What greater spatial and temporal geochemistry detail can add to geobiology
Abstract
Interaction between life and surrounding chemical environments is a defining component of the field of geobiology, one where the spatial scales vary from molecular to global, and the temporal scales of consideration span through deep time and include reaction times from femtoseconds to millennia. Sometimes the details in these interactions are as simple as identifying key microbial species present and changes in key chemical compounds, but there is a richness in the complexity of many systems only greater detail and an eye for the unseen can deliver. Determining the appropriate scale of measurement and the chemical and biological details needed to unravel these sometimes complex interactions is a key towards continuing the rapid and exciting pace of discovery for the field. Focusing on the geochemical side of this process, we have shown that fine-scale spatial and temporal measurements of redox compounds central to microbial metabolisms can illuminate new avenues of possible interactions between life and its surroundings. Additionally, new techniques supplying greater chemical and mineralogical detail can also shed new light on microbial interactions with earth systems. Chemical measurements approaching the chemical environment through time a single microbe may experience show us that some systems display a remarkably chaotic and variable chemical environment that may offer added ecological pressure on microbial function and community structure. New details of the chemical environment, particularly via the coupling of different element cycles such as sulfur and carbon, show us that life and its chemical surroundings can significantly interact beyond metabolisms. And the interaction between geomicrobial niches in even different materials such as sediments and the water column, can be strongly coupled behavior through biotic and abiotic interactions.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.B21E0475D
- Keywords:
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- 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0419 Biomineralization;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0424 Biosignatures and proxies;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0444 Evolutionary geobiology;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES