TNRTB Classic: Oxygenation Events

TNRTB Classic: Oxygenation Events

Humans and other large-bodied organisms, even some single-celled organisms, require free oxygen for survival. For most of Earth’s history, all the planet’s oxygen was locked away in other compounds.

Around 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen established a more permanent foothold (with some instability) in the atmosphere, and it rose to current values around half-a-billion years ago. The coordination of these oxygenation events with important biological, geological, atmospheric, and astronomical changes looks very much like an orchestrated, well-executed plan. Read more about these extraordinary events in this previous TNRTB post.