Carbonate-silicate cycle predictions of Earth-like planetary climates and testing the habitable zone concept

Owen R. Lehmer (), David C. Catling and Joshua Krissansen-Totton
Additional contact information
Owen R. Lehmer: NASA Ames Research Center
David C. Catling: University of Washington
Joshua Krissansen-Totton: Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract In the conventional habitable zone (HZ) concept, a CO2-H2O greenhouse maintains surface liquid water. Through the water-mediated carbonate-silicate weathering cycle, atmospheric CO2 partial pressure (pCO2) responds to changes in surface temperature, stabilizing the climate over geologic timescales. We show that this weathering feedback ought to produce a log-linear relationship between pCO2 and incident flux on Earth-like planets in the HZ. However, this trend has scatter because geophysical and physicochemical parameters can vary, such as land area for weathering and CO2 outgassing fluxes. Using a coupled climate and carbonate-silicate weathering model, we quantify the likely scatter in pCO2 with orbital distance throughout the HZ. From this dispersion, we predict a two-dimensional relationship between incident flux and pCO2 in the HZ and show that it could be detected from at least 83 (2σ) Earth-like exoplanet observations. If fewer Earth-like exoplanets are observed, testing the HZ hypothesis from this relationship could be difficult.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19896-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-19896-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19896-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().