Search Here

Geological studies from the University of Copenhagen show that atmospheric oxygen was present in the earth 3.8 billion years ago. That works out to about 0.7 to 0.8 billion years earlier than believed!

The study was published in Feb.11,2016 issue of Scientific Reports.

Information gathered from the Earth's oldest Banded Iron Formations (BIFs), or marine chemical sediments made up of alternating layers of silica and Fe-hydroxides located in Western Greenland. BIFs are mostused ly in geochemical archiving. They have the ability to retain information on the composition and presence of oxygenation/reduction processes in ambient seawater, along with the interaction between the Earth's atmosphere and surface.

While analysing the concentrations and isotope compositions in the BIFs in order to identify when the continental land masses of western Greenland were exposed to reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as oxygen, it was seen that the exposure happened 3.8 billion years ago.

"It is generally believed that the Early Earth was a completely anoxic, but our study shows that the surface of the Earth was exposed to a low oxygen atmosphere already this time," Robert Frei, who participated in the research, said in a press release. "This has far reaching implications for how we investigate the pace of evolution of life and its biodiversity on our planet."