Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News & Views
  • Published:

Earth's productivity Ghosts of biospheres past

Nature volume 400, pages 509–510 (1999)Cite this article

A variety of clever approaches has been developed to obtain proxy records of what the Earth was like in previous eras. Ocean cores, lake sediments, pollen, corals, palaeosoils and the annual rings of trees have all been used to infer changes in climate and productivity1. But these records are essentially local in coverage, and they need to be extended to regional or global scales. Such a planetary-scale analogue to the annual rings of trees would be a boon for Earth-system research, and the study by Luz et al.2 on page 547of this issue may provide just such information. Their work indicates that, by analysing the abundance of the three stable isotopes of oxygen — 16O, 17O and 18O — from air trapped in ice cores, we can obtain estimates of gross photosynthetic production of oxygen, integrated to a global scale and averaged over millennia.

Atmospheric oxygen is continuously recycled by biospheric processes — it is formed from water by photosynthetic organisms, and most of it is cycled back to water by aerobic respiration2. It is estimated that the atmosphere now turns over in this way every 1,200 years3. Because the amount of O2in the atmosphere is roughly constant, the rate of turnover is inversely proportional to the rate of total biological productivity summed for the whole planet. Luz et al.2 use this variation in the turnover time of atmospheric O2to obtain proxy information on past global productivity from analyses of air extracted from glacial ice.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: The 17O anomaly.

References

  1. Bradley, R. S. Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary 2nd edn (Academic, New York, 1999).

  2. Luz, B., Barkan, E., Bender, M. L., Thiemens, M. H. & Boering, K. A. Nature 400, 547–550 (1999).

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bender, M., Sowers, T. & Labeyrie, L. T. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 8, 363–376 (1994).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Thiemens, M. H., Jackson, T. L. & Brenninkemeiijer, C. A. M. Geophys. Res. Lett. 22, 225–257 (1995).

    Google Scholar 

  5. Theimens, M. H. Science 283, 341–345 (1999).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Alley, R. B. & Bender, M. Sci. Am. 278, 80–85 (1998).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bender, M., Sowers, T. & Brook, E. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 94, 8343–8349 (1997).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Petit, J. R. et al. Nature 399, 429–436 (1999).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Joe Berry

Authors
  1. Joe Berry
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Berry, J. Earth's productivity Ghosts of biospheres past. Nature 400, 509–510 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/22886

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/22886

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing