“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.
Globular Clusters: The Home of Space-Faring Civilizations?
Transcendent Human Brain to Our Future if We Survive Another Million Years (Planet Earth Report)
Will Gravitational Waves Solve One of the Biggest Mysteries in Physics? (Weekend Feature)
The Most Overhyped Space Movie to Soaring to Alpha Centauri to Mars’ Ancient Killer Asteroid (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
3,000 Light-Year-Long Anomaly In Milky Way’s Sagittarius Arm
Detecting Our Solar System’s Center of Gravity: “The Location of Absolute Stillness”
How the Space Economy Will Change the World to Conscious Artificial Intelligence? (Planet Earth Report)Rise of Oxygen –An Evolutionary Moment that Shaped Our PlanetOur Universe Wouldn’t Exist Without Phase Transitions to The Quest for Quantum Gravity (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
