Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Vladimir I. Vernadsky
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them on new, fundamental scientific concepts and perspectives.
vernadsky’s teachings
Vernadsky’s idea that living beings possess a great geological significance in changing the Earth’s face gave birth to a new science – biogeochemistry. This concept increasingly interested Vernadsky and eventually became the main content of his creative work. Near the end of his life in 1944, he wrote as if summing up:
I spent the years of World War I in constant research and creative work, and I have been going on in the same direction up till now…. All these years, no matter where I was, I was captured by the thought of geochemical and biogeochemical manifestations in the surrounding nature (the biosphere).
These new geochemical and biogeochemical ideas did not enter the scientific mind of that time. Old notions reigned supreme in geology many years after Vernadsky’s works had been published. His thought was far ahead of his time, and he was not understood by many of his contemporaries. That is why the creation of biogeochemistry and the concepts of the biosphere not only manifests his scientific genius, but is also a striking example of the anticipatory power of this scientist, of his persistence in reaching the goal, of faith in his ideas, and of being able to work in most unfavorable conditions. We should remember that his most significant scientific achievements were made during the years of civil war and economic breakdown in Russia.
The central concept of Vernadsky’s teaching is that of the biosphere, but its definition in literature has been vague until now. Many people define it in an easy way as “the realm of life,” the territory of the planet inhabited by living organisms at any given time. But it is not quite like that. In Vernadsky’s understanding, the biosphere is a historic concept. It dates back to the very first manifestations of life on Earth – manifestations that created the oxygenated atmosphere and changed the planet’s surface in the course of life’s evolution, which is still ongoing. By “the biosphere,” Vernadsky meant all the layers of the planet, and first of all the layers of the Earth’s crust, that had undergone the influence of biogeochemical activity throughout its entire geological history. This idea of the historic character of the biosphere was shown rather recently in a large geological, geochemical, and paleontological work, a book by the Leningrad geologist Andrey Lapo that was translated into English as Traces of Bygone Biospheres (Synergetic Press, 1987).
Vernadsky in suburbs of Prague (circa 1928)
Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere is as diverse and hierarchical as the structure of the actual biosphere. This concept integrates the data of all sciences that relate to the Earth, all biology, chemistry, and biochemistry. The growing specialization of the sciences has provided great progress in the knowledge of profound details and intimate mechanisms of life, without getting closer to understanding its essence. This widely acknowledged drawback of contemporary science consists in its failure to embrace Earth’s nature in all its scope and profundity, on a planetary and cosmic scale. Given this background, the concept of the biosphere, in its unprecedented scope and depth, is an excellent example of the integration of the sciences and a great event in the science of the twentieth century.
All this became possible due to the long-term and conscious approach to the integral study of any phenomenon in connection with other phenomena. Vernadsky wrote about the necessity of such an approach as long ago as the end of the nineteenth century, in his student diary; at that time the process of the specialization of science and its division into a number of specific disciplines and trends was only beginning. Later, in 1920, he privately recollected:
I have long been surprised at the lack of desire to embrace Nature as a whole in the field of empirical knowledge, whereas it is within our grasp to do so. Often we as scientists give only a mere collection of facts and observations where actually we could present the whole … It looks like some mental laziness. We feel that if we make an effort, we can rise to embracing the phenomenon as a whole, but this effort is not made, and judging by the literature nobody makes it.
Only much later, in the second half of the twentieth century, was this approach in science widely realized, acknowledged, defined and called integrative, systematic, global, etc. An example is provided by one of the fundamental principles of biology; namely, the unity of the organism and its environment. The briefest definition of this principle was probably given by the Russian physiologist I. M. Sechenov, who believed in the late nineteenth century that the description of an organism would not be complete without the description of its environment. Vernadsky came to affirm this principle on a different scale, independently and in his own way as a geologist and a biochemist, through ideas about the matter-energy connections of organisms and their environment in the biosphere. But he did not restrict the concept to an individual; he thought on the geological scale of the living matter of humankind as a whole. He wrote:
Humankind, as living matter, is constantly connected with the matter-energy processes of the defined geological envelope of the Earth – its biosphere. Not for a single moment can humankind be physically independent of its environment.
Vernadsky in his St. Petersburg office 1921
In the course of the development of Vernadsky’s notions of the biosphere as the most active part of the planet’s matter and its connection with cosmic factors, he was getting a more extensive idea about its limits – the boundaries of the integral approach within which the biosphere processes were to be studied in order to get as close as possible to an exhaustive understanding of the subject. Reading his Essays on Geochemistry and The Biosphere, it is easy to see that the author, while projecting the phenomena he considers on the whole biosphere, is constantly reminding us that the planet itself also has its external connections, its “habitat” in the cosmos. The dependence of the biosphere upon the luminous radiation of the Sun is obvious to us all, but Vernadsky had left the problem of the Earth’s cosmic connections open for further discoveries in this field, since he understood their scientific inevitability. We now know more about these connections than in Vernadsky’s time. It is enough to remember the galactic and extra-galactic cosmic radiation, the role of the magnetosphere of the Earth in preventing the destructive effects of cosmic radiation upon terrestrial life, the loss of terrestrial oxygen in the upper layers of the atmosphere, the role of the ozone screen of the Earth, and the connection of biological processes with solar activity. But all this is included in the realm embraced by Vernadsky’s scientific mind, which actually had no boundaries.
Reflecting on the structure or the macrostructure of the visible cosmos as an object of scientific study, Vernadsky clearly distinguished “three separate layers of reality,” within which the scientifically stated facts are situated. These three layers of reality, in all probability, differ distinctly from each other in properties of space and time. They penetrate into one another, but they are definitely realms unto themselves, distinctly delimited from one another both in their content and in the methods of studying their manifestations. These layers are the following: the phenomena of cosmic spaces, the planetary phenomena of our visible “nature,” so close to us, and the microscopic realm in which gravity is of secondary importance. The phenomena of life are observed only in the two latter layers of world reality.
Vernadsky embraced with his mind’s view all these layers of the world’s reality. Such scope of thinking is unprecedented in the last centuries of exact (not speculative) sciences. At the same time, one cannot but think that the scope of his ideas is directly related to philosophical and religious systems of the ancient East, India, and Tibet, although Vernadsky based his ideas strictly on empirical data from which he never digressed. In the literature “the phenomenon of Vernadsky” is often spoken of in connection with the power of his scientific thinking. Of course, there were many factors that contributed to his development as a scientist, such as his education and upbringing, his will, his character, his persistence (as noted, he read in fifteen languages), his analytical and critical mind, etc. But many other scientists possessed all these to a certain extent. What, then, is the “phenomenon of Vernadsky?”
The main features of his thinking are probably his wide range