TNRTB Archive – Retained for reference information
A team of American earth scientists has found yet more fine-tuning for one of the design features for sustaining life on Earth. A stable, efficient cycling of silica plays a crucial role in sustaining life. Silica buffers soil acidification, it regulates atmospheric carbon dioxide, and it provides an important nutrient for both marine and terrestrial life. For several decades scientists assumed that weathering and hydrology (the water cycle) played the dominant role in cycling silica throughout the environment. The team’s measurements across the Hawaiian Islands, however, established that biological processes (for example, plants taking up silica from the soil and plants depositing silica into the soil through decaying leaf litter) dominate weathering and hydrology in cycling silica. Their finding implies that a supernatural, superintelligent Being must have created the just-right kinds of life in the just-right amounts in the just-right locations at the just-right times throughout the past 3.8 billion years so that silica cycling was maintained at the ideal levels for all life.
Louis A. Derry et al., “Biological Control of Terrestrial Silica Cycling and Export Fluxes to Watersheds,” Nature 433 (2005): 728-31.
During my time as a graduate student studying biochemistry at Ohio University, I spent many long days—and nights—working in the laboratories housed in the...
