“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 Exoplanet Paradox” -Worlds With Low Oxygen May Be Teeming with Life Based on Early Earth History
Astronomers Share Their Hopes for the JWST to Will Tardigrades Be the First Interstellar Travelers? (Today’s Galaxy Report)
Monster Black Hole in Tiny Galaxy Holds Clues to Their Existence in Early UniverseCarbon Isotopes on Mars Could Be From Ancient Life to Is Pluto a Planet Debate Continues (Today’s Galaxy Report)
Venus Could Have Been Habitable and Radically Different from the Planet We See Today
The Death of Mars (YouTube Episode)
Why are NASA Spaceships Exploring Earth’s Deepest Oceans to Is Reality a Wavefunction? (Planet Earth Report)
Harvard Astronomers on the ‘Detective Story’ of a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Bubble Surrounding Earth 
Extraterrestrial Contact Paradox to Antimatter Stars of the Milky Way (The Galaxy Report)
Supervoids of the Universe – Mystery of the Vast CMB Cold Spot 
