All Biomass is sunlight

[ss2]

Hi all,

 

Im writing a paper discussing the following statement:

 

"All Biomass is sunlight"

 

 

I was wondering if anyone knew any good websites which includes scientific arguments that contradict this statement as well as those that support it. Any suggestions and help will be appreciated thanks in advance.

[someguy]

I dont' know of any websites, but wikipedia says that "Biomass, in the energy production industry, refers to living and recently dead biological material which can be used as fuel or for industrial production." and since biological material is not made of only sunlight then i would not say that biomass is purely sunlight either. plants are also made of things found in the earth, like carbon (also drawn from the air) and water. if biomass was purely sunlight then you could make plants out of purely sunlight. if you look at the wikipedia website in its definition of biomass it states it as being much more than sunlight, but i think you mean to say that the energy drawn from those plants was originally sunlight and therefore biomass is nothing more than sunlight, but if that's the case then i still think that's not fully correct because plants are not just sunlight. i mean at the end of the day everything is made of the same stuff, energy, so you could say in a way that stones are just sunlight but certain types of energy don't easily transfer into others they need a complex or precise chain of events in order to do so. in order to get energy from biomass you need to take all the original materials you need to make the plants including the seed, that comes with lots of evolution included, and all of the other ingredients they need to grow and then you need to burn it or something, and that complex process makes biomass not sunlight in my opinion. by reasoning that it does you would also need to concede that fossil fuels are sunlight also since they are basically biomass that have been rotting for way too long.

[Glider]

Also, you have the relatively recent findings of the ecosystems living around the black smokers found in the Marianas trench. They don't rely on sunlight for their primary energy, they rely on heat, methane and sulfur compounds released by the vents. Bacteria convert these to energery and form the basis of the food chain there.

[Norman Albers]

Glider, bingo! Are there any significant beds of ocean-floor growth like the surface growth that became petroleum? I'd think it is more localized.

[Glider]

I think you're right, and I doubt there's sufficient build-up of biomass to become petrolium deposits. The black smoker ecosystems are transient, 'crawling' along the ocean bed as the tectonic plates shift (look for example at the 'chain' of Hawaiian islands).

 

Any particular ecosystem lasts only for a comparatively short period of time (some hundreds to a few thousand years) before the smokers die and anything around them that can move has to go and find somewhere else.

[scalbers]

The ice-like methane clathrates that are in abundance on the ocean floor might count as ocean floor energy that is solar in nature?

[Norman Albers]

I just read in Wiki that some ocean clathrates are formed within sediments by microbes reducing CO2. Others are formed by digestion of organic matter. I guess such matter must have been fueled by growth at the top in light, ultimately. What do you know, scalbers?

[scalbers]

Very informative Wikipedia article on methane clathrates. I guess the rarer kind where the methane comes from organic matter decay was originally powered by the sun. The more abundant kind with CO2 processed "in situ" by the micororganisms is a good question. Where do these microorganisms get their energy from? It could be something other than photosynthesis.

[Norman Albers]

Yah, here is a reference I just received from my brother: http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Professional_Fasters_Deep_Under_The_Sea_Floor_999.html