First Oxygen Appeared On Earth Way Earlier Than We Realized

If you hopped in the Tardis and traveled back four billion years , you ’d find yourself on a hot , poor wasteland of a planet with nary an oxygen molecule to breathe . Earth used to be an asphyxiating hellscape , but over the eons , tiny green germ fill the air with O . young inquiry get hold they ’ve been at it much longer than we reckon .

In a forthcomingstudyin Earth and Planetary Science Letters , a squad of geochemists report the find of rust-brown , iron - productive rock layers — a telltale sign of oxygen — in sediments deposit on shallow ocean floors some 3.2 billion days ago . Through chemical analyses , the researcher show that this ancient rust had to have come from biology . That range the appearance of Earth ’s first oxygen - producing bacteria some 200 million eld earlier than we ’d guess .

Earth’s First Terraformers

Plants get all the credit for keeping our atmosphere breathable , but it was cyanobacteria that kickstarted the effort billions of years ago . These tiny dark-green microbes develop the very first versions of photosynthesis , the cognitive process that uses captured sun to split water and make sugar . favorable for animals , photosynthesis releases oxygen as a thriftlessness - product .

Around 2.3 billion years ago , the cyanos took off like crazy and part pouring oxygen into the atmosphere . While O - intolerant bug suffer , the air became much more pleasant for complex , multicellular life . Geologists moot this “ Great Oxygenation ” outcome to be a major turn point in the history of life on Earth .

Cyanobacteria . Image Credit : Doc . RNDr . Josef Reischig , CSc./ Wikimedia

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But how and when the very first cyanos got going remains a mystery . As you might imagine , it ’s rather tricky occupation to study teensy being from long , long ago . Most of their fingermark have been erased or overwritten by plate plate tectonics .

Still , geologist are stubborn family line , and they ’ve been consistently hunting down the few very ancient rock organization they can to assemble together Earth ’s muddy past .

A band Fe organization studied holds grounds of oxygen on Earth 3.2 billion years ago , pre - dating earlier estimate of the first occurrence of oxygen by 200 million twelvemonth . range of a function Credit : A. Satkoski / University of Wisconsin – Madison

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In the new study , geochemist Aaron Satkoski of the University of Wisconson - Madison and his colleagues reverse to the Manzimnyama Banded Iron Formation , a 3.2 billion twelvemonth - erstwhile sequence of scarlet and pink - striped rocks that hails from a site in South Africa , just east of Johannesburg . First deposited in ancient ocean , these sedimentary rock and roll get their color from Fe that literally eat away in the presence of oxygen . By bet at the ratio of two Fe isotopes — Fe-56 and Fe-54 — within the rust fungus , the team find out that the shallow ocean rocks formed under oxygen concentrations of 0.1 % . That may not sound like a lot , but keep in mind most rocks from this clip period indicate no oxygen whatsoever . Further evidence for O2 total from a smattering of uranium atom , which break out of their transparent word form when they react with oxygen .

Of naturally , this study only identify oxygen in a single daub . The dubiousness of whether cyanobacteria were crop up all over the world at this breaker point remain opened . If they were , it ’s a number perplexing why the Great Oxygenation effect took another billion years to unfold .

Then again , the early Earth was a reasonably unlivable position — bombarded with UV radiotherapy and asteroid alike . perchance other cyanobacteria were very qualified , hang on in the few shallow sea that offered just enough sunlight and security from the elements . If there ’s one takeaway here , it ’s that Earth ’s first terraformers were even more resilient than we imagined — and that we still have a tidy sum to learn about our planet ’s deep past .

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