Jack Lohmann writes:

Stored in rock and organic material, phosphorus cycles slowly around Earth, through magma and mountains, down rivers, through waste and into oceans. Without it, there’d be no life – every living being needs it to grow. Unlike other mined materials, we all eat it. In the human body, it gives our cells energy, structure and identity, and it is particularly concentrated in our bones.

Rare enough to be notable, common enough to be necessary, phosphorus tracks the development of our planet. Over billions of years, as life and Earth evolved, phosphorus held the two together. Two hundred million years ago, when Pangaea broke apart, all those newly exposed continental edges leaked phosphorus into the oceans, leading to a biological boom. Something similar, though smaller, is happening today due to the rapid growth and uplift – and exposure – of the Himalayas. Trace amounts of phosphorus in mountains are enough to raise the biological productivity of the world.

Phosphorus fascinates me because it is a tangible expression of big ideas – a literal crystallisation of life on our planet. I am not the first observer to see worlds within this element. Phosphorus over the years has inspired bouts of marvelling and poetry, of reflection on our place within the world. In the 19th century, the theologian and geologist William Buckland found in phosphate ‘records of warfare, waged by successive generations of inhabitants of our planet on one another’. The naturalist Leonard Jenyns, some years later, saw in phosphate rock ‘the tracings of the fingers of God’.

This is a life-giving material that runs throughout Earth, a vibrant substance that is accessible to everyone. (Chemically isolated, it literally glows.) And yet humanity, on the whole, has turned it into a pollutant, creating life – and death – in the wrong places. In excess, it causes eutrophication, leading to algal blooms or sargassum outbreaks that suffocate other aquatic life. Our species’ relationship with this essential element has mirrored our own trajectory from living within nature’s cycles to imposing linear, extractive systems on the planet. By mining million-year-old phosphate and releasing it into the world’s waters, we are changing the biological composition, and even the geological structure, of the world. Understanding the phosphorus cycle means reckoning with our influence on Earth. [Continue reading…]