Elemental

July 10, 2023
Brown University ecologist Porder debuts with a probing exploration of how carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous have shaped life on Earth. He focuses on three epochal events: the rise of cyanobacteria more than two billion years ago, the proliferation of land plants 400 million years ago, and the 19th-century industrial revolution. Cyanobacteria, ocean-dwelling single-celled microbes, were the first organisms capable of both photosynthesis and capturing nitrogen from their environment, processes that created oxygen as a by-product and changed the composition of the atmosphere. When land plants arrived, they used their roots to draw hydrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous from Earth’s rocky surface and took in so much CO 2 from the air that the tropical atmosphere cooled into an ice age, freezing out many of the forests that precipitated the temperature drop. Porder warns that burning fossil fuels adds carbon to the atmosphere at an unsustainable rate, threatening a cataclysmic climate shock on the scale of the one that wiped out many early land plants. The deep history offers a fresh perspective on climate change, and Porder’s well-considered solutions include the expansion of wind, solar, and nuclear power, and replacing furnaces with heat pumps that capture the little available heat in cold air and transport it into the home. It’s an illuminating account of how these elements and the organisms that rely on them have influenced the course of life. Photos.

September 1, 2023
Porder focuses on linkages between hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, and oxygen and how these elements impact life, atmosphere, and climate. Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, Porder begins with a question, "What does it take to change the world?" From here, he reviews major events that caused mass extinctions and spawned new life. Beginning with the great oxygenation event 2.5 billion years ago, Porder shows how early ancestors of cyanobacteria developed and, through photosynthesis, generated an abundance of oxygen. Over millions of years, this caused the earth to change. Plants migrated to land. Powerful root systems evolved abilities to extract phosphorous from rocks. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria developed alongside certain plant groups, providing them with a usable form of nitrogen. Victims of their own success, plants pulled so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that the earth plunged into successive ice ages. Now, as humanity disrupts the slow carbon cycle and pumps extreme levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the earth may be entering a new, warmer phase that could disrupt, well, everything.

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