Is the earth a self-regulating organism? A new study suggests that our planet has built-in climate controls

The Permian-Triassic extinction, also called The Great Dying, has definitely earned the nickname. It was the largest mass extinction in the geological record, wiping out between 83 and 97 percent of all species living on Earth. Although the exact cause is debatable, ultimate volcanic activity that may have cooked the planet is juicy as the main culprit.

But somehow, despite being battered by asteroids and cosmic radiation, life on this planet has continued to exist for nearly four billion years. As our planet enters a Sixth mass extinctiondriven by a wave of human activity that has wiped out thousands of species, the question of how this works—in particular, how Earth appears to recover from large-scale disasters or extreme changes in the atmosphere or climate—become even more pressing.

It turns out the answer may be, in part, even stranger than anyone imagined. New research in the journal Scientific progress suggests that the Earth can self-regulate its temperature for hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, there are large-scale geological processes that appear to absorb carbon dioxide over enormous time scales. However, the timescales involved are far, far too long to correct for the sudden spike in carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuels, meaning the mechanism will not save us from climate change.

Konstantin Arnscheid and Daniel Rothman, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, compiled the data from multiple datasets documenting global temperature over the past 66 million years. These paleoclimate records include ice cores from Antarctica and the chemical composition of prehistoric marine fossils, which can tell us a lot about what Earth’s atmosphere was like in the distant past.

“All of this research is only possible because there has been great progress in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records,” Arnscheid said in statement. “We now have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart.”

The two MIT scientists found a strong model that suggests Earth uses feedback loops to keep its temperatures in a range where life can thrive. However, this happens on a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years, so while it suggests our planet will recover from anthropogenic climate change, it won’t happen soon enough to save us.

The finding has major implications for our understanding of the past, but also for how global warming is shaping the future of our home world. It even helps us better understand the evolution of planetary temperatures, which can make the search inhabited by alien exoplanets more fertile.

“You have a planet whose climate has undergone such dramatic external changes. Why has life survived all this time? One argument is that we need some kind of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheid said. “But such a mechanism has never been demonstrated by data to have consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”

Many scientists assume that the Earth has self-regulated its temperature throughout history, but this is difficult to prove. In the 1960s, the late inventor and conservationist James Lovelock applied Darwinian processes to the entire planet, rather than an individual organism, to explain how such a complex system evolved. He called this Gaia hypothesiswhich explains how the Earth and its biological systems have formed a feedback loop that keeps our planet favorable for living organisms.

That also helped explain it The Paradox of the Weak Sunfirst proposed by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Essentially, our Sun was much smaller and colder 4.5 billion years ago. Then, based on our current understanding of the life cycle of stars, the Sun would be about 30 percent darker than it is today. That, in turn, would make Earth too cold for liquid water, preventing life from forming — yet apparently that happened. So how did our rocky world achieve this?

The answer seems to lie in how carbon moves across the planet. A popular theory is that when our planet first formed, it had an atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that allowed it to absorb heat even though the Sun was colder.

A complex process known as silicate weathering it then removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and buries it at the bottom of the ocean. Over time, this cools the planet. Then something like large volcanic eruptions or people driving cars, pumping more carbon dioxide into the air, warming the planet again. Over the ages, Earth seems to balance between too cold and too hot, which explains why some call Earth a Planet Goldilocks.

The MIT study helps reconcile existing data with this long-standing theory, which helps us better understand our past and the consequences of uncontrolled climate change. And it would make sense that if these feedback loops exist on our planet, they might exist in other galaxies as well, informing the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

“On the one hand, that’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be reversed by this stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheid said. “But on the other hand, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our problems today.”

However, Arnscheidt’s model failed to account for this balance on time scales longer than a million years, so chance may also have played a huge role in the success of life on this scale.

“There are two camps: some say randomness is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheid said. “We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.” In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck probably also played a role in keeping the Earth continuously habitable.”

It may have been a combination of randomness and feedback loops such as silicate weathering that affected Earth’s temperature in the past. But in the future of humanity, free will – our politics, our consumption, our choices – will determine the temperature of the planet in the future. And we might just crush these natural systems so much that they can’t balance themselves, like famous potential theories life on mars.

“The heating of the Sun is slow enough to allow life to develop, a process that takes millions of years. “Unfortunately, the Sun is now too hot for further development of organic life on Earth,” Lovelock wrote in his 2019 book.Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence.” “The heat output from our star is too great for life to start again, as it did from the simple chemicals of the Archaean period between 4 billion and 2.5 billion years ago. If life on Earth is destroyed, it will not arise again.”