“Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it,” wrote evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, in The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“Contrary to our first expectations, global climate was not the primary cause of this change in ocean oxygen and nitrogen cycling,” said biogeochemist Emma Kast currently at the University of Cambridge about the planet’s dramatic increase in oxygen 55 million years ago. The more likely culprit? Plate tectonics. The collision of India with Asia — dubbed “the collision that changed the world” by Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker, a pioneer in the ocean’s role in climate change.— closed off an ancient sea called the Tethys, disturbing the continental shelves and their connections with the open ocean.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“Our theory is the only one that accounts for the global impact on the production of oxygen over such a sustained period of time and explains why it was able to rise to the levels we see today, fueling the evolution of life on Earth,” says William Martin at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
Mystery of Gravity Could Soon Be Solved to Will Mars Samples Endanger Earth? (The Galaxy Report)
“Information Can Escape a Black Hole Both On the Outside and Possibly to Another Universe” (Stephen Hawking’s Paradox)
The Fourth Copernican Revolution: “Our Universe May Be One Patch of Space and Time In a Infinite Archipelago” (Weekend Feature)
Human Imprint on Earth’s Rocks to Our Inner Fish (Planet Earth Report)What the First Two Pictures of Black Holes Tell Us to What If Aliens We are Looking for are AI? (The Galaxy Report)
The Most Massive Objects in the Modern Universe –Primordial Relics of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Antarctica’s ‘Factorian Deep’ to Can We Think Without Language? (Planet Earth Report)
Mystery of Our Lopsided Universe to China’s Alien-Signal False Alarm (The Galaxy Report)
3-D Views of Interstellar Supernova “Cavities” Reveal Explosive Star-forming RegionsWhy the US Navy is Listening to Shrimp to Google has Not Created Sentient AI — Yet (Planet Earth Report)
