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The Earth, the planet we call home, is full of life and biodiversity. It appeared billions of years ago and has evolved to become a place capable of welcoming humans, who are now looking for other worlds of the same kind.
The planet currently provides adequate conditions – a rocky surface, a stable atmosphere – to support life as we know it, but things were not the same in the beginning. Scientists believe that the Earth's biosphere has undergone a number of changes in recent years
Now, an international team of researchers has the earliest evidence of this theory: isotopes of old oxygen 1.4 billion years old. The ancient terrestrial biosphere and reveals what our planet looked like before the emergence of complex animal life.
The team, which included researchers from McGill University, Yale University, the University of New York, USA, USA, USA University of California Riverside and Lakehead University, collected well-preserved salts These sediments, also known as sulphates, are known to trap oxygen from the atmosphere, which has prompted the group to use specialized mbad spectrometry techniques in the state of Louisiana. University to probe the material. The test worked as expected and they were able to extract old isotopes of oxygen from salts.
The result, which was presented as the oldest oxygen isotope ever measured, indicated levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. what they are today. This reinforced the idea that the composition of the atmosphere was very different at the time.
According to the researchers, the atmosphere had low levels of oxygen, probably because of the less productive biosphere and the less active microbial life
. Well established that microorganisms like algae, cyanobacteria use carbon dioxide to produce organic matter and pump oxygen into the air – a process known as primary production. However, this study shows that this production was well below 1.4 billion years ago.
"This means that the size of the global biosphere had to be smaller and probably not produce enough food – organic carbon – to support a" moderate primary productivity, like the team described, was also One of the factors that contributed to what has been dubbed "Boring Billion" or "Boring Billion" or "Boring Billion" – the "darkest time on Earth" – when the planet has little known biological change or environmental impact between 2 billion and 800 million years.
That said, along with other studies aimed at understanding the early conditions of the planet, will help scientists determine what is needed. Searching for Life Beyond the Earth
"For most of the Earth's history, our planet has been peopled with microbes, and they will probably be the guardians of the planet." Peter Crockford, lead author of the "Understanding the environments that they shape not only informs us of our own past and how we arrived here, but also provides clues to what we might find if we discover an inhabited exoplanet."
The study titled "Triple isotope Primary productivity mid-Proterozoic" was published July 18 in the journal Nature.
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