Homeostasis: State of being in balance the tendency of an organism to maintain constant internal conditions despite large changes in the external environment. Words to Knowīiosphere: The sum total of all lifeforms on Earth and the interaction among those lifeforms.įeedback: Information that tells a system what the results of its actions are. This accounts for the beginnings of a nitrogen build-up in Earth's atmosphere. This type of bacteria cannot live in an oxygen environment, and its only job is to convert nitrates to nitrogen gas.

The only form that did exist was what many consider to be the first forms of life -anaerobic (pronounced ANN-ay-roe-bik) bacteria that lived in the ocean. He explained this dramatic difference by saying that Earth's atmosphere was probably very much like that of its neighbors at first, and that it was a world with hardly any life on it. Both Mars and Venus have an atmosphere with about 95 percent carbon dioxide, while Earth's is about 79 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. Suggesting that chemistry and physics seemed to argue that these barren and hostile planets should have an atmosphere just like that of Earth, Lovelock stated that Earth's atmosphere is different because it has life on it.

Lovelock arrived at this hypothesis by studying Earth's neighboring planets, Mars and Venus. Telling Golding of his new theory, he then asked his advice about choosing a suitable name for it, and the result of this meeting was that the term 'Gaia' was chosen because of its real connection to the Greek goddess who pulled the living world together out of chaos or complete disorder. In modern times, the name has come to symbolize 'Earth Mother' or 'Living Earth.' In this book, Lovelock proposed that Earth's biosphere (all the parts of Earth that make up the living world) acts as a single living system that if left alone, can regulate itself.Īs to the name Gaia, the story goes that Lovelock was walking in the countryside surrounding his home in Wilshire, England, and met his neighbor, English novelist William Golding (1911 –1993), author of Lord of the Flies and several other books. Gaia is the name of the Greek goddess of Earth and mother of the Titans. As a result, no one really pursued this notion until some 200 years later, when the English chemist James Lovelock (1919 – ) put forth a similar idea in his 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The idea that Earth and its atmosphere are some sort of 'superorganism' was actually first proposed by Scottish geologist (a person specializing in the study of Earth) James Hutton (1726 –1797), although this was not one of his more accepted and popular ideas.

This idea argues that Earth is able to maintain conditions that are favorable for life to survive on it, and that it is the living things on Earth that give the planet this ability. The Gaia (pronounced GAY-ah) hypothesis is the idea that Earth is a living organism and can regulate its own environment.

Gaia project 2012 origins