The Isotopic Imprint of Life on an Evolving Planet
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The Isotopic Imprint of Life on an Evolving Planet M.K. Lloyd1,2 · H.L.O. McClelland3,4 · G. Antler5 · A.S. Bradley6 · I. Halevy3 · C.K. Junium7 · S.D. Wankel8 · A.L. Zerkle9
Received: 25 December 2019 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Stable isotope compositions of biologically cycled elements encode information about the interaction between life and environment. On Earth, geochemical biomarkers have been used to probe the extent, nature, and activity of modern and ancient organisms. However, extracting biological information from stable isotopic compositions requires untangling the interconnected nature of the Earth’s biogeochemical system, and must be viewed through the lens of evolving metabolisms on an evolving planet. In this chapter, we provide an introduction to isotope geobiology and to the geobiological history of Earth. We discuss the isotope biogeochemistry of the biologically essential elements carbon, nitrogen and sulM.K. Lloyd and H.L.O. McClelland contributed equally to this work Reading Terrestrial Planet Evolution in Isotopes and Element Measurements Edited by Helmut Lammer, Bernard Marty, Aubrey L. Zerkle, Michel Blanc, Hugh O’Neill and Thorsten Kleine
B M.K. Lloyd
[email protected]
B H.L.O. McClelland
[email protected]
1
Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
2
Department of Geosciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
3
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
4
School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
5
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel
6
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA
7
Department of Earth Sciences, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
8
Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA
9
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Centre for Exoplanet Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
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fur, and we summarize their distribution on the modern Earth as an interconnected network of isotopically fractionated reservoirs with contrasting residence times. We show how this framework can be used to explore the evolution of life and environments on the ancient Earth, which is our closest accessible analogue for an extraterrestrial planet. Keywords Isotope geochemistry · Biogeochemical cycles · Geobiology · Evolution of life · Carbon · Nitrogen · Sulfur
1 Introduction Living things exist in thermodynamic disequilibrium with their environment. This can be reflected in the stable isotope ratios of materials that are produced by organisms or otherwise impacted by metabolic processes. Isotopic analyses can therefore be used to study life where direct observations are not possible. Isotopic information has been use
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