Exciting Days

These days the data on the natural world is getting pretty overwhelming. Recently, a missing link for crocodiles has been discovered, linking modern crocodiles to their ancestors. A new monkey species has been discovered.

There's even been an interesting synthesis between geology and biology recently, cross checking against one another. Geologists have inferred for a while that the oceans of ancient earth, some 3.5 billion years ago were hot ocean; an ocean around 60 degrees C. We're talking in excess of 120 degrees F-- hotter than your hot tub unless your hot tub is a Yellowstone hot pool. But, like a lot of scientific speculation, there's been some discussion of the matter.

Now, living systems have a protein (EF-Tu), essential for life, that is finely tuned to species temperature. Mammals are tuned to body temperature. Reptiles would be tuned lower. Temperate plant species tuned lower still. (One wonders if EF-Tu can be tuned dynamically so a tree can optimize replication throughout the spring-fall temperature range. But I digress.)

Scientists have reconstructed ancient bacterial EF-Tu (techniques in the link) and, surprise, it has an optimal temperature of 60 degrees C.

The same sort of analysis gives some more unhappy results as well. Analysis of biofuels suggest that they are anything but green. Think about it. If you take a forest, which is sequestering carbon, and cut it down to create a field to grow sugar cane, you lose the carbon sequestration ability of the forest. It takes time to make that up. Curiously, corn-- a biofuel of a particularly pale shade of green-- fares better than, say, palm oil. Corn has a huge carbon debt engendered when it is grown, harvested, etc. But at least a forest isn't being cut down to grow it.

Further analysis of the world shows us what goes on if we reach the infamous 6 degrees C-- last seen in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 55 million years ago. This has been dramatized by National Geographic in a television show. Here's its website. 6C isn't going to be fun.

As Tank said in the Matrix: "These are very exciting times."



C.