Latest Great Oxygenation Event Stories

A UC Riverside-led study reports on the effects of biological oxygen production nearly 100 million years before oxygen accumulated in the atmosphereScientists widely accept that around 2.4 billion years ago, the Earth's atmosphere underwent a dramatic change when oxygen levels rose sharply. Called the "Great Oxidation Event" (GOE), the oxygen spike marks an important milestone in Earth's history, the transformation from an oxygen-poor atmosphere to an oxygen-rich one paving the way...

Danish-led scientists say an analysis of rock found only in the world's oldest oceans has shed light on how large animals obtained a foothold on Earth. The team led by University of Copenhagen Professor Robert Frei said it has, for the first time, plotted the rise and fall of oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere that occurred during the last 3.8 billion years. By analyzing the isotopes of chromium in iron-rich sediments formed in the ancient oceans, the team found a rise in atmospheric...

An international team of geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice age may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland geology colleague James Farquhar, and scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S.A., uncovered evidence that...

The Earth's original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically during what scientists call the "Great Oxidation Event." The cause of this event has puzzled scientists, but researchers writing in Nature have found indications in ancient sedimentary rocks that it may have been linked to a drop in the level of dissolved nickel in seawater."The Great Oxidation Event is what irreversibly changed...

NASA-funded astrobiologists have found evidence of oxygen present in Earth's atmosphere earlier than previously known, pushing back the timeline for the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere. Two teams of researchers report that traces of oxygen appeared in Earth's atmosphere from 50 to 100 million years before what is known as the Great Oxidation Event. This event happened between 2.3 and 2.4 billion years ago, when many scientists think atmospheric oxygen increased significantly from the...

WASHINGTON -- Oxygen, key to life on Earth today, began to appear on the planet millions of years earlier than scientists had thought, new research indicates.An analysis of a deep rock core from Australia indicates the presence of at least some oxygen 50 million to 100 million years before the great change when the life-giving element began rising to today's levels, according to two papers appearing in Friday's edition of the journal Science.Previously, the earliest indications of oxygen had...