Why did oxygen not appear in Earth's atmosphere until hundreds of millions of years after photosynthesizing organisms first produced it? Perhaps because reducing gases from undersea volcanoes claimed it first.
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Lyons, T. Oxygen's rise reduced. Nature 448, 1005–1006 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/4481005a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4481005a