Great Oxidation Event Got Earlier Start

January 29, 2009 / Posted by: Daniella Scalice

NAI’s Archean Biosphere Drilling Project supported the drilling of several pristine cores from ancient rocks in Western Australia, with the goal of furthering our understanding of the atmosphere, oceans, climate, and biosphere of early Earth. A new paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters from NAI’s Penn State Team outlines results from the analyses of these cores. Their studies evidence oxygenated surface environments, at least localized and/or short-lived, emerging more than 300 million years before the widely accepted Great Oxidation Event during 2.45 and 2.32 billion years ago. This implies that the emergence of life (oxygenic photoautotrophs) and of oxygenated surface environments occurred before 2.8 billion years ago.