Description:

Dr. David Bercovici
Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Yale University

Host: Elvira Mulyukova

Talk Title: Origin, Evolution and Habitability of Planet Earth

Talk Abstract:

One of the many lessons gleaned from planet Earth is that habitability is about more than just being at the Goldilocks distance to a host star to allow liquid water.  Without the addition of its unique carbon and plate tectonic cycles, our planet might be no more habitable than Mars or Venus.  To understand how we arrived at our current state of habitability, I briefly review some prior work on the challenges of planetary formation, the formation of our Moon, and the origin of our oceans and atmospheres. I’ll dig a bit deeper into the geological carbon cycle that is driven by plate tectonics and permits an autocorrecting thermostat, which keeps our planet (mostly) habitable.  This culminates in understanding some of the physics, from micro-scales to planet scales, of why our planet alone in the solar system has plate tectonics and under what conditions might we expect it to occur in other solar systems.   Finally, time permitting, I might use some of this framework to comment on natural solutions for anthropogenic climate change