Geosphere-biosphere interaction

Andreae, M. O. 1998. Feedbacks and interactions between Global change, atmospheric chemistry and the biosphere. Paper presented at the Workshop on Geosphere-Biosphere Interactions and Climate. Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Vatican City, 9-13 November 1998. 

Kasting, J.F. (2000) iLong-term stability of Earth s climate the faint young Sun problem revisited , in Proceedings of the IGBP Workshop on Geosphere-Biosphere Interactions and Climate, Vatican City in press. 

One recent example is The Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) Project, a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), whose stated goals include a determination of nutrient fluxes between land and sea (with emphasis on carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen), and an assessment of how coastal systems respond to varying terrestrial inputs of nutrients (Gordon et al., 1996 Smith, 2001). 

Earth system is composed of subsystems such as atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere (geosphere), biosphere and humans. Each subsystem can be divided into several parts. Eor example, geosphere includes crust (oceanic crust and continental crust), mantle (upper mantle and lower mantle) and core (outer core and inner core). Here, each part which constitutes subsystem is called reservoir. Each reservoir interacts chemically and physically with each other. Two aspects of interaction are heat and mass transfer. 

The Earth system consists of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere (geosphere), biosphere, and humans, and each subsystem interacts with other bodies with regard to mass and heat (Fig. 1). The interactions between humans and the other subsystems are becoming the most important problems for humans. The interaction between humans and nature poses difficulties because current methodologies do not yet offer solutions to its problems. For instance, people today are facing issues related to Earth s resources and environmental problems (e.g., depletion of resources pollution of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and soils extinction of biomass global warming acid rain and destruction of the ozone layer). 

Interactions between processes in the geosphere and biosphere, and their dependence on space. 

We cannot disagree with Stanley (2005) and Stanley et al. (2005) that our planet is a system of integrated components driven by the Earth s internal heat and external energy from the Sun. It is evident that geospheric processes like plate tectonics, volcanism, and the rock cycle are linked to the hydrosphere, atmosphere, climate system, and biosphere, and their interactions form the global processes that we observe. 

A biogeochemical cycle results from the integration of several biological, chemical and, in many cases, physical processes. In this section, we discuss the nitrogen cycle to illustrate the ways in which organisms cooperate to effect the cyclic turnover of an element, and the selenium cycle to demonstrate the interaction between the biosphere and geosphere. 

In an ecological sense, soils exist where the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the geosphere, and the biosphere all converge. Thus, contaminants in soil can impact human health and the environment through a complex web of interactions. The sections below provide an introduction to three issues related to toxicology and soil - (1) the potential for soil... 

What we see is that all disciplines overlap. The original focus of geology as the science of the (solid) earth, hydrology as the science of liquid water, and meteorology as the science of the atmosphere, is still valid and should not be diffused, but the modern study of earth sciences looks at the planet as a large, complex network of physical, chemical, and biological interactions (Sammonds and Thompson 2007). This is known as a systems approach to the study of the earth. The systems approach treats the earth as a combination of several subsystems, each of which can be viewed individually or in concert with the others. These subsystems are the geosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the biosphere. 

Fig. 1 Earth system consisting of subsystems such as atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, humans and geosphere. Subsystems are interacting each other with regard to mass and heats...

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