Microbes are 'active engineers' in Earth's rock-to-life cycle

I really highly recommend Robert Hazen's _Story of Earth_ [1] if you're into this sort of stuff. Highly knowledgeable and entertaining geologist argues that the geosphere and the biosphere should really be viewed as one co-evolving system, over deep time. There are thousands of species of minerals that can only exist because of the action of life, and those minerals in turn enable new forms of life, which enable new species of mineral, and so on in a complex and ever evolving system within which we exist for only a fraction of an instant.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Story-Earth-Billion-Stardust-Living/d...

You can call it the revenge of the softies. Rock thought it had it all worked out, geometric purity, eternal hardness, high atomic numbers, crushing abundance, first mover advantage. Then comes along Life, a freak aberration, barely indistinguishable from water, chaotic and brittle, ugly and arbitrary in structure, and it starts chewing on the mighty Rock.

Fast forward billions of years: the entire volume of the planet (where temperature allows macromolecules to exist) is alive somehow... Rock retreats to the molten interior

Microbes also started the oxygenation of the atmosphere. Some microbes were off-gassing oxygen.

There was a cartoon in one of my college textbooks where some microbes were decrying how their oxygen-producing neighbors were ruining the environment with their high levels of poisonous oxygen off-gassing.

For a salient discussion of how biotic cycling can be used in agriculture, microbiologist Elaine Ingham gives a practical talk to audiences of actual farmers.[0]

[0] https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag

It's weird how the anime Nausicaa, with it's focus on mushrooms and fungi etc. making the earth habitable, seems prescient.

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite#Fossil_record

The ‘rock to microbe’ story is even more interesting :)

Other active engineers in the rock-to-life cycle: Fort Minor, The Beatles, Polyphia.