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This is Justin Hayles CREDIT: Rice University
Sleuthing by a Rice University postdoctoral fellow is part of a new Nature paper that gives credence to theories about Earth's atmosphere 1.4 billion years ago.
Rice's Justin Hayles and his colleagues, led by Peter Crockford at McGill University in Montreal, badyzed samples from an ancient Canadian lake bed that turned into anomalous oxygen isotopes embedded in deposits of sulfate. The causes of death in the earth's surface (19659005) The researchers found the planet's primary production-a measure of the effects of photosynthesis-was a small fraction of a protonzoic level the "Boring Billion" because of the planet's environmental and evolutionary stability.
"The Boring Billion is called boring because it seemed like a long time ago. continued, "Hayles said.
Hayles, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow, did the work as a PhD student at Louisiana State University. He joined the Rice lab of Laurence Yeung, an badistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, two years ago.
Hayles' badysis with specialized mbad spectrometry equipment part of the effort to badyze cores taken from the lake bed. "When the project started, we were just looking at what sulfates looked like through Earth's history," he said. "In the process, we badyzed an anomaly."
That anomaly was an unexpected amount of oxygen-17, one of three stable isotopes of oxygen. "This was shocking because we thought this anomaly could only exist when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are extremely high, such as during a 'snowball Earth' event," Hayles said. "
Because oxygen is highly reactive, it easily combines with sulfide in a lake at Ontario's Sibley. Basin. "When you form sulfate from sulfide, you get a little bit of O2 incorporated," he said. "
The researchers suggest their discovery is the oldest direct measurement of atmospheric oxygen isotopes by nearly a trillion years. Microorganisms, including bacteria and algae, were started to ramp up production through photosynthesis but had not yet reached the fertile period that triggered a second "oxygenation event."
"It has been suggested for many decades now "said Crockford, now a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton. "
" Earth during the Proterozoic was like an alien. World compared with the modern Earth, "Hayles said. "
" Knowing how well microbial life thrived, "he said." There is potential that if Mars was ever sufficiently Earth-like and the right way to Earth, this technique could provide similar evidence. "
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