Give a DETAILED account of the biosphere and ecosystem. (LONG)
Answers
Explanation:
This exchange of food and energy makes the biosphere a self-supporting and self-regulating system. The biosphere is sometimes thought of as one large ecosystem—a complex community of living and nonliving things functioning as a single unit. More often, however, the biosphere is described as having many ecosystems.
Biosphere, relatively thin life-supporting stratum of Earth’s surface, extending from a few kilometres into the atmosphere to the deep-sea vents of the ocean. The biosphere is a global ecosystem composed of living organisms (biota) and the abiotic (nonliving) factors from which they derive energy and nutrients.
Before the coming of life, Earth was a bleak place, a rocky globe with shallow seas and a thin band of gases—largely carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, molecular nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and water vapour. It was a hostile and barren planet. This strictly inorganic state of Earth is called the geosphere; it consists of the lithosphere (the rock and soil), the hydrosphere (the water), and the atmosphere (the air). Energy from the Sun relentlessly bombarded the surface of the primitive Earth, and in time—millions of years—chemical and physical actions produced the first evidence of life: formless, jellylike blobs that could collect energy from the environment and produce more of their own kind. This generation of life in the thin outer layer of the geosphere established what is called the biosphere, the “zone of life,” an energy-diverting skin that uses the matter of Earth to make living substance.
The biosphere is a system characterized by the continuous cycling of matter and an accompanying flow of solar energy in which certain large molecules and cells are self-reproducing. Water is a major predisposing factor, for all life depends on it. The elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, when combined as proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids, provide the building blocks, the fuel, and the direction for the creation of life. Energy flow is required to maintain the structure of organisms by the formation and splitting of phosphate bonds. Organisms are cellular in nature and always contain some sort of enclosing membrane structure, and all have nucleic acids that store and transmit genetic information.
An ecosystem (or ecological system) is a large community of living organisms (plants, animals and microbes) in a particular area. The living and physical components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Ecosystems are of any size, but usually they are in particular places.