Center for Environmental and Biological Evolution

In this project we will leverage chemical observations from modern environments, and from organism physiology, to generate fundamental insights into elemental and carbon cycling on the modern and ancient Earth. A key goal will be to understand the relation between the evolving chemical environment of the Earth and the evolution of eukaryotes and eukaryote ecosystems. These observations will be bound with modelling. This work follows my long-standing interest in exploring the coupling between the chemical and biological evolution of the Earth, but with a variety of novel approaches. Thus, we will determine the elemental composition of the seafloor with 5000 sites exploring 66 elements including C and N. With these results we can quantify the cycling of elements in the modern oceans, providing a foundation for quantifying elemental cycling in the past. Our physiological work will employ novel techniques to unravel the oxygen requirements of early animals and early eukaryote ecosystems, while Raman spectroscopy will be used to quantify carbon cycling present and past and its relationship to atmospheric oxygen. We will also develop trait-based ecosystem models to explore the interactions between the evolving chemical environment and the evolution of eukaryote ecosystems.