Biosphere

[ˈbɑɪ·əˌsfɪər]

Related terms: Critical Zone, Cybernetics, Cycles, Ecology, Flux, Gaia, Lebensraum (German), Skin, Vulnerability

Life is a geological force continuously transforming the Earth. In 1926 the Russian mineralogist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky formulated this groundbreaking insight in his publication 

The Biosphere. Similar to the notion of the Critical Zone, the biosphere, as Vernadsky describes it, is a thin membrane at the surface of the Earth continuously transformed by life and solar energy. Thus it forms an open, complex, self-regulating system through cyclic processes. Vernadsky’s theory of the biosphere has become the implicit precursor of the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (1970s).