Title of the talk: Slow Closure of Earth's Carbon Cycle
The global carbon cycle inherits the complexity of biology, geology, and chemistry. Yet somehow it expresses a mathematical structure: once carbon dioxide is reduced to organic carbon by photosynthesis, its oxidation back to CO2 by microbial respiration slows down at rates that are inversely proportional to its age. Moreover, microbial populations themselves decrease as a power of age. I show that a simple model of fluctuation-limited kinetics quantitatively predicts these and other observations. The impact of these slow dynamics is profound: they preclude complete oxidation of organic carbon, thereby freeing molecular oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere.
Short bio: Daniel H. Rothman is a Professor of Geophysics in the Department of
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He is co-founder and co-director of MIT's Lorenz Center, which is devoted to learning how climate works. Rothman joined the MIT faculty in 1986, after receiving his AB in applied mathematics from Brown University and his PhD in geophysics from Stanford University. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, Ecole Normale Superieure,
and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union, and the recipient of the 2016 Levi L. Conant Prize from the American Mathematical Society.
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