Hudsons Bay Belcher Island Group

Bloom and Bust Is How The Ocean Plankton Run This Blue Planet

2 Billion years ago, a devastating mass extinction eradicated 99% of all life on this blue planet.

This extinction event made the later extinction of the dinosaurs look like nothing more than a planetary ‘bad hair day.’

It happened when the ocean plankton that had recently become the primary producers of oxygen took a break.

Are those same plankton masters of this blue planet about to take another break?

Blue screen of death

Great dyings, mass extinctions are part of business as usual for the ocean plankton that rule this blue planet. Click to read more

Scientists have discovered in the geological record in Canada a mass die-off, the bust side of ‘bloom and bust’ that took place two billion years ago. They report up to 99.5 percent of life on Earth abruptly died off. The massive die-off saw many times the amount of the planet’s biosphere vanish than the chaos that befell when the dinosaurs were wiped off the face of the planet 65 million years ago. It was the first ‘blue screen of death’ event.

In more recent global mass extinctions the fossil record of big animal life tells the tale. First, they are seen in the fossil record then not. Complex life, like dinosaurs and us, are relatively new residents in this planet Air B&B that the real masters of this blue planet maintain. Those planet hosts are the plankton, the microscopic to tiny free-swimming ocean life who made and keep this world habitable. They are a gregarious welcoming lot who are more than happy to share their abode with we larger beasts. They do however expect some level of decorum and civility and decent housekeeping.

In a study published recently in PNAS, an international team of scientists reports on their study of rocks that formed billions of years ago now lying near Hudson Bay, Canada. They were looking at the mineral barite, as it holds information about how much oxygen was in the atmosphere when the mineral forms. Oxygen at sufficient levels, like today’s 20% in our air, is what makes living life large, as we like it, possible. It is blooms of ocean pasture plankton that control this world’s oxygen.

In these ancient rocks (seen as layers in the photo at the start of this post), the team was able to show that there was a massive drop in the amount of life on Earth 2 billion years ago. They correlated this with deadly changes to the oxygen levels on the planet. Before the die-off, about 2.4 billion years ago, there was a massive growth in the amount of oxygen being fed into the atmosphere by ‘blooms’ of ocean pastures. Then came the ‘bust,’ the end of this event, known as the Great Oxidation Event, oxygen levels rapidly dropped and with it, 99% of life vanished.

Bloom and Bust

The researchers say conditions for life on Earth went from “feast to famine”, but they choose the wrong catchphrase as they were talking of plankton which has a ‘bloom and bust’ biology. The blooms stopped and the bust conditions persisted for a billion years. It took that long for the planktors to recover from that planetary living operating system failure, the blue screen of death event, and rewrite the root level code to allow living life large to once again evolve.

“We were very surprised,” study author Peter Crockford, from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and Princeton University, told Newsweek. “We didn’t expect to see such a large signal, nor did we expect to find it in this specific type of sample”.

“Over the 100 to 200 million years before this die-off event there was a large amount of life on the planet, but after this event a huge portion died off. However, instead of recovering like more recent mass extinctions, the amount of life on the planet or size of the biosphere stayed small for the following billion years of Earth’s history—about two billion to one billion years ago.”

The scientists estimate it could be that up to 99.5 percent of life on the planet died off in that first ‘blue screen of death event.’ To put that in context, the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs saw about three-quarters of life on Earth disappear, while the Great Dying event—the previously reported biggest known mass extinction—resulted in the loss of around 70 percent of terrestrial life and 96 percent of ocean dwellers.

The findings, the team say, provides support for the idea of an “oxygen overshoot”— a theory that says photosynthesis and weathering produced a massive amount of oxygen that spurred the development of life on Earth. However, the oxygen-emitting phytoplankton became so abundant they exhausted critical nutrient supply and numbers fell.

Many researchers point out that a key nutrient that went suddenly scarce was iron, before the abundance of oxygen iron was found in forms that were more biologically available. With the age of superabundant oxygen, the iron oxidized and became difficult for the photosynthetic plankton to access this, their most vital micro-nutrient. It simply took time for evolution to rewrite the genetic codes to allow for the use of oxidized iron.

About the role of men vs. the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional planktors

Pan dimensional hyper-intelligent mice

Slartibartfast tells Arthur that the mice created a supercomputer to find the answer of the universe, which happens to be 42.

In Douglas Adams famous book, “The Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy” the central character Arthur Dent interrupts a pair of white mice, who are in fact the hyper-intelligent master race of this and multiple universes. The mice are talking about problems with their great computer that was working to provide the answer to everything.

Dent interjects with a quote from the famous human author John Steinbeck saying, “the best-laid plans of mice and men …” to which the mice snap back “what do men have to do with anything.” Presently it seems the hyper-intelligent pan-universe masters here on this blue planet are indeed the cyano-bacters who don’t really give a damn what happens to humankind, not that they aren’t happy to have us but only if we behave and help with keeping the place livable.

Shifting the ocean ecology from green plants toward blue-green plants has dire consequences for us

The new developments as detailed in this fine paper give us reason on why we should listen to our plankton ‘overlords’. When they issued us their plankton manifesto a few years ago, it was not so much a warning of an eviction, but rather a simple statement of how life on this planet might carry on with or without us.

There is today a dramatic shift taking place on this blue planet, this time not due to our cyanobacterial forefathers and overlords but rather due to our insistent delinquent behaviour of misbehaving. On one hand, we have been wantonly spewing hundreds of billions of tonnes of noxious CO2 into the world’s atmosphere. You know that CO2 as being the primary agent of ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ as that is the physicist and engineers view of our CO2.

Biologists have a very different view of the role of our high and rising CO2, for we biologists and especially ecologists, we see CO2 as plant food! It is helping plants on land grow and it is changing the way plants in the ocean grow.

Good news and bad news

Whether these changes to this blue planet’s environment and ecosystem are good or bad depends entirely on the point of view of each and every particular life form that shares the lease. We, humans, are particularly sensitive the dramatic changes in our environment as being large rather inflexible creatures with very long lifetimes our ability to evolve and adapt to changes in our environment takes tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. We are very slow to change and hence very vulnerable to change.

Eco-Judo

The bacteria, on the other hand, started as the first residents of this blue planet. It is now clear that within the first 500 million years after the planet formed the bacteria took up residence. The first bacters were simple folk, happy to live without the fast energy provided by oxygen, and for all intents and purposes just fine eating rocks.

clouds keep us cool

One day some of the bacters decided that all that sunlight that was beating down on their blue planet was making things just a bit too hot and the set about evolving a way to be the Goldilock’s prima donna’s that they were. They would craft a means to shade their blue oceans from the blistering sunlight and to do so they would use their own eco-judo, they would use the suns own energy to do so.

The first geo-engineers

The bacter solution was to become photosynthetic. By harvesting the sun’s energy to manufacture new chemicals, including abundant oxygen. They would release these chemicals, cloud nucleating aerosols, into the air and make more clouds. This new abundance of bright white clouds would reflect much of the sunlight and beneath the clouds, the oceans would have a respite from what was at that time a perennial too hot tropical sun.

They made a few mistakes along the way, as in perhaps making too much oxygen which threw an evolutionary spanner into the works. But eventually, with their infinite patience, they managed to get things sorted.

These events happened 2 billion years ago. The stumble was made by the cyanobacteria who switched to photosynthesis over eating rocks. The evolution of these geo-engineering plankton was mostly complete by 2 billion years ago and with their good efforts, this planet became highly oxygenated. With the exception of that slight billion year glitch, the great oxygenation dying, that oxygen provided the fast fix energy that offered the bacters the chance to change from being not only tiny plants but it opened the opportunity for them to become real animals.

It took another nearly 2 billion years for we humans to evolve and we and our kin have only taken up our blue planet ‘apartments’ for a very short time in the scheme of things. It seems we’ve not been the best of tenants. Our co-inhabitants, our landlords, on this blue planet aren’t exactly evicting us yet. They are simply putting us on polite notice to do better or they may cease to make their accommodations comfortable for us, or heaven forbid they hit the deep reboot key and send us through another blue screen of death routine.