Long Term Planetary Habitability and the Carbonate-Silicate Cycle

TL;DR

This paper develops a biogeochemical model of the carbon cycle to assess how planetary size and insolation influence long-term habitability, emphasizing the importance of geochemical plausibility in habitability assessments.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model integrating Earth's carbon cycle to evaluate habitability, considering planetary and stellar variations beyond climate models.

Findings

Larger planets exhibit greater surface temperature deviations due to topography and tectonics.

Temperature deviations up to 20 K for planets between 0.5 and 2 Earth radii.

Geochemical processes significantly impact habitability assessments.

Abstract

The potential habitability of an exoplanet is traditionally assessed by determining if its orbit falls within the circumstellar `habitable zone' of its star, defined as the distance at which water could be liquid on the surface of a planet (Kopparapu et al., 2013). Traditionally, these limits are determined by radiative-convective climate models, which are used to predict surface temperatures at user-specified levels of greenhouse gases. This approach ignores the vital question of the (bio)geochemical plausibility of the proposed chemical abundances. Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere in terms of regulating planetary temperature, with the long term concentration controlled by the balance between volcanic outgassing and the sequestration of CO2 via chemical weathering and sedimentation, as modulated by ocean chemistry, circulation and biological (microbial) productivity. We develop a model incorporating key aspects of Earth's short and long-term biogeochemical carbon cycle to explore the potential changes in the CO2 greenhouse due to variance in planet size and stellar insolation. We find that proposed changes in global topography, tectonics, and the hydrological cycle on larger planets results in proportionally greater surface temperatures for a given incident flux. For planets between 0.5 to 2 R_earth the effect of these changes results in average global surface temperature deviations of up to 20 K, which suggests that these relationships must be considered in future studies of planetary habitability.