[HN Gopher] How great was the Great Oxidation Event?
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How great was the Great Oxidation Event?
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 167 points
Date : 2024-07-31 13:40 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (eos.org)
| ianbooker wrote:
| This is a expertly crafted narrative of presumably complicated
| research.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Also EOS:
|
| https://eos.org/articles/metallic-nodules-create-oxygen-in-t....
|
| I _can_ wait for the next Great De-Oxidation Event, when mining
| companies are allowed to scoop up all these metals without any
| research.
| duxup wrote:
| PBS had a wonderful series Ancient Earth that covered the
| geological history of the earth.
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/ancient-earth/
|
| My naive understanding was always that the earth or planets just
| sort of found a natural state of being after a while and were /
| are just that way now. It's very interesting to see the sea saw
| type scale of changes that occurred over time.
| csours wrote:
| You ever think about a plate of shrimp and then someone says
| "plate of shrimp" randomly? - Repo Man (1984)
|
| > "I'm reminded of the Oxygen Catastrophe -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event - we need
| oxygen to live, but it also kills."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41080195
| tectonic wrote:
| It's why we have many tiger's eyes gemstones and banded iron
| deposits.
| andrewla wrote:
| It's a remarkable thing to step back for a second and realize
| that while we try to figure out the exact impact of a parts-per-
| million change in CO2 concentration, that it's astonishing that
| CO2 is not 20% of the atmosphere, that the only thing keeping O2
| in the atmosphere at all is the large-scale actions of living
| things. [1]
|
| The fact that living organisms are responsible for something so
| large seems almost dumbfounding -- planets are big, atmospheres
| are big, and life is small; what is a pool of algae compared to a
| mountain, etc. But even such a basic thing as "the only reason we
| can have something as fundamental as FIRE is because of living
| things" is a bit of a mindblowing realization.
|
| [1] probably not literally true; if you eliminated all life on
| earth then most of the O2 would probably be sequestered in oxides
| rather than remaining resident as CO2, but still. Although I
| guess a lot of non-living organic matter would eventually burn
| away as long as there is oxygen to support combustion.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > The fact that living organisms are responsible for something
| so large
|
| how do you separate living and non living things?
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Challenge)
|
| everything is responsible for something.
| exe34 wrote:
| They meant puny gooey things.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Yes, I figured that's about the level of sophistication:)
| exe34 wrote:
| It was a poetic reflection. Don't worry, I didn't always
| get this sort of thing either. Maybe one day you too will
| learn to enjoy it :-)
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it is literally true that the oxygen in the
| atmosphere is there only because living things keep putting it
| there. You're right that without life, it would be sequestered
| in oxides pretty quickly. That's the local minima for energy
| dissipation. Life is good at breaking those minimas for cyclic
| matter dissipation. If there was a natural source for oxygen,
| it would have to come from some sort of cycle in order to be
| maintained, and there's not a energetically favorable cycle for
| that.
|
| It's why it makes a good biomarker when looking at exoplanets.
| If we find an exoplanet with high amounts of oxygen in the
| atmosphere, we can be fairly confident
| patcon wrote:
| Was much more likely true until a week ago, but now there's a
| legit competing hypothesis :)
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| Yeah, that's an exciting discovery. I was excited by this,
| because I believe it demonstrates a dissipative pathway
| that could have contributed to abiogenesis. Energy
| gradients are a driver of emergent complexity.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Yep, exactly what I thought when reading Lane! But what
| would be the quantitative contribution of benthic O2?
| robwwilliams wrote:
| I'm surprised by this statement.
|
| Here is a quote from Nick Lane's great text: Power, Sex,
| Suicide (p 153):
|
| > The early Earth, as envisaged by [Michael J] Russell, is a
| giant electrochemical cell, which depends in the power of the
| sun to oxidize the oceans. UV rays split water and oxidize
| iron. Hydrogen, released from the water, is so light that it
| is not retained by gravity, and evaporates into space. The
| oceans become gradually oxidized relative to the more reduced
| conditions of the mantle."
|
| Lanes cites this paper "On the origins of cells: A hypothesis
| for the evolutionary transition from abiotic to nucleated
| cells", 2003, by Martin and Russell
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12594918/
|
| Am I missing something? This text forces me to assume that
| solar UV splitting water is the cause of the O2 atmospheric
| flooding.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| And not true at all that all organisms need O2 to pump
| protons. Microbes have quite a few alternative ways. Even
| we do when we run the Krebs cycle backwards.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| I'm currently reading another of his books, _Oxygen: The
| Molecule that made the World_ , which unsurprisingly has
| lots more about this topic.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of Nick Lane, and I'm not an expert, so I
| may have misunderstood. I have not read "Power, Sex,
| Suicide" but have read "The vital question", "transformer,"
| and most importantly in this context, "Oxygen."
|
| My understanding, which could absolutely be wrong, is that
| there are pathways to where Oxygen can be generated without
| life, but for it to be maintained at high levels of
| concentration over time, that takes life. I would
| definitely defer to whatever Nick Lane has to say about it.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Here's the full text of the "On the origins of cells..."
| paper via sci-hub:
|
| https://sci-hub.se/10.1098/rstb.2002.1183
|
| There's nothing in it about ultraviolet splitting of water
| or oceanic oxidation. If Nick Lane meant to paraphrase the
| paper in that cited passage, he did a poor job.
|
| Direct UV homolysis of water to release hydrogen requires a
| photon with more than 6.5 electron volts of energy [1],
| corresponding to a wavelength of 190 nm or shorter. As you
| can see here, solar irradiance is extremely low at
| wavelengths shorter than 240 nm:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#/media/File:
| S...
|
| There isn't enough energetic UV radiation emitted from the
| sun to directly oxygenate the Earth via water homolysis. It
| might be possible for an exoplanet in orbit around a hotter
| star that emits more energetic UV.
|
| EDIT: I forgot to account that the sun may have had a very
| different UV profile billions of years ago.
|
| "UV radiation from the young Sun and oxygen and ozone
| levels in the prebiological palaeoatmosphere"
|
| https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/296816a0
|
| _UV measurements of young T-Tauri stars, resembling the
| Sun at an age of a few million years, have recently been
| made with the International Ultraviolet Explorer. They
| indicate that young stars emit up to 10^4 times more UV
| than the present Sun._
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocatalytic_water_spli
| tting...
| topaz0 wrote:
| To reduce hydrogen, something needs to be oxidized, but it
| doesn't need to be oxygen. E.g. you could get more metal
| oxides. Not my field exactly, so I don't know either
| relative abundances of different stuff in early oceans or
| the exact ranking of which would be most readily oxidized,
| but that could explain the discrepancy.
|
| Edit: rereading the passage you quoted does make me think
| that metal oxides are the important factor here.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I've never understood applying this idea to exoplanets. What
| if the life there puts sulfur into the atmosphere instead of
| oxygen? Why would the life elsewhere look anything like the
| life here in terms of gas use, etc
| marcellus23 wrote:
| The point is that if a planet has oxygen, it's a potential
| marker for life. No one is claiming that a planet that
| lacks oxygen in the atmosphere must necessarily be
| lifeless.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| It's true that if life exists on other planets, it may not
| look exactly like life here. But it's also true that there
| are a small number of elements in the periodic table, and
| only so many of those are even relatively common in the
| universe, and only so many of those are useful for
| reactions, etc, etc. The things that life on our planet use
| seem to be some of the most obvious candidates to use, if
| not _the_ most obvious, so if life exists on other planets,
| it would be surprising if the things that we use are unique
| or even uncommon across the universe.
| weitendorf wrote:
| > If there was a natural source for oxygen, it would have to
| come from some sort of cycle in order to be maintained, and
| there's not a energetically favorable cycle for that.
|
| Life _is_ the energetically favorable natural source of
| oxygen. Or more accurately, it 's thermodynamically
| favorable.
|
| Photosynthesis uses light to create intermediate products (eg
| carbohydrates) which are later metabolized in a way that
| releases chemical energy and heat. If you consider the
| incoming light as part of a system including Earth, and not
| as something acting on a system, you can see that it
| ultimately increases entropy despite being chemically
| endothermic. It converts fewer, higher energy photons (in the
| visible light range) into a higher number of lower energy
| photons (most of the energy being infrared as a result of the
| incremental increase in blackbody radiation from the heat
| generated from metabolism of the intermediate food products)
| and drives the conversion of simple chemical compounds like
| urea into highly complex ones like proteins.
|
| In other words, the oxygen in the atmosphere is an energetic
| byproduct of all the light colliding with the surface of
| earth. There are processes which do essentially the same
| thing without life. The atmosphere of the moon includes trace
| amounts of elemental sodium _gas_ from very high energy
| photons colliding with sodium rocks in a way that cleaves
| away sodium ions. And the atmosphere of earth contains the
| even-more-reactive form of oxygen Ozone because of
| ultraviolet light doing the same thing to molecular oxygen.
| andrewla wrote:
| I don't think this interpretation is correct -- at least on
| Earth, there are no fundamental geophysical processes which
| can sustain oxygen in the atmosphere at anything but trace
| levels.
|
| Producing oxygen is not energetically favorable under
| basically any circumstances. Free O2 production was
| "invented" (as it were) as a way of murdering almost all
| other life on earth at the time. It's a mistake to look at
| life in a thermodynamic equilibrium sense unless your time
| scales are ridiculously long (i.e. burn-out-of-the-sun
| long).
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| Yes, you are exactly right, that is my awkward wording for
| exactly the point you're trying to make. I should have
| added, "besides life" to the end of my sentence.
|
| The fact that there is not a more thermodynamically
| favorable pathway besides life is probably what allowed
| life to emerge in the first place. If there was a more
| efficient way to dissipate that energy, earth would
| probably be dead.
|
| Or put another way: life emerged because it was the most
| thermodynamically favorable way to dissipate the available
| free energy in our system.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > planets are big, atmospheres are big, and life is small;
|
| And time is long.
|
| The consensus is still that the oxygenation of Earth's
| atmosphere took "at least 400 million years". A lot of that is
| due to the "great rust", i.e. minerals that would take oxygen
| out of the air had to first exhaust their capacity to oxidise.
| This took "nearly a billion years".
|
| Iron ore deposits are from the seabed of this period.
|
| See:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Iron ore deposits are from the seabed of this period.
|
| Many are, but some are more recent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_Iron_Belt
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43655-8
| tambourine_man wrote:
| That was pretty interesting to me and perhaps changes our idea
| of how the great oxidation went a bit:
|
| (Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor)
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8
| BestHackerOnHN wrote:
| > "the only reason we can have something as fundamental as FIRE
| is because of living things" is a bit of a mindblowing
| realization.
|
| I am fairly confident living things did not create FIRE.
| andrewla wrote:
| Well, we (broadly speaking) did not create the concept of a
| plasma phase of matter, but fire as we know it is only
| possible because of free oxygen. Fire, for the most part, is
| just another name for rapid oxidation.
|
| Even some things that can burn without air (e.g. magnesium)
| typically only burn because they are so hot that they cause
| H2O to separate.
|
| Obviously stars exist, so there are other ways of getting to
| plasma, but oxygen is what makes terrestrial fires possible.
|
| So yes -- living things created fire!
| wrycoder wrote:
| Bare rocks and water don't burn, they are already oxidized.
| Life chemically reduces CO2, providing material than can
| support combustion.
| bregma wrote:
| Well, we didn't start the FIRE. It was always burning since
| the world's been turning.
| solardev wrote:
| Without living things, who would retire early? The markets
| aren't going to trade themselves.
| Teever wrote:
| Let me share a twist on this train if thought that I've had
| recently.
|
| The nature of the Earth's atmosphere, surface, oceans, and much
| of the subsurface is entirely the product of a single cell. A
| single cell lead to more cells which eventually evolved into
| different forms and became multicellular and so on and so forth
| until the earth was covered in all kinds of shapes and sizes of
| life and the landscape was permanently changed.
|
| All that from one cell.
|
| You and I are composed of trillions of these things and we're
| able to do incredible things with them, but at the same time
| our power is much more limited than that of the single cell
| that created all of life. We can do incredible things with our
| bodies but we lack the ability to completely control even a
| single cell in our body. As such a single cell can go rogue and
| kill you with cancer, or despite your best efforts to nourish,
| heal and exercise your cells you will eventually die.
|
| Imagine if it wasn't so.
|
| Imagine if you could control but a single long lived cell in
| your body. What could you do with that? Anything. Nothing could
| stop you. You could travel to the deepest depths as a whale or
| soar to the highest heights as an eagle. You could spawn a mass
| organism larger than Pando, or evolve something novel that
| would go to space.
|
| So imagine if someone locked you deep in a dark prison in
| solitary confinement and you could through something akin to
| meditation come to control a single cell in your body. No
| prison could hold you.
|
| What happens when we achieve mastery over ourselves in such a
| way through technology? Will we allow individuals this level of
| control over their own cells? Can we stop them?
| chiggsy wrote:
| This reminds me: Stem cells. Whatever happened with that?
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Oh, lots. We are slowly but steadily making more advances
| with learning how to reprogram cells and get those cells to
| grow and divide and turn into things are sort of like
| different body parts. It's not really like sci-fi yet but
| it is honestly starting to get a bit weird. See the new
| book _The Master Builder_ by Alfonso Arias for some recent
| info.
| feoren wrote:
| > our power is much more limited than that of the single cell
| that created all of life
|
| Is it? That single cell had 3.5 billion years of almost-
| exponential growth to do its thing. We've been on this planet
| for something like 100,000 to 1 million years, depending on
| how you count, and we've had a pretty damn big impact on its
| atmosphere, surface, oceans, and even subsurface; most of
| that in the last century. Imagine how much we could change
| the Earth in the next billion. Our power seems terrifying in
| comparison.
|
| > We can do incredible things with our bodies but we lack the
| ability to completely control even a single cell in our body
|
| That's only because you've snuck in a very particular
| definition of "we" here. Single cells in my body are happily
| controlling themselves as they always have.
|
| > Imagine if you could control but a single long lived cell
| in your body. What could you do with that? Anything. Nothing
| could stop you. You could travel to the deepest depths as a
| whale or soar to the highest heights as an eagle.
|
| Could you? By your accounting, isn't your original single
| cell (let's call it LUCA) already doing that now? That little
| archaebacterium from 3.5 billion years ago must be pretty
| proud of itself. Aren't you essentially saying: hey, you
| might end up with a lot of descendants, and they might do
| cool things. Yup. That's true. "Control" never really played
| into it at all. See the funky accounting of "we" and "you"
| you're doing here? It's actually LUCA going to space, isn't
| it? Or is it us? Or just them? Who are you actually talking
| about here?
|
| > So imagine if someone locked you deep in a dark prison in
| solitary confinement and you could through something akin to
| meditation come to control a single cell in your body.
|
| Yeah, but, y'know, _you can 't_, because the "you" you're
| thinking of is an emergent property of the collective action
| of trillions of these cells, with virtually no resemblance to
| the forces that individual cells use to make decisions.
|
| > No prison could hold you.
|
| There's already no prison that could hold me for 3.5 billion
| years. Except a black hole, I guess. And I've already spawned
| some descendants, so by your accounting, you'd have to
| imprison them all too.
|
| > Will we allow individuals this level of control over their
| own cells? Can we stop them?
|
| What happens when humanity develops The Super
| Encaptropositronator? That can do ANYTHING? Are we just going
| to let ANYONE use the Super Encaptropositronator that can do
| LITERALLY ANYTHING!? IMAGINE THE HORROR! It might make a
| decent sci-fi book though.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you kill all life on earth, I assume all dead biomass would
| oxidize into CO2.
|
| Though I'm not sure what processes would do that. Without
| microorganisms, nothing rots. Lightning would eventually burn
| down most forests, but maybe everything else would just lie
| where it fell for ever.
| s_dev wrote:
| I definitely recommend "Life on Our Planet" produced by Spielberg
| and narrated by Morgan Freeman.
|
| Covers all the extinction events in Earths history in a way that
| would enthuse and educate laymen on this issue.
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about Intel...
| db48x wrote:
| My first guess was Rust. My third was geology.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Well then you may want to make more time to watch PBS Eons
| on YouTube:
|
| https://youtu.be/qERdL8uHSgI?si=u58MApIHgGp9G60o
|
| https://youtu.be/mAkjETPM1s4?si=emy483-M4LYK0Jh5
|
| It's more accessible than PBS SpaceTime, but the rotating
| hosts I do find makes it harder to binge.
| anticristi wrote:
| Why?
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| "Intel confirms oxidation and excessive voltage in 13th and
| 14th Gen CPUs"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41058791
| hinkley wrote:
| Rust buckets, eh?
| spdegabrielle wrote:
| YMMV, but I'm happy it happened.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| A great man once wrote: In the beginning the Universe was
| created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been
| widely regarded as a bad move.
| olalonde wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about Rust taking over the
| world.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It is!
| ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
| [flagged]
| exe34 wrote:
| Make Oxidation Great Again!
| danglingptr wrote:
| [flagged]
| glitchc wrote:
| It's worth noting that the Great Oxidation event was also a mass
| extinction event, yet we are happy that it occurred.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think that's true for every mass extinction event except the
| current one
| lazide wrote:
| Pretty sure all those people bouncing around are much happier
| alive than dead.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Looking at chart 1, it seems to me that the distribution of the
| chromium-53 ratio in today's seawater is a reasonable match to
| the ratios seen in today's sediments, and not to that seen in
| ancient rocks, while the distribution for today's rivers and
| estuaries is not a good match for today's sediments, and, if
| anything, is a better match to the ancient rocks.
|
| Absent any other evidence, this seems to suggest that the
| fractionation seen in today's sediments may be the result of
| processes occurring in seawater rather than in rivers, and if so,
| that would in turn suggest that what happens in rivers and
| estuaries is not a good guide to the fractionation we should see
| in ancient rocks, even if we assume ancient rivers were mostly
| like the Rio Tinto - unless the ancient seawaters were acidic
| enough to prevent fractionation occurring there.
| mannykannot wrote:
| One of the problems for the paleontology of this period is that
| almost all the rocks from it have been eroded away - the great
| unconformity. It has been speculatively attributed to erosion
| during Snowball Earth, which preceded the Cambrian explosion,
| though it seems the story is becoming more complicated.
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/great-unconformity-geo...
| thangalin wrote:
| My coffee table photobook describes the role of molybdenum in
| determining the GOE's timeline:
|
| https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=11
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I mis-parsed what you are saying here. Molybdenum lets us track
| the timeline of when the GOE happened; it didn't change or
| cause the timeline.
| N3cr0ph4g1st wrote:
| What book is this :)
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| https://www.impacts.to/index.html
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