Biomass recycling and Earth's early phosphorus cycle
Date
22/11/2017Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Phosphorus sets the pace of marine biological productivity on geological time scales. Recent estimates of Precambrian phosphorus levels suggest a severe deficit of this macronutrient, with the depletion attributed to scavenging by iron minerals. We propose that the size of the marine phosphorus reservoir was instead constrained by muted liberation of phosphorus during the remineralization of biomass. In the modern ocean, most biomass-bound phosphorus gets aerobically recycled; but a dearth of oxidizing power in Earth’s early oceans would have limited the stoichiometric capacity for remineralization, particularly during the Archean. The resulting low phosphorus concentrations would have substantially hampered primary productivity, contributing to the delayed rise of atmospheric oxygen.
Citation
Kipp , M & Stueeken , E E 2017 , ' Biomass recycling and Earth's early phosphorus cycle ' , Science Advances , vol. 3 , no. 11 , eaao4795 . https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao4795
Publication
Science Advances
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2375-2548Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2017 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This work was supported by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship DGE-1256082 to M.A.K., a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship to E.E.S., NASA Exobiology grant NNX16AI37G, and NASA Astrobiology Institute grant NNA13AA93A.Collections
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