Geodiversity supports all biodiversity.
Today there is a lot of talk about biodiversity and it is a good thing that it is. Biologists have been able to give due importance to this very important issue.
The same has not happened with GEODIVERSITY, a word that is still absent in the official discourse, although, it is worth remembering, geodiversity constitutes the support of all biodiversity.
In a first approximation, geodiversity can be understood as the set of all occurrences of a geological nature, with emphasis on rocks, minerals and fossils (testimony of past biodiversity), folds and faults, natural caves and mine galleries, reliefs and land depressions and submarines, volcanoes, etc.
Under favorable conditions, physical, chemical and biological agents, existing on the surface of the planet, alter the outer layer of the rocks, a necessary condition for the birth of SOIL (from Latin only, floor, pavement), defined as a natural, complex and dynamic body, consisting of mineral and organic elements, characterized by its own plant and animal life, subject to the circulation of air and water and which functions as a receiver and redistributor of solar energy .
In fact, when wood or coal burn, be it charcoal or fossil (lignite, coal or anthracite), all the heat they release is solar energy trapped in them and released.
All the strength that animals, including this complicated “animal” that we are, develop in the work they perform, originated in sunlight, absorbed by the plants used in their food.
Author AM Galopim de Carvalho
Science in the Regional Press – Ciência Viva
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