The historical timeline of ancient ocean oxygenation: a look into Earth's past

• Published date: 05 April 2024
• Author: JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

It can be used to date rocks that formed and crystallized from about a million years to over 4.5 billion years ago with routine precisions in the 0.1–1 percent range – shedding new light on the evolution of ancient marine environments

By uncovering discrepancies in dolomite samples' U-Pb ratios, the team developed a reliable proxy for reconstructing the levels of oxygen within ancient marine habitats in which the first animals emerged and evolved.

Dr. Uri Ryb and Dr. Michal Ben-Israel from HU's Institute of Earth Sciences, along with their collaborators. revealed a significant rise in marine oxygenation during the Late Paleozoic era (400 million years ago), hundreds of millions of years after the emergence of animal-life.

These findings suggest that early animals have evolved in oceans that were mostly oxygen-poor and deepened our grasp of interactions among ecosystems and the evolution of complex life forms.

Comprehending these relationships provides critical context for future observations of exoplanet's atmospheres using the new generation of space-telescopes in search for extra-terrestrial life.

This important discovery in the field of earth sciences has just been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications under the title "Late Paleozoic oxygenation of marine environments supported by dolomite U-Pb dating."

The new approach spans 1.2 billion years

The new approach reconstructs the rise of oxygen in ancient marine environments using such measurements in dolomite rocks spanning the last 1.2 billion years.

Most earth scientists had estimated the oxygen levels in ancient oceans from the composition of...