The Great Oxidation Event (GOE) or Great Oxygenation Event, also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Revolution, Oxygen Crisis or Oxygen Holocaust,[2] was a time interval during the Early Earth's Paleoproterozoic era when the Earth's atmosphere and the shallow ocean first experienced a rise in the concentration of oxygen.[3] This began approximately 2.460–2.426 Ga (billion years) ago during the Siderian period and ended approximately 2.060 Ga ago during the Rhyacian.[4] Geological, isotopic, and chemical evidence suggests that biologically produced molecular oxygen (dioxygen or O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere and changed it from a weakly reducing atmosphere practically devoid of oxygen into an oxidizing one containing abundant free oxygen,[5] with oxygen levels being as high as 10% of their present atmospheric level by the end of the GOE.[6]
The sudden injection of highly reactive free oxygen, toxic to the then-mostly anaerobic biosphere, may have caused the extinction of many organisms on Earth – mostly archaeal colonies that used retinal to utilize green-spectrum light energy and power a form of anoxygenic photosynthesis (see Purple Earth hypothesis). Although the event is inferred to have constituted a mass extinction,[7] due in part to the great difficulty in surveying microscopic organisms' abundances, and in part to the extreme age of fossil remains from that time, the Great Oxidation Event is typically not counted among conventional lists of "great extinctions", which are implicitly limited to the Phanerozoic eon. In any case, isotope geochemistry data from sulfate minerals have been interpreted to indicate a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80% associated with changes in nutrient supplies at the end of the GOE.[8]
The GOE is inferred to have been caused by cyanobacteria that evolved porphyrin-based photosynthesis, which produces dioxygen as a byproduct. The increasing oxygen level eventually depleted the reducing capacity of ferrous compounds, hydrogen sulfide and atmospheric methane, and compounded by a global glaciation, devastated the microbial mats around the Earth's surface. The subsequent adaptation of surviving archaea via symbiogenesis with aerobic proteobacteria (which went endosymbiont and became mitochondria) may have led to the rise of eukaryotic organisms and the subsequent evolution of multicellular life-forms.[9][10][11]
^Holland, Heinrich D. (19 May 2006). "The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. 361 (1470): 903–915. doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1838. PMC 1578726. PMID 16754606.
^
Margulis, Lynn; Sagan, Dorion (1986). "Chapter 6, "The Oxygen Holocaust"". Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. California: University of California Press. p. 99. ISBN 9780520210646.
^Lyons, Timothy W.; Reinhard, Christopher T.; Planavsky, Noah J. (February 2014). "The rise of oxygen in Earth's early ocean and atmosphere". Nature. 506 (7488): 307–315. Bibcode:2014Natur.506..307L. doi:10.1038/nature13068. PMID 24553238. S2CID 4443958.
^Gumsley, Ashley P.; Chamberlain, Kevin R.; Bleeker, Wouter; Söderlund, Ulf; De Kock, Michiel O.; Larsson, Emilie R.; Bekker, Andrey (6 February 2017). "Timing and tempo of the Great Oxidation Event". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 114 (8): 1811–1816. doi:10.1073/pnas.1608824114. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 5338422. PMID 28167763.
^Sosa Torres, Martha E.; Saucedo-Vázquez, Juan P.; Kroneck, Peter M.H. (2015). "The Magic of Dioxygen". In Kroneck, Peter M.H.; Sosa Torres, Martha E. (eds.). Sustaining Life on Planet Earth: Metalloenzymes Mastering Dioxygen and Other Chewy Gases. Metal Ions in Life Sciences volume 15. Vol. 15. Springer. pp. 1–12. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-12415-5_1. ISBN 978-3-319-12414-8. PMID 25707464.
^Ossa Ossa, Frantz; Spangenberg, Jorge E.; Bekker, Andrey; König, Stephan; Stüeken, Eva E.; Hofmann, Axel; et al. (15 September 2022). "Moderate levels of oxygenation during the late stage of Earth's Great Oxidation Event". Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 594: 117716. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2022.117716. hdl:10481/78482.
^Plait, Phil (28 July 2014). "Poisoned Planet". Slate. Retrieved 8 July 2019.
^Hodgskiss, Malcolm S. W.; Crockford, Peter W.; Peng, Yongbo; Wing, Boswell A.; Horner, Tristan J. (27 August 2019). "A productivity collapse to end Earth's Great Oxidation". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 116 (35): 17207–17212. doi:10.1073/pnas.1900325116. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6717284. PMID 31405980.
^Schirrmeister, Bettina E.; de Vos, Jurriaan M.; Antonelli, Alexandre; Bagheri, Homayoun C. (29 January 2013). "Evolution of multicellularity coincided with increased diversification of cyanobacteria and the Great Oxidation Event". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 (5): 1791–1796. Bibcode:2013PNAS..110.1791S. doi:10.1073/pnas.1209927110. PMC 3562814. PMID 23319632.
"Great Oxidation Event: More oxygen through multicellularity". ScienceDaily (Press release). 17 January 2013.
^Crockford, Peter W.; Kunzmann, Marcus; Bekker, Andrey; Hayles, Justin; Bao, Huiming; Halverson, Galen P.; et al. (20 May 2019). "Claypool continued: Extending the isotopic record of sedimentary sulfate". Chemical Geology. 513: 200–225. doi:10.1016/j.chemgeo.2019.02.030. ISSN 0009-2541.
^Crockford, Peter W.; bar On, Yinon M.; Ward, Luce M.; Milo, Ron; Halevy, Itay (November 2023). "The geologic history of primary productivity". Current Biology. 33 (21): 4741–4750.e5. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2023.09.040. PMID 37827153.
and 30 Related for: Great Oxidation Event information
The GreatOxidationEvent (GOE) or Great Oxygenation Event, also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Revolution, Oxygen Crisis or Oxygen Holocaust, was...
oil-bearing fluid inclusions: an uncontaminated record of life before the GreatOxidationEvent". Geology. 34 (6): 437. Bibcode:2006Geo....34..437D. doi:10.1130/G22360...
GreatOxidationEvent roughly 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago during the Neoarchean-Paleoproterozoic boundary. Although the end of the GreatOxidation Event...
fractionation law. The GreatOxidationEvent represented a massive transition of global sulfur cycles. Before the GreatOxidationEvent, the sulfur cycle was...
cyanobacteria. Oxidation of ferrous iron may have been hastened by aerobic iron-oxidizing bacteria, which can increase rates of oxidation by a factor of...
The Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event (NOE), also called the Second GreatOxidationEvent (the first having occurred during the Palaeoproterozoic), was...
revealing that sulphur-oxidising bacteria had evolved prior to the GreatOxidationEvent. During this era, the supercontinent Kenorland is proposed to have...
during the Siderian and Rhyacian periods in an aerochemical event called the GreatOxidationEvent, which brought atmospheric oxygen from near none to up to...
GreatOxidationEvent Iron cycle Iron oxide nanoparticle Limonite List of inorganic pigments Cornell., RM.; Schwertmann, U (2003). The iron oxides: structure...
oxygen-poor, reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, causing the GreatOxidationEvent and the "rusting of the Earth", which dramatically changed the composition...
was believed that the ocean becoming fully oxygenated during the GreatOxidationEvent (GOE; ~2.46 Gya) was the mechanism that ceased BIF deposition. By...
events include a single footprint, an earthquake, a series of volcanic eruptions, the formation of mountains (orogenies), the GreatOxidationEvent (GOE)...
metabolism on Earth, about 2.9 billion years ago, a forerunner of the GreatOxidationEvent. Pyridoxal phosphate "CSD Entry: BIHKEI01". Cambridge Structural...
periods and events in climate history includes some notable climate events known to paleoclimatology. Knowledge of precise climatic events decreases as...
has been altering Earth's atmosphere and surface, leading to the GreatOxidationEvent two billion years ago. Humans emerged 300,000 years ago in Africa...
present, amounts of dissolved oxygen in the water such as during the GreatOxidationEvent or snowball earths. The red bands are microcrystalline red chert...
examples of algal mats. Algal mats played an important role in the GreatOxidationEvent on Earth some 2.3 billion years ago. Algal mats can become a significant...
to oceans in the Archean and Paleoproterozoic Eons, before the GreatOxidationEvent (GOE). The biogeochemical activity in the hypolimnion has been studied...
not present until about 2,500 million years ago (Myr). After the GreatOxidationEvent, quantities of oxygen produced as a by-product of photosynthesis...
allowed the buildup of an oxygen-rich atmosphere. This second, follow-on event is known as the oxygen catastrophe, which, some geologists believe triggered...
terms of their oxidation states. An agent's oxidation state describes its degree of loss of electrons, where the higher the oxidation state then the fewer...
oxygen in the air. Atmosphere of Earth – Gas layer surrounding Earth GreatOxidationEvent – Paleoproterozoic surge in atmospheric oxygen Paleoclimatology –...
S2CID 4311084. Holland HD (2002). "Volcanic gases, black smokers, and the greatoxidationevent". Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 66 (21): 3811–3826. Bibcode:2002GeCoA...
a large asteroid collision created the Vredefort impact structure. The event that created the Sudbury Basin structure occurred near the end of the period...
Heinrich D. (2002-11-01). "Volcanic gases, black smokers, and the greatoxidationevent". Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 66 (21): 3811–3826. Bibcode:2002GeCoA...
biota (Also see Akouemma) Evolutionary concepts GreatOxidationEvent Shunga-Francevillian event Huronian glaciation Lomagundi event Origin of Life v t e...
pre-Cryogenian time scale to reflect important events such as the formation of the Solar System and the GreatOxidationEvent, among others, while at the same time...
likely evolved early in the Archean but proliferated across Earth's GreatOxidationEvent with an increase to the rate of oxygenic photosynthesis by cyanobacteria...