On the effects of the evolution of microbial mats and land plants on the Earth as a planet. Photometric and spectroscopic light curves of paleo-Earths

TL;DR

This study models how Earth's surface evolution from deserts to microbial mats and land plants affects its reflected light, aiding future exoplanet characterization by identifying surface type signatures in photometric data.

Contribution

It introduces a radiative transfer model combined with paleo-records to simulate Earth's reflectance changes over geological time, highlighting detectable spectral signatures of surface evolution.

Findings

Reflectance changes up to 40% due to surface evolution.

Different surface types produce distinct spectral signatures.

Near-IR observations can effectively identify land plants.

Abstract

Understanding the spectral and photometric variability of the Earth and the rest of the solar system planets has become of the utmost importance for the future characterization of rocky exoplanets. As this is not only interesting at present times but also along the planetary evolution, we studied the effect that the evolution of microbial mats and plants over land has had on the way our planet looks from afar. As life evolved, continental surfaces changed gradually and non- uniformly from deserts through microbial mats to land plants, modifying the reflective properties of the ground and most probably the distribution of moisture and cloudiness. Here, we used a radiative transfer model of the Earth, together with geological paleo-records of the continental distribution and a reconstructed cloud distribution, to simulate the visible and near-IR radiation reflected by our planet as a function of Earth's rotation. We found that the evolution from deserts to microbial mats and to land plants produces detectable changes in the globally-averaged Earth's reflectance. The variability of each surface type is located in different bands and can induce reflectance changes of up to 40% in period of hours. We conclude that using photometric observations of an Earth- like planet at different photometric bands, it would be possible to discriminate between different surface types. While recent literature proposes the red edge feature of vegetation near 0.7 {\mu}m as a signature for land plants, observations in near-IR bands can be equally or even better suited for this purpose.