“Most people think the rise of oxygen was linked to cyanobacteria, and they are not wrong,” said James Eguchi, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside who led a new study suggesting that the first burst of oxygen was added by a spate of volcanic eruptions brought about by tectonics. “The emergence of photosynthetic organisms could release oxygen. But the most important question is whether the timing of that emergence lines up with the timing of the Great Oxidation Event. As it turns out, they do not.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“We’re in a different situation now — carbon dioxide is the major player in our current world,” said Princeton University geophysicist Yuzhen Yan, lead author of a new climate-change study based on two- million-year-old ice cores from Antarctica. “If we want to look into the geologic past for an analogy of what’s going on in our world today, we need to go beyond 2 million years to find it.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
On June 8, 2019, The Daily Galaxy reported that the impacting object that produced Mars Borealis Basin must have been about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) across –an asteroid larger than Pluto. In the early days of the planet, the basin appears to have held an ocean the size of the combined areas of Asia, Europe and Australia, before Mars lost so much of its atmosphere and the water either sublimated away or froze beneath the surface. Subsequently, Martian seas could have disappeared when the planet was bombarded by smaller meteors that changed its atmosphere and dried it out.