Water-Rock Interaction: Implications for the Origin and Program of Global Evolution

Author(s): S.L. Shvartsev

Evolution was thought for several hundreds of years to be restricted to biological systems and to have originated together with life. This idea remains quite broadly supported at present though recent research in synergetics shows that any open system existing far from equilibrium can evolve and reach more complicated states. Such an open system exists in geology: it is the water-rock system having particular basic properties. It is a nonlinear equilibrium-nonequilibrium system, which receives solar energy and undergoes intrinsically driven evolution, at any external conditions, to produce ever new secondary minerals and chemical types of water. Thus, the water-rock system is suggested to have been at the origin of global evolution.

Composition of water, equilibrium, hydrogeochemistry, internal evolution, water-rock interaction, mechanism of evolution, program of global evolution

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