To what extent does terrestrial life "Follow The Water"?
Date
2010
Authors
Jones, Eriita
Lineweaver, Charles
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Mary Ann Liebert
Abstract
Terrestrial life is known to require liquid water, but not all terrestrial water is inhabited. Thus, liquid water is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for life. To quantify the terrestrial limits on the habitability of water and help identify the factors that make some
terrestrial water uninhabited, we present empirical pressure-temperature (P-T) phase diagrams of water, Earth, and terrestrial life. Eighty-eight percent of the volume of Earth where liquid water exists is not known to host life. This potentially uninhabited terrestrial
liquid water includes i) hot and deep regions of Earth where some combination of high temperature (T > 122˚C) and restrictions on pore space, nutrients, and energy is the limiting factor, and ii) cold and near surface regions of Earth, such as brine inclusions and
thin films in ice and permafrost (depths less than ~1 km), where low temperatures (T < - 40˚C), low water activity (aw < 0.6), or both are the limiting factors. If the known limits of terrestrial life do not change significantly, these limits represent important constraints on
our biosphere and, potentially, on others, since ~4 billion years of evolution have not allowed life to adapt to a large fraction of the volume of Earth where liquid water exists.
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Keywords
biosphere, limits of life, extremophiles, water
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Astrobiology 10.3 (2010): 349-361
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Journal article
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