Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Vladimir I. Vernadsky
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The purpose of this introduction is to familiarize the reader with the powerful historic figure of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945) as a great scientist and thinker of the twentieth century. The scope of his genius can be fully comprehended only through acquaintance with all his creative work in the fields of natural science, biology, and philosophy, which by far exceeds the common idea of Vernadsky as a geochemist, mineralogist, and geologist.
Vernadsky’s teachings on the biosphere and noösphere belong to science, just as Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species, Bohr’s fundamentals of quantum physics, and Einstein’s relativity theory. That is why this edition is a homage to the history of fundamental scientific ideas to which the teaching of the biosphere clearly belongs. Vernadsky was the founder of genetic mineralogy, geochemistry, biogeochemistry (the concept of “living matter” as a geological force), the theory of the biosphere, radiogeology, and hydrogeology. His ideas gave birth to many scientific disciplines. By force of logic and generalization he anticipated the ideas of unity of time and space, of the physical vacuum and of the asymmetry of space. His ideas of the “local” features of sections of the world’s ocean, occupied by living organisms or growing crystals, have not yet been fully understood and developed in terms of present-day physics. Long before World War II, Vernadsky had written about the potential use of atomic energy for military purposes and, in this connection, about the great responsibility of scientists, though physicists had not even thought about creating an atom bomb. Such was the scope of his thought and vision.
Vernadsky’s teachings not only prepare the ground for planetary thinking, but also exemplify a full-scale understanding of the unity of the planet’s living and non-living nature and the unity of the planet with its cosmic environment. This unity is the gist of Vernadsky’s teachings.
V. I. Vernadsky is undoubtedly a great and rare phenomenon in the history of natural science. Such powerful figures do not emerge every century. This is the way I see him, and this is the way I would like to introduce him to the English-speaking reader.
vernadsky’s life
Vernadsky, St. Petersburg, 1875
The future scientist and Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was born in St. Petersburg into a nobleman family with ancient historic roots in the Ukraine. In his early years, he was an ordinary boy, a bit phlegmatic and shy, and manifested no signs of genius. From early childhood, he was keen on reading. No one in the family controlled his reading, and he used his father’s large library to his heart’s content. At age twenty-three, he recollected in one of his letters:
I threw myself at books early and read voraciously everything I came across, constantly digging in my father’s library…. From these early years, I especially remember various books on geography, not only about travels but also rather dry books that seemed difficult for my age, for instance, The Earth by E. Reclus…. At the same time, I was fond of books on history, especially Greek.
And then, speaking about his High School years:
I was deeply interested in the history of the Church…. My home life gave me the main thing: dozens of journals, Russian and foreign, that my father subscribed to.
Vernadsky’s father was a professor of political economy, which seems very far from geological sciences. But political economy compares human needs with natural conditions; from here, it is not far to Vernadsky’s subsequent understanding of nature and man’s place in it. As a young man, Vernadsky wanted to take up history but decided first to get an education in natural science. In 1885, Vladimir Ivanovich graduated from the natural science department of the faculty of Mathematics and Physics of St. Petersburg University, and continued at the faculty to prepare for a professor’s degree.
Vernadsky studied at St. Petersburg University when it was in its heyday: a brilliant constellation of scientists gathered there; they created an era not only in Russian but also in world science. His teachers were the chemists Mendeleyev, Butlerov, and Menshutkin, the soil scientists Dokuchaev and Kostychev, the geologist Inostrantsev, the geographer and meteorologist Voyeikov, and other famous scientists of that time. Each of them made a great contribution to twentieth-century science. The first among them was D. I. Mendeleyev. I do not need to introduce the creator of the Periodic Law and the Periodic Table of the Elements, which are studied in every school. The ideas of Mendeleyev, and especially those of the soil scientist Dokuchaev, greatly influenced Vernadsky’s later scientific work.
Having received a geological education, Vernadsky first took up crystallography and mineralogy at St. Petersburg University. After moving to Moscow, he delivered lectures in mineralogy at Moscow University, at the chair of a famous geologist and subsequent Academician of his time, A. P. Pavlov, who was one of Vernadsky’s teachers whose name we shall come across below.
During his student years and his work at Moscow University, Vernadsky took part in Dokuchaev’s expeditions, studying soil chemistry in different regions of Russia. It is easy to understand that the science created by Vernadsky – geochemistry – turned out as “genetic” as Dokuchaev’s soil science. It embraced not only the distribution and content of chemical elements in the Earth’s crust, the atmosphere, and the natural waters, but also their origin under different conditions and the places of their existence, their migration in the course of geological processes, and especially their biogenic migration as the result of the activity of living matter in the biosphere. That is why the titles of separate sections of Essays on Geochemistry contain the word history: history of carbon, of oxygen, and so on.
Vernadsky and other students at St. Petersburg University 1884
Although the scope of his scientific work was tremendous, Vernadsky never limited himself to it. Like many representatives of the Russian intelligentsia of his time, he was deeply concerned with social and political problems. He plunged into social activities early, in his student years. He was one of the founders of the first political party in Tsarist Russia – the Constitutional Democrats – and a member of its leading central committee. Twice he was elected a member of the State Council, the supreme elected body of Russia, where he expressed his emphatically democratic political views. In 1911, he resigned from Moscow University, along with twenty-one leading professors, in a collective protest against the Education Minister’s arbitrary rule. He then decided to give up teaching and to devote himself entirely to scientific work. After 1917, he gave up political and social activities as well.
All of Vernadsky’s scientific work was accompanied by extensive organizational activities: He attracted the interest of the Academy of Sciences, with its potential for scientific investigation, to the circle of scientific problems he was anticipating, or he created new branches in the Academy. In 1912, he founded the first radiochemical laboratory in Russia. In 1915, on his initiative, a committee of the Academy of Sciences was created to “study the natural productive forces of the country.” At first, it was meant to discover new sources of strategic ores, because Russia was taking part in World War I. He also included the study of uranium ore deposits as a task of the committee. He was chairman of this committee for fifteen years, until it became the State Geology Committee.
Vernadsky and other professors of Moscow University who resigned in 1911 in support of students’ protest against the Education Ministry
In 1926, at Vernadsky’s suggestion, the “Committee on the History of Science” was founded at the Academy of Sciences; Vernadsky remained its head until 1930. It later became the Institute of History of Natural Science and Technology which continues to carry out successful work together with a similar branch of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States.
During the Russian Civil War 1918–1921, he actively participated in the creation of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and became its first president. No matter where he lived during the most difficult years, he created new branches of scientific research, groups