Understanding Energy Transfer in Ecosystems

Schrödinger argued that living beings maintain their internal organization at the expense of larger increases in randomness outside their bod-is. Cells give off gasses. You produce urine, sweat, heat, exhaled carbon dioxide, and feces. The biosphere puts out mostly heat. Organisms may well be enchantingly complex, but they always yield waste in their wake.

When we follow Schrödinger we find ways of looking through life to the energetic processes governing not only life but inanimate systems as well. Life’s complexity is due not just to its chemical data processing, but to its function as an energy transformer. Indeed, life’s DNA replication and RNA protein-building duties may have ridden into existence on a thermodynamic horse. Their roles make sense in the context of an earlier gradient-reducing function. Life is not just a genetic entity. Genes by themselves do nothing more than salt crystals. Life is an open, cycling system organized by the laws of thermodynamics. And it is not the only one.

Over time, energy that might be used constructively is sacrificed, apparently forever. A bent cigarette butt in an ashtray does not straighten out, gather ash and suck smoke into itself, then jump between the fingers of a man holding a burnt match that flares up and develops a red tip, which he restores unscathed next to other matches in a matchbook. Rather the reverse: Babies are born, cereal gets soggy, desks get messy, and sideburns grow. Watches run down and people die. Heat moves, without recompense, into the cool.

Organisms struggle not only among each other, but to survive amid a challenging environment; they often collaborate and even meld with each other the better to access absolutely required free energy. Energy always must be available to maintain life’s informational systems. These are the very systems, in turn, that are adept at extracting the energy necessary to run them.

Hurricanes range in size from fewer than one hundred miles across to as much as a thousand. A storm must enjoy wind speeds of greater than seventy-five miles an hour to gain “hurricane” status. Hurricanes originate along small atmospheric and ocean fronts, and generally form over warm water. As in a Taylor vortex or Bénard cell, small instabilities are amplified into larger-scale coherent actions. Often a small low-pressure system with ascending winds draws warm moist air upward. The gradient that drives a hurricane is between the warm ocean, about 27°C and above, and much cooler temperatures higher in the atmosphere.

Imagine a planet that revolves around its sun. Because of the distribution of radiation on the globe, the equatorial regions of this idealized sphere will be warm, the polar regions cold. A temperature gradient from the poles to the equator sets up. And gradients tend to break down. Winds, rain, and ocean currents reduce Earth’s pole-to-pole temperature gradient.

Ocean currents reduce much of a global temperature gradient. The Gulf Stream in the Atlantic and the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific flow from equatorial regions into the cooler climes of the north. Curling to the east as they carry warm equatorial water northward, these giant “rivers” in the surface oceans warm the coasts of Scotland and Alaska. Because a given volume of water can hold much more heat than air, the oceans are disproportionately responsible for global energy transfer. Dense, cold, oxygen-rich salt water from the polar regions sinks beneath the surface waters and slips to the deepest parts of the oceans. Warm saline water flows out of marginal seas such the Mediterranean to occupy midlevel waters. Each distinct water type that carries oxygen, heat, and salt finds its place within the seas. The water types interact to give the oceans their fluid dynamic complexity. Both temperature and material gradients would vanish were new water types not constantly being added to the world’s oceans. A satellite view from space of the Gulf Stream shows it spinning of giant spirals and loops very much like white tendrils of cream looping through your morning coffee.

Neither the largest volcano nor the deepest valley is on Earth. Mars’s Mons Olympus dwarfs Mount Everest. The greatest cauldrons of the island of Hawaii seem like campfires relative to the volcanoes of lo, a moon of Jupiter. Five Grand Canyons could fit with room to spare in the three-thousand-mile-long chasm of Mars. So, too, the greatest storm in the solar system, three times as large as Earth, is over two thousand years old: the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.

Source : Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life by Eric D. Schneider, Dorion Sagan

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52737.Into_the_Cool