The Great Oxygenation Event was more of a rollercoaster ride than one big spike.
. Over several billion years, they coated our planet with a stew of noxious methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and water vapor., microorganisms called cyanobacteria created a windfall of oxygen through photosynthesis. Scientists call these first drops of the gas, creatively, the Great Oxygenation Event. But despite its grandiose name, the juncture only brought our atmosphere’s oxygen to at most a small fraction of today’s levels.
That’s important for geologists to know, because atmospheric oxygen is involved in virtually every process on Earth’s surface. Even if early life mostly lived in the sea, the upper levels of the ocean and the atmosphere constantly exchange gases. Additionally, as the planet’s tectonic plates move, oxygen buried deep within the mantle can emerge and bubble up into the air through a process known as
He and his colleagues found that atmospheric oxygen levels didn’t follow a straight line over the Earth’s history. Instead, imagine it like an oxygen roller coaster. Across 100-million-year stretches or so, oxygen levels rose to around 50 percent of modern levels, and then plummeted again. The Neoproterozoic alone saw five such peaks.
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