“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.”
“What we’ve made lets us dig ten times deeper than what we’ve been able to do before, helping us to see hundreds of millions of years into the past,” says Evan Floden, a researcher at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona who led on developing a new tool that simultaneously compares 1.4 million genetic sequences. “Our technology is essentially a time machine that tells us how ancient constraints influenced genes in a way that resulted in life as we know today, much like how the Hubble Space Telescope observes things that happened millions of years ago to help us understand the Universe we live in today.”
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.
“It is remarkable to think that our oldest animal ancestors—and therefore all of us—may owe our existence, in part, to an unusual episode of plate tectonics over half a billion years ago” said Tim Lenton, professor of Climate Change and Earth System Science with the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute in June, 2019 about the most dramatic moment in the history of evolution when the spectacular supernova of biology, the Cambrian Explosion, was detonated and the world of animal life was born with the rise in oxygen levels during the formation of the supercontinent Gondwana and a major increase in continental arc volcanism—chains of volcanoes often thousands of miles long formed where continental and oceanic tectonic plates collided.
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.
The discovery of the language of life, an ancient, long molecule called DNA with eight nucleotide letters suitable for storing and transmitting information, was a breakthrough in our knowledge of the range of possibilities necessary for life on Earth and beyond. Now, new studies suggest that alternatives to DNA-based life, as we know it on Earth, may be possible on other worlds.