From poison to breath: how cyanobacteria seeded Earth’s oxygen-rich world
TL;DR
Oxygen, now essential to life, started as a poisonous byproduct released by cyanobacteria about 2.4–2.5 billion years ago, triggering the Great Oxidation Event that poisoned much of the anaerobic biosphere and reshaped Earth’s chemistry. As some microbes adapted to oxygen, they evolved enzymes and aerobic respiration, enabling far more energy production and the rise of larger, more complex life. The modern atmosphere remains a steady-state maintained by ongoing photosynthesis, with cyanobacteria still producing oxygen today.
- Scientists say the oxygen you just breathed in was once the deadliest poison on the planet, released by tiny microbes that accidentally wiped out most of the life around them in what geologists call the Great Oxidation Event Space Daily
- One of the earliest great extinctions in Earth's history may have been caused not by an asteroid or a volcano but by oxygen itself, when tiny photosynthetic microbes slowly filled the air with a gas that was poison to much of the anaerobic life that ruled the planet Space Daily
- Want an oxygen-rich atmosphere? Stuff oxygen’s friends in the mantle. Ars Technica
- Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere may owe its existence to cold subduction Phys.org
- The oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is essential to almost every animal alive today — but when it first started accumulating in the air roughly 2.4 billion years ago, it triggered the most lethal pollution event in the planet's history, wiping out the vast majority of spec Space Daily
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