History of Earth predicts its future

My interest in the native plant movement began about 25 years ago when my neighborhood park was designated as a “natural area” by San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department.  My park was only one of 33 parks in San Francisco that were designated as a “natural area.” 

What did it mean to be a “natural area?”  As I studied the plans, my reaction was primarily to the proposed destruction of non-native plants and trees.  Later I realized that the eradication of non-native plants and trees would be accomplished with herbicides. 

How could the creation of native plant gardens justify the destruction of our urban forest using herbicides?  I have spent the last 25 years trying to answer that question.  There are many useful lines of inquiry in the search for the answer, but the approach that has been most helpful to my understanding of the futility of the undertaking has been the study of the physical and biological forces that created Earth and its inhabitants.  Today, I will take you on an abbreviated journey of the past 4.6 billion years of events on Earth that have resulted in present-day nature, drawing from A Brief History of Earth by Andrew Knoll, Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. (1)

Gravity “created” the Earth

“Gravity is the architect of our universe.”  Gravity is the attraction of objects to one another in proportion to their mass and proximity that over billions of years accumulated the elements dispersed in Earth’s universe.  As these dispersed objects coalesced into stars, planets, moons, and asteroids, Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago.

“Earth is a rocky ball.”  Its inner core is solid, composed mostly of iron.  Earth’s molten outer core moves by convection as hotter, denser material near the base rises and cooler, less dense matter toward the top sinks.  This circular motion generates electrical current that creates the Earth’s magnetic field.  The mantle is composed of the molten magma that emerges on the surface crust of Earth where tectonic plates are separating and when volcanoes erupt where tectonic plates submerge into the mantle. The crust of Earth that is visible to us is only 1% of Earth’s mass.

Physical Earth

The crust of Earth is composed of plates that are moved on the surface of the Earth by the convection current of the mantle.  Some of the plates are moving away from one another where they meet.  As the plates separate, molten magma from the mantle is pushed through the crust, forming new crust.  The North American and Eurasian plates are moving apart in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at the rate of about 1 inch per year. 

Since the Earth is not getting bigger, the expanding crust collides with adjacent plates.  In some places, the collision of the plates pushes up the crust into mountain ranges.  The Himalayan mountain range is the result of the collision of the Indo-Australian and the Eurasian Plates, a process that continues today.

In other places, the expanding crust is pushed below the adjacent plate in subduction zones, where the crust dives below the crust into the mantle.  Earthquakes are common in subduction zones and the subducting plate triggers volcanic eruptions in the overriding plate.  Earthquakes are also common where adjacent plates are grinding against one another in opposite directions, as is the case on the coast of California.

The movement of tectonic plates has assembled and reassembled the Earth’s continents many times. The entire history of the configuration of continents is not known to us because of the cycle of the crust emerging from the mantle only to return to the mantle about 180 million years later.  We know that all continents were fused into a single continent, named Pangea, about 350 million years ago and began to break up 200 million years ago.  Much of life as we know it evolved on Earth while the continents were fused, which is one of the reasons why all life on Earth is related.  Geographic isolation of species results in more biodiversity as genetic drift and different environments result in greater speciation.  Geologists believe such continental mergers are likely in the distant future.  

Earth’s oceans and atmosphere were formed within the first 100 million years of its birth.  Continents were visible above oceans, but small compared to their present size.  The absence of oxygen in the air at that early stage was the most significant difference between present and early Earth.

Biological Earth

Life, as presently defined, requires growth and reproduction, metabolism, and evolution. (I say, “presently defined” because debate continues about defining viruses as life since they do not meet all criteria.)  The chemical components required to perform the functions of life and the natural processes to combine them (such as heat and lightning) were available on Earth for millions of years before they combined to perform the functions of life.  Precisely how and when that happened on Earth is studied intensely, but not conclusively known, although Professor Knoll describes theoretical possibilities. 

The geological record suggests that “Earth has been a biological planet for most of its long history.” Microbes may have been living on Earth 4 billion years ago.  Climate on Earth was warm at that time for the same reason the climate is warming today.  The atmosphere was composed primarily of carbon dioxide (the greenhouse gas that traps heat on the surface of the Earth) and nitrogen:  “…life emerged on an Earth barely recognizable to the modern eye—lots of water and not much land, lots of carbon dioxide but little or no oxygen…”

Oxygen Earth

Two of the three domains of life were capable of living without oxygen:  archaea and bacteria.  Archaea are single-cells without nuclei.  We are all too familiar with bacteria, as they are as much a part of our bodies as our own cells.  Oxygen was the prerequisite for the evolution of the third domain of life, eukarya.  The kingdoms of eukarya most familiar to us are plants, animals, and fungi. 

Oxygen arrived on Earth when early life forms evolved the ability to photosynthesize, the process by which plants (and some other organisms) use sunlight to synthesize food from carbon dioxide and water, generating oxygen as a byproduct.  This transition occurred about 2.4 billion years ago, as measured by the absence of iron on the seafloor after that time. 

Photosynthesis alone could not have accomplished the transformation of Earth’s atmosphere to the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen needed to support complex life on our planet because photosynthesis also requires nutrients as well as sunlight and water.  Phosphorous weathers from rocks, a process that was initially limited by the small amount of land above sea level.  As the planet matured, more land emerged from the sea, making more phosphorous available to photosynthesizing organisms.  Photosynthesis was also enhanced when some bacteria and archaea evolved the ability to convert nitrogen gas into biologically usable molecules, a process called nitrogen-fixing.  Many plants in the legume family are capable of nitrogen-fixing today.

Extinctions of the past predict extinctions of the future

There have been five major extinction events in the past 500 million years that changed the course of evolution of life on Earth and at least 20 mass extinctions in total (2).  The first representatives of all modern animal phyla (a taxonomic classification between kingdom and class) evolved during the Cambrian Period (541-486 million years ago).  All extinction events were associated with radical changes in the climate.  Many of the changes in the climate were caused by changes in the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere.  All these catastrophic events were natural events, not caused by the activities of humans because they all occurred long before the advent of human evolution. 

The third and biggest extinction event occurred 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian geologic period, when more than 90% of marine animals and 70% of terrestrial species disappeared.  At that time, continents were fused into the single supercontinent of Pangea.  The extinction of most life on Earth was caused by the sudden and catastrophic change in the atmosphere–and therefore the climate–by an episode of volcanism in Siberia “a million times greater than any volcanism ever witnessed by humans” or our primate ancestors.  Gases emitted by volcanism at the end of the Permian period rapidly increased the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and oceans by several times greater than before that event.  “It would take 10 million years for life to reassemble into something approaching the complexity of the ecosystems that preceded it. The world that emerged from the volcanic dust was unlike anything that came before.” (2) The current increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels by human activities is comparable to this event and is expected to cause the sixth great extinction on Earth.  

The fifth and most recent massive extinction event occurred 66 million years ago, bringing 170 million years of dinosaur evolution to an abrupt end. The entire environment of the planet was radically and suddenly altered by the impact of an asteroid 7 miles in diameter that landed on what is now the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.  The impact engulfed Earth in a dust cloud that precipitated the equivalent of a nuclear winter, killing most vegetation and animals adapted to a much warmer climate.  As with all massive extinctions, it took millions of years for plants and animals to slowly evolve adaptations to the new environment.  Dinosaurs did not evolve again, a reminder that evolution does not necessarily repeat itself (although birds evolved from dinosaurs).  Although there were small mammals during the dinosaur age, the disappearance of dinosaurs and corresponding changes in the climate introduced the age of mammals, including the human lineage about 300,000 years ago.  When multiple animal groups disappear it creates opportunities by reducing competition between groups.

What can we learn from the history of Earth?

If a native plant advocate were reading this abbreviated history of Earth, these are the lessons I would hope they might learn from it:

• When the climate changes, life on Earth changes with it.
• We are embarked on a radical, human-induced change in the climate that we are unwilling to stop. Plants and animals will move, adapt, or die. We should not stand in their way.
• All life on Earth is related.  All life is made of the same chemical components and shares common ancestors. 
• Evolution has not stopped, nor will it in the future because physical Earth is constantly changing and biological Earth follows it. 
• Changes in nature are neither good nor bad.  There are pros and cons to most changes in nature.  A negative or positive judgment depends on the perspective of the observer.  Is the assessment made by a plant or an animal, an insect or a bird, an anteater or an ant, a predator or prey, etc.? Humans are not the only animals affected by changes in the environment and our judgment of the effects are rarely the same as other species.
• Resisting change in the environment is futile.  Physical and biological forces of nature are more powerful than our puny attempts to prevent them.
• The human race can kill itself, but it cannot kill Earth.  We have been on Earth very briefly and our attempts to control nature are cutting our visit even shorter.

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1. Andrew H. Knoll, A Brief History of Earth, 2021.  All quotes in this article are from this excellent book unless otherwise indicated.
2. Elsa Panciroli, Beasts Before Us: The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution, Bloomsbury Sigma, 2021.