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Earth science

Sea change for the rise of oxygen

Nature volume 478, pages 194–195 (2011)Cite this article

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A model proposes that falling sea levels shifted the make-up of volcanic gases on the early Earth, triggering a chain of events that may have allowed photosynthesis in the ocean to oxygenate the atmosphere. See Letter p.229

A burning question for those studying the early Earth is whether oxygen production started in the ocean before it first began to accumulate in the atmosphere. A growing body of work convincingly shows that cyanobacteria in the ocean produced oxygen roughly 200 million to 300 million years before the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) — the first appreciable build-up of oxygen in the atmosphere, which occurred about 2.4 billion years ago. But for oxygen to have been produced without accumulating in the atmosphere, efficient sinks or buffers must have existed to consume it as quickly as it was generated. On page 229 of this issue, Gaillard and co-authors1 offer their take on this conundrum. They propose that falling sea levels across growing, stabilizing continents altered the gas composition of volcanoes, and that these tectonic changes weakened oxygen buffers, enabling the GOE.

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Figure 1: Sulphur isotopic data through Earth's history.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Timothy W. Lyons and Christopher T. Reinhard are in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, California 92521, USA.,

    Timothy W. Lyons & Christopher T. Reinhard

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  1. Timothy W. Lyons
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  2. Christopher T. Reinhard
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Correspondence to Timothy W. Lyons or Christopher T. Reinhard.

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Lyons, T., Reinhard, C. Sea change for the rise of oxygen. Nature 478, 194–195 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/478194a

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