Volcanoes, oxygen and life

Professor Mark Barley (SEGS) is quietly chuffed to have a paper — co-authored by Professor Lee Kump, from the NASA Astrobiology Institute and Department of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University — published in Nature.

The paper, “Increased subaerial volcanism and the rise of atmospheric oxygen 2.5 billion years ago”, finds that the origins of complex life on Earth were significantly affected by volcanic activity more than two billion years ago.

They discovered that the rise of atmospheric oxygen levels, which allowed life to flourish but had long been simply attributed to ancient bacteria, was also due to terrestrial volcanic activity.

The change in Earth's atmosphere occurred about 2.5 billion years ago. And the bacteria theory has long been problematic, because fossilized cyanobacteria first appeared 200 million years earlier. Scientists wondered why they took so long to fill the atmosphere with oxygen. The answer appears to be that underwater volcanoes were undoing their work.

Read the article in Nature. ^{(Public access may be limited)}

Read a summary in Science

Read the UWA Media Release