EvGeo

Geological Evolution of a Habitable Planet

Giovanni Muttoni - The State University of Milan

2022/2023 lessons in Room BS (Teams 1g3gn4r)

Cooper : Detach!
Brand : Goodbye TARS.
TARS : Good-bye Dr. Brand. See you on the other side Coop.
Cooper : See you there slick!

LECTURES (* are mandatory)

Part 0. Introduction

Class discussion on the basic requirements for simple life and complex life.

Introductory icebreaker lecture: how many Earths?

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Part I. Setting the scene: the first half billion years. Formation of a wet rocky planet

Early Earth 4.56-3.9 By *

Halliday, A. N. (2006), The origin of the Earth-What's new?, Elements, 2(4), 205-210.

History of the Hadean&Archean

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Part II. Liquid water: origin

Origin of Water *

Welcome on a Comet!

Wet Stardust?

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Part III. Liquid water: maintenance. The long-term carbon cycle

Without the radiative forcing supplied by CO2 and the other noncondensing greenhouse gases, the terrestrial greenhouse would collapse, plunging the global climate into an icebound Earth state.

Zonal climate, plate tectonics & Earth's thermostat *

WHY DO WE NEED A CO2 OUTPUT? *

Could oceans ever boil off?

Climate sensitivity calculator

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The role of planetary albedo

The building of polar ice has the effect to amplificate – through enhanced planetary albedo – global cooling resulting from the reduction of greenhouse gases via CO2 weathering consumption of mafic rocks in the tropical humid belt.

Kent, D.V., Muttoni, G. Latitudinal land–sea distributions and global surface albedo since the Cretaceous. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 585, 110718, 2022.

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Part IV. Liquid water: climate extremes

...expectations are that the silicate weathering thermostat would always be operative at the high temperature end and act to limit global overheating. However, at times when continental drift focused the weathering-prone landmasses in the pCO2-insensitive equatorial belt, the low range of the thermostat could become decoupled from global climate, allowing Earth to descend into glacial modes of varying severity.

Snowball Earth *

Hoffman, P. F., A. J. Kaufman, G. P. Halverson, and D. P. Schrag (1998), A Neoproterozoic snowball earth, science, 281(5381), 1342-1346.

Hoffman, P. F., and D. P. Schrag (2002), The snowball Earth hypothesis: testing the limits of global change, Terra nova, 14(3), 129-155.

Documentary 'Snowball Earth'

From the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum to the Neogene Ice Age *

Kent, D. V., and G. Muttoni (2008), Equatorial convergence of India and early Cenozoic climate trends, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(42), 16065-16070.

Kent, D. V., and G. Muttoni (2013), Modulation of Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic climate by variable drawdown of atmospheric pCO 2 from weathering of basaltic provinces on continents drifting through the equatorial humid belt, Climate of the Past, 9(2), 525-546.

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Part V. Oxygen

The G.O.E. and the N.O.E. *

Kump, L. R. (2008), The rise of atmospheric oxygen, Nature, 451(7176), 277.

Shields-Zhou, G., and L. Och (2011), The case for a Neoproterozoic oxygenation event: geochemical evidence and biological consequences, GSA Today, 21(3), 4-11.

LECTURES

Part VI. Earth's magnetic shield

Magnetic shielding of atmosphere *

Tarduno, J. A., R. D. Cottrell, W. J. Davis, F. Nimmo, and R. K. Bono (2015), A Hadean to Paleoarchean geodynamo recorded by single zircon crystals, Science, 349(6247), 521-524.

Tarduno, J. A., E. G. Blackman, and E. E. Mamajek (2014), Detecting the oldest geodynamo and attendant shielding from the solar wind: Implications for habitability, Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, 233, 68-87.

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Part VII. From simple to complex life

Knoll, A. H. (2014), Paleobiological perspectives on early eukaryotic evolution, Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, 6(1), a016121.

Early life forms:

Schopf, J. W. (2006), The first billion years: When did life emerge?, Elements, 2(4), 229-233. *

Virtual Field Trip to Dresser Formation *

Ediacara Day

Students' presentations

(see Students page, top left)

Pick your favourite beast

Trip to Mistaken Point *

Brasier, M., and J. Antcliffe (2004), Decoding the Ediacaran enigma, Science, 305(5687), 1115-1117.

Xiao, S., and M. Laflamme (2009), On the eve of animal radiation: phylogeny, ecology and evolution of the Ediacara biota, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24(1), 31-40.