Every breath we take in contains 21% oxygen, the gas that makes life on Earth possible. Oxygen, in its combined oxide state, ...

While most strains took up the ability to tolerate and use oxygen after the GOE, the researchers did spot some outliers – certain bacteria that were aerobic approximately 900 million years before ...

A team of scientists led by the University of Tokyo proposes that volcanic eruptions influenced precursor oxygenation events, or “whiffs,” that signaled the coming Great Oxygenation Event (GOE). Role ...

TOKYO — For nearly 90% of Earth’s history, our planet’s atmosphere contained almost no oxygen, making it completely uninhabitable for humans and most modern life forms.Then, around 2.5 billion years ...

The organic carbon content of ancient rocks provides a fundamental record of the biosphere on early Earth. For over 50 y, the high organic content of Archean (>2.5 Ga) mudrocks has puzzled geologists ...

Over that time, most scientists have come to agree that O 2 first reached appreciable concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere roughly 2.4 billion years ago, during the Great Oxidation Event (GOE ...

The Great Oxidation Event, often thought of as a single event, was actually a prolonged and complex process. ... To map ocean oxygen levels during the GOE, the team used stable thallium isotopes.

About 2.5 billion years ago, free oxygen first started to accumulate to meaningful levels in Earth’s atmosphere, setting the stage for the rise of complex life. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as ...