New Oxygen research; cyanobacteria (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, November 23, 2015, 15:15 (3069 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Cyanobacteria, one of the earliest groups on Earth use photosynthesis for energy, taking CO2 and splitting it, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. the process appears to have started 2.5 billion years ago:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151120182620.htm-"Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere emerged in whiffs from a kind of cyanobacteria in shallow oceans around 2.5 billion years ago, according to new research from Canadian and US scientists.-"These whiffs of oxygen likely happened in the following 100 million years, changing the levels of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere until enough accumulated to create a permanently oxygenated atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago -- a transition widely known as the Great Oxidation Event.-"'The onset of Earth's surface oxygenation was likely a complex process characterized by multiple whiffs of oxygen until a tipping point was crossed," said Brian Kendall, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Waterloo. "Until now, we haven't been able to tell whether oxygen concentrations 2.5 billion years ago were stable or not. These new data provide a much more conclusive answer to that question."-"The findings are presented in a paper published this month in Science Advances from researchers at Waterloo, University of Alberta, Arizona State University, University of California Riverside, and Georgia Institute of Technology. The team presents new isotopic data showing that a burst of oxygen production by photosynthetic cyanobacteria temporarily increased oxygen concentrations in Earth's atmosphere.
"One of the questions we ask is: 'did the evolution of photosynthesis lead directly to an oxygen-rich atmosphere? Or did the transition to today's world happen in fits and starts?" said Professor Ariel Anbar of Arizona State University. "How and why Earth developed an oxygenated atmosphere is one of the most profound puzzles in understanding the history of our planet."-"The new data supports a hypothesis proposed by Anbar and his team in 2007. In Western Australia, they found preliminary evidence of these oxygen whiffs in black shales deposited on the seafloor of an ancient ocean."-Comment: CO2 is a friend. We exhale it and plants inhale it. we all benefit. Neat.