TY - JOUR
T1 - Possible nitrogen fertilization of the early Earth Ocean by microbial continental ecosystems
AU - Thomazo, Christophe
AU - Couradeau, Estelle
AU - Garcia-Pichel, Ferran
N1 - Funding Information:
This project was funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 328530. We thank Arnaud Brayard and the members of the GPI for fruitful discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s).
PY - 2018/12/1
Y1 - 2018/12/1
N2 - While significant efforts have been invested in reconstructing the early evolution of the Earth's atmosphere-ocean-biosphere biogeochemical nitrogen cycle, the potential role of an early continental contribution by a terrestrial, microbial phototrophic biosphere has been largely overlooked. By transposing to the Archean nitrogen fluxes of modern topsoil communities known as biological soil crusts (terrestrial analogs of microbial mats), whose ancestors might have existed as far back as 3.2 Ga ago, we show that they could have impacted the evolution of the nitrogen cycle early on. We calculate that the net output of inorganic nitrogen reaching the Precambrian hydrogeological system could have been of the same order of magnitude as that of modern continents for a range of inhabited area as small as a few percent of that of present day continents. This contradicts the assumption that before the Great Oxidation Event, marine and continental biogeochemical nitrogen cycles were disconnected.
AB - While significant efforts have been invested in reconstructing the early evolution of the Earth's atmosphere-ocean-biosphere biogeochemical nitrogen cycle, the potential role of an early continental contribution by a terrestrial, microbial phototrophic biosphere has been largely overlooked. By transposing to the Archean nitrogen fluxes of modern topsoil communities known as biological soil crusts (terrestrial analogs of microbial mats), whose ancestors might have existed as far back as 3.2 Ga ago, we show that they could have impacted the evolution of the nitrogen cycle early on. We calculate that the net output of inorganic nitrogen reaching the Precambrian hydrogeological system could have been of the same order of magnitude as that of modern continents for a range of inhabited area as small as a few percent of that of present day continents. This contradicts the assumption that before the Great Oxidation Event, marine and continental biogeochemical nitrogen cycles were disconnected.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-018-04995-y
DO - 10.1038/s41467-018-04995-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 29955055
AN - SCOPUS:85049301609
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 9
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 2530
ER -