User:Winterba/sandbox

'''This is a user sandbox'''=This is a user sandbox. Instead of putting in the quotes between text I want to bold, I should in the edit source screen select/highlight text i want to bold and then the bold button and the 3 quotes are added yet only seen in the edit source screen. This is the edit screen and can't be changed with code but under the A above bold can be selected. Either method will work to make text bold. Bold testing in the link Bold will bring you to the wikilink Boldness is the objective.

Testing links target page or URL section

This is going to be the draft for updating the Salinity section of the Gaia Hypothesis.

This page in a nutshell: If you have the ability, please boldly assist Wikipedia by fixing the issues flagged by maintenance templates! This is a request to make updates so that the Help:Maintenance template removal can be completed since it has been up since 2012.

I have changed two citation needed and found a third in the introduction-

Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Biogeochemical Selection or Gaia?

Lapenis, Andrei G.

The Professional Geographer, 01 August 2002, Vol.54(3), p.379-391 [Peer Reviewed Journal]

This is the needed citation for the "influential Gaia" statement. I will add it.

Introduction:

Gaian hypotheses suggest that organisms co-evolve with their environment: that is, they "influence their abiotic environment, and that environment in turn influences the biota by Darwinian process". Lovelock (1995) gave evidence of this in his second book, showing the evolution from the world of the early thermo-acido-philic and methanogenic bacteria towards the oxygen-enriched atmosphere today that supports more complex life.

A reduced version of the hypothesis has been called "influential Gaia" in "Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Biogeochemical Selection or Gaia?" by Andrei G. Lapenis, which states the biota influence certain aspects of the abiotic world, e.g. temperature and atmosphere. This is not the work of an individual but a collective of Russian scientific research that was combined into this peer reviewed publication. It states the coevolution of life and the environment through “micro–forces” and biogeochemical processes. An example is how the activity of photosynthetic bacteria during Precambrian times have completely modified the Earth atmosphere to turn it aerobic, and as such supporting evolution of life (in particular eukaryotic life).

Since barriers existed through the Twentieth Century between Russia and the rest of the world, pioneer of the Gaia Theory have been unknown to the Western scientific community. The following scientists are published in this anthology:

1. Piotr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842–1921)
2. Rafail Vasil’evich Rizpolozhensky (1847–1918)
3. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945)
4. Vladimir Alexandrovich Kostitzin (1886–1963)

Biologists and Earth scientists usually view the factors that stabilize the characteristics of a period as an undirected emergent property or entelechy of the system; as each individual species pursues its own self-interest, for example, their combined actions may have counterbalancing effects on environmental change. Opponents of this view sometimes reference examples of events that resulted in dramatic change rather than stable equilibrium, such as the conversion of the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing environment to an oxygen-rich one at the end of the Archaean and the beginning of the Proterozoic periods.

Less accepted versions of the hypothesis claim that changes in the biosphere are brought about through the coordination of living organisms and maintain those conditions through homeostasis. In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all lifeforms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.

Salinity Section:

Ocean salinity has been constant at about 3.5% for a very long time. Salinity stability in oceanic environments is important as most cells require a rather constant salinity and do not generally tolerate values above 5%. The constant ocean salinity was a long-standing mystery, because no process counterbalancing the salt influx from rivers was known. Recently it was suggested that salinity may also be strongly influenced by seawater circulation through hot basaltic rocks, and emerging as hot water vents on mid-ocean ridges. However, the composition of seawater is far from equilibrium, and it is difficult to explain this fact without the influence of organic processes. One suggested explanation lies in the formation of salt plains throughout Earth's history. It is hypothesized that these are created by bacterial colonies that fix ions and heavy metals during their life processes.^{[citation needed]}

In the biogeochemical processes of the earth, sources and sinks are the movement of elements. The composition of salt ions within our oceans and seas are: sodium (Na+), chlorine (Cl-), sulfate (SO4-2), Magnesium (Mg+2), calcium (Ca+2) and potassium (K+). The elements that comprise salinity do not readily change and are a conservative property of seawater. There are many mechanisms that change salinity from a particulate form to a dissolved form and back. The known sources of sodium i.e. salts is when weathering, erosion, and dissolution of rocks transport into rivers and deposit into the oceans. When the earth's crust (primarily igneous rocks) degas and become differentiated. The mainstream, non-Gaian interpretation of the thermohaline circulation (The Gulf Stream) for salinity in the oceans is needed on the salinity page.

The Mediterranean Sea as being Gaia's kidney is found (here) by Kenneth J. Hsue a correspondence author in 2001. The "desiccation" of the Mediterranean is the evidence of a functioning kidney. Earlier "kidney functions" were performed during the "deposition of the Cretaceous (South Atlantic), Jurassic (Gulf of Mexico), Permo-Triassic (Europe), Devonian (Canada), Cambrian/Precambrian (Gondwana) saline giants."