 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @12:16AM (#13267033) Homepage
    This is what happens when consumer journalists are allowed to write stories about real science.

    Newsflash: nearly all autotrophic life on earth (read: photosynthetic life, commonly known as plants) breaks down water when it creates glucose. Basically what the students have figured out is that cyanobacteria came up with a significant part of the chemical reactions that just about every plant on earth uses now, rather than those reactions evolving further down the chain.

    The fact that this occured isn't new. at all. originally it was thought that the O2 that plants make came from the C02 they take in, but it was demonstrated quite some time ago that the plants actually split water and use the oxygens from that for the 02.

    conclusion: cnet writers are idiots.

  • Imediate Action Now! (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheLoneCabbage ( 323135 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @02:54AM (#13267531) Homepage
    I demand that the government employ thousands of (** remove** astronomers) biologists to blanket the (** remove** sky ) ocean watching out for these killer (** remove** aseroids ) microbes. At the moment we can only observe .00001% of the (** remove** sky ) marine biosphere. We need this protection now!

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