Biomass recycling and Earth’s early phosphorus cycle

The scarcity of oxidants in the ancient oceans may have inhibited phosphorus recycling, stifling the growth of the biosphere. Phosphorus sets the pace of marine biological productivity on geological time scales. Recent estimates of Precambrian phosphorus levels suggest a severe deficit of this macronutrient, with the depletion attributed to scavenging by iron minerals. We propose that the size of the marine phosphorus reservoir was instead constrained by muted liberation of phosphorus during the remineralization of biomass. In the modern ocean, most biomass-bound phosphorus gets aerobically recycled; but a dearth of oxidizing power in Earth’s early oceans would have limited the stoichiometric capacity for remineralization, particularly during the Archean. The resulting low phosphorus concentrations would have substantially hampered primary productivity, contributing to the delayed rise of atmospheric oxygen.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2017-11-01

• Fields of study

  Geology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aao4795PMID 29202032PMCID 5706743
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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