Great Oxygenation Event - wikipedia Great Oxygenation Event O build - up in the Earth 's atmosphere. Red and green lines represent the range of the estimates while time is measured in billions of years ago ( Ga ). Stage 1 ( 3.85 -- 2.45 Ga ) : Practically no O in the atmosphere. The oceans were also largely anoxic with the possible exception of O gases in the shallow oceans. Stage 2 ( 2.45 -- 1.85 Ga ) : O produced, and rose to values of 0.02 and 0.04 atm, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock. Stage 3 ( 1.85 -- 0.85 Ga ) : O starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces. There was no significant change in terms of oxygen level. Stages 4 and 5 ( 0.85 -- present ) : O sinks filled and the gas accumulates. The Great Oxygenation Event, the beginning of which is commonly known in scientific media as the Great Oxidation Event ( GOE, also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust, Oxygen Revolution, or Great Oxidation ) was the biologically induced appearance of dioxygen ( O ) in Earth 's atmosphere. Geological, isotopic, and chemical evidence suggest that this major environmental change happened around 2.45 billion years ago ( 2.45 Ga ), during the Siderian period, at the beginning of the Proterozoic eon. The causes of the event are not clear. The current geochemical and biomarker evidence for the development of oxygenic photosynthesis before the Great Oxidation Event has been mostly inconclusive. Oceanic cyanobacteria, which evolved into coordinated ( but not multicellular or even colonial ) macroscopic forms more than 2.3 billion years ago ( approximately 200 million years before the GOE ), are believed to have become the first microbes to produce oxygen by photosynthesis. Before the GOE, any free oxygen they produced was chemically captured by dissolved iron or organic matter. The GOE started when these oxygen sinks became saturated, at which point oxygen produced by the cyanobacteria was free to escape into the atmosphere. Cyanobacteria : Responsible for the buildup of oxygen in the Earth 's atmosphere The increased production of oxygen set Earth 's original atmosphere off balance. Free oxygen is toxic to obligate anaerobic organisms, and the rising concentrations may have destroyed most such organisms at the time. Cyanobacteria were therefore responsible for one of the most significant mass extinctions in Earth 's history. Besides marine cyanobacteria, there is also evidence of cyanobacteria on land. A spike in chromium contained in ancient rock deposits formed underwater shows the accumulation had been washed off from the continental shelves. Chromium is not easily dissolved and its release from rocks would have required the presence of a powerful acid. One such acid, sulfuric acid ( H SO ), might have been created through bacterial reactions with pyrite. Mats of oxygen - producing cyanobacteria can produce a thin layer, one or two millimeters thick, of oxygenated water in an otherwise anoxic environment even under thick ice, and before oxygen started accumulating in the atmosphere, these organisms would already be adapted to oxygen. Additionally, the free oxygen would have reacted with atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas, greatly reducing its concentration and triggering the Huronian glaciation, possibly the longest episode of glaciation in Earth 's history and called snowball Earth. Eventually, the evolution of aerobic organisms that consumed oxygen established an equilibrium in its availability. Free oxygen has been an important constituent of the atmosphere ever since. Contents 1 Timing 2 Time lag theory 2.1 Tectonic trigger 2.2 Nickel famine 2.3 Bistability 2.4 Hydrogen gas 3 Late evolution of oxy - photosynthesis theory 4 Role in mineral diversification 5 Origin of eukaryotes 6 See also 7 References 8 External links Timing Life timeline view discuss edit - 4500 -- -- - 4000 -- -- - 3500 -- -- - 3000 -- -- - 2500 -- -- - 2000 -- -- - 1500 -- -- - 1000 -- -- - 500 -- -- 0 -- water Single - celled life photosynthesis Eukaryotes Multicellular life Land life Dinosaurs Mammals Flowers ← Earliest Earth ( − 4540 ) ← Earliest water ← Earliest life ← LHB meteorites ← Earliest oxygen ← Atmospheric oxygen ← Oxygen crisis ← Earliest sexual reproduction ← Ediacara biota ← Cambrian explosion ← Earliest humans h n r o z o i r o r o z o i r h n d n Pongola Huronian Cryogenian Andean Karoo Quaternary Axis scale : million years Orange labels : ice ages. Also see : Human timeline and Nature timeline See also : Oxygen cycle The most widely accepted chronology of the Great Oxygenation Event suggests that free oxygen was first produced by prokaryotic and then later eukaryotic organisms that carried out photosynthesis more efficiently, producing oxygen as a waste product. These organisms lived long before the GOE, perhaps as early as 3,400 million years ago. Initially, the oxygen they produced would have quickly been removed from the atmosphere by the chemical weathering of reducing ( oxidizable ) minerals, most notably iron. This ' mass rusting ' led to the deposition of iron ( III ) oxide in the form of banded - iron formations such as the sediments in Minnesota and Pilbara, Western Australia. The saturation of these mineral sinks, and the resulting persistence of oxygen in the atmosphere, led within 50 million years to the start of the GOE. Oxygen could have accumulated very rapidly : at today 's rates of photosynthesis ( much greater than those in the Precambrian without land plants ), modern atmospheric O levels could be produced in only 2,000 years. Another hypothesis is that oxygen producers did not evolve until a few million years before the major rise in atmospheric oxygen concentration. This is based on a particular interpretation of a supposed oxygen indicator used in previous studies, the mass - independent fractionation of sulfur isotopes. This hypothesis would eliminate the need to explain a lag in time between the evolution of oxyphotosynthetic microbes and the rise in free oxygen. In either case, oxygen did eventually accumulate in the atmosphere, with two major consequences. Firstly, it oxidized atmospheric methane ( a strong greenhouse gas ) to carbon dioxide ( a weaker one ) and water. This decreased the greenhouse effect of the Earth 's atmosphere, causing planetary cooling, and triggered the Huronian glaciation. Starting around 2.4 billion years ago, this lasted 300 - 400 million years, and may have been the longest ever snowball Earth episode. Secondly, the increased oxygen concentrations provided a new opportunity for biological diversification, as well as tremendous changes in the nature of chemical interactions between rocks, sand, clay, and other geological substrates and the Earth 's air, oceans, and other surface waters. Despite the natural recycling of organic matter, life had remained energetically limited until the widespread availability of oxygen. This breakthrough in metabolic evolution greatly increased the free energy availabile to living organisms, with global environmental impacts. For example, mitochondria evolved after the GOE, giving organisms the energy to exploit new, more complex morphologies interacting in increasingly complex ecosystems. Timeline of glaciations, shown in blue. Time lag theory There may have been a gap of up to 900 million years between the start of photosynthetic oxygen production and the geologically rapid increase in atmospheric oxygen about 2.5 -- 2.4 billion years ago. Several hypotheses propose to explain this time lag. Tectonic trigger 2.1 billion year old rock showing banded iron formation The oxygen increase had to await tectonically driven changes in the Earth, including the appearance of shelf seas, where reduced organic carbon could reach the sediments and be buried. The newly produced oxygen was first consumed in various chemical reactions in the oceans, primarily with iron. Evidence is found in older rocks that contain massive banded iron formations apparently laid down as this iron and oxygen first combined ; most present - day iron ore lies in these deposits. Evidence suggests oxygen levels spiked each time smaller land masses collided to form a super-continent. Tectonic pressure thrust up mountain chains, which eroded to release nutrients into the ocean to feed photosynthetic cyanobacteria. Nickel famine Early chemosynthetic organisms likely produced methane, an important trap for molecular oxygen, since methane readily oxidizes to carbon dioxide ( CO ) and water in the presence of UV radiation. Modern methanogens require nickel as an enzyme cofactor. As the Earth 's crust cooled and the supply of volcanic nickel dwindled, oxygen - producing algae began to out - perform methane producers, and the oxygen percentage of the atmosphere steadily increased. From 2.7 to 2.4 billion years ago, the rate of deposition of nickel declined steadily from a level 400 times today 's. Bistability Another hypothesis posits a model of the atmosphere that exhibits bistability : two steady states of oxygen concentration. The state of stable low oxygen conentration ( 0.02 % ) experiences a high rate of methane oxidation. If some event raises oxygen levels beyond a moderate threshold, the formation of an ozone layer shields UV rays and decreases methane oxidation, raising oxygen further to a stable state of 21 % or more. The Great Oxygenation Event can then be understood as a transition from the lower to the upper steady states. Hydrogen gas Another theory credits the appearance of cyanobacteria with suppressing hydrogen gas and increasing oxygen. Some bacteria in the early oceans could separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. Under the Sun 's rays, hydrogen molecules were incorporated into organic compounds, with oxygen as a by - product. If the hydrogen - heavy compounds were buried, it would have allowed oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere. However, in 2001 scientists realized that the hydrogen would instead escape into space through a process called methane photolysis, in which methane releases its hydrogen in a reaction with oxygen. This could explain why the early Earth stayed warm enough to sustain oxygen - producing lifeforms. Late evolution of oxy - photosynthesis theory The oxygen indicator might have been misinterpreted. During the proposed lag era in the previous theory, there was a change in sediments from mass - independently fractionated ( MIF ) sulfur to mass - dependently fractionated ( MDF ) sulfur. This was assumed to show the appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere, since oxygen would have prevented the photolysis of sulfur dioxide, which causes MIF. However, the change from MIF to MDF of sulfur isotopes may instead have been caused by an increase in glacial weathering, or the homogenization of the marine sulfur pool as a result of an increased thermal gradient during the Huronian glaciation period ( which in this interpretation was not caused by oxygenation ). Role in mineral diversification The Great Oxygenation Event triggered an explosive growth in the diversity of minerals, with many elements occurring in one or more oxidized forms near the Earth 's surface. It is estimated that the GOE was directly responsible for more than 2,500 of the total of about 4,500 minerals found on Earth today. Most of these new minerals were formed as hydrated and oxidized forms due to dynamic mantle and crust processes. ↓ Great Oxygenation ↓ End of Huronian glaciation Ediacaran Cambrian Ordovician Silurian Devonian Carboniferous Permian Triassic Jurassic Cretaceous Paleogene Neogene Quaternary Palæoproterozoic Mesoproterozoic Neoproterozoic Palæozoic Mesozoic Cenozoic │ − 2500 │ − 2300 │ − 2100 │ − 1900 │ − 1700 │ − 1500 │ − 1300 │ − 1100 │ − 900 │ − 700 │ − 500 │ − 300 │ − 100 Million years ago. Age of Earth = 4,560 Origin of eukaryotes It has been proposed that a local rise in oxygen levels due to cyanobacterial photosynthesis in ancient microenvironments was highly toxic to the surrounding biota, and that this selective pressure drove the evolutionary transformation of an archaeal lineage into the first eukaryotes. Oxidative stress involving production of reactive oxygen species ( ROS ) might have acted in synergy with other environmental stresses ( such as ultraviolet radiation and / or desiccation ) to drive selection in an early archaeal lineage towards eukaryosis. This archaeal ancestor may already have had DNA repair mechanisms based on DNA pairing and recombination and possibly some kind of cell fusion mechanism. The detrimental effects of internal ROS ( produced by endosymbiont proto - mitochondria ) on the archaeal genome could have promoted the evolution of meiotic sex from these humble beginnings. Selective pressure for efficient DNA repair of oxidative DNA damages may have driven the evolution of eukaryotic sex involving such features as cell - cell fusions, cytoskeleton - mediated chromosome movements and emergence of the nuclear membrane. Thus the evolution of eukaryotic sex and eukaryogenesis were likely inseparable processes that evolved in large part to facilitate DNA repair. Constant pressure of endogenous ROS has been proposed to explain the ubiquitous maintenance of meiotic sex in eukaryotes. See also Geological history of oxygen Iodide Medea hypothesis Pasteur point Rare Earth hypothesis Stromatolite References Jump up ^ Holland, Heinrich D. `` The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans ''. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society : Biological Sciences. Vol. 361. 2006. pp. 903 -- 915. Jump up ^ Margulis, Lynn ; Sagan, Dorion ( 1986 ). `` Chapter 6, `` The Oxygen Holocaust '' ``. Microcosmos : Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. 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Jump up ^ Sperling, Erik ; Frieder, Christina ; Raman, Akkur ; Girguis, Peter ; Levin, Lisa ; Knoll, Andrew ( Aug 2013 ). `` Oxygen, ecology, and the Cambrian radiation of animals ''. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 : 13446 -- 13451. doi : 10.1073 / pnas. 1312778110. PMC 3746845. PMID 23898193. Retrieved 1 October 2014. Jump up ^ Lenton, T.M. ; H.J. Schellnhuber ; E. Szathmáry ( 2004 ). `` Climbing the co-evolution ladder ''. Nature. 431 ( 7011 ) : 913. Bibcode : 2004Natur. 431... 913L. doi : 10.1038 / 431913a. PMID 15496901. Jump up ^ American, Scientific. `` Abundant Oxygen Indirectly Due to Tectonics ''. Scientific American. Retrieved 2016 - 04 - 06. Jump up ^ American, Scientific. `` Breathing Easy Thanks to the Great Oxidation Event ''. Scientific American. Retrieved 2016 - 04 - 06. Jump up ^ Kurt O. Konhauser ; et al. ( 2009 ). `` Oceanic nickel depletion and a methanogen famine before the Great Oxidation Event ''. Nature. 458 ( 7239 ) : 750 -- 753. Bibcode : 2009Natur. 458... 750K. doi : 10.1038 / nature07858. PMID 19360085. Jump up ^ Goldblatt, C. ; T.M. Lenton ; A.J. Watson ( 2006 ). `` The Great Oxidation at 2.4 Ga as a bistability in atmospheric oxygen due to UV shielding by ozone '' ( PDF ). Geophysical Research Abstracts. 8 : 00770. Jump up ^ Franzen, Harald. `` New Theory Explains How Earth 's Early Atmosphere Became Oxygen - Rich ''. Scientific American. Retrieved 2016 - 04 - 06. Jump up ^ Sverjensky, Dimitri A. ; Lee, Namhey ( 2010 - 02 - 01 ). `` The Great Oxidation Event and Mineral Diversification ''. Elements. 6 ( 1 ) : 31 -- 36. doi : 10.2113 / gselements. 6.1. 31. ISSN 1811 - 5209. Jump up ^ `` Evolution of Minerals '', Scientific American, March 2010 ^ Jump up to : Gross J, Bhattacharya D ( August 2010 ). `` Uniting sex and eukaryote origins in an emerging oxygenic world ''. Biol. Direct. 5 : 53. doi : 10.1186 / 1745 - 6150 - 5 - 53. PMC 2933680. PMID 20731852. ^ Jump up to : Hörandl E, Speijer D ( February 2018 ). `` How oxygen gave rise to eukaryotic sex ''. Proc. Biol. Sci. 285 ( 1872 ). doi : 10.1098 / rspb. 2017.2706. PMID 29436502. Jump up ^ Bernstein H, Bernstein C. Sexual communication in archaea, the precursor to meiosis. pp. 103 - 117 in Biocommunication of Archaea ( Guenther Witzany, ed. ) 2017. Springer International Publishing ISBN 978 - 3 - 319 - 65535 - 2 DOI 10.1007 / 978 - 3 - 319 - 65536 - 9 Jump up ^ Bernstein, H., Bernstein, C. Evolutionary origin and adaptive function of meiosis. In `` Meiosis '', Intech Publ ( Carol Bernstein and Harris Bernstein editors ), Chapter 3 : 41 - 75 ( 2013 ). External links First breath : Earth 's billion - year struggle for oxygen New Scientist, # 2746, 5 February 2010 by Nick Lane. ( 1 ) Proterozoic Eon Paleoproterozoic Era Mesoproterozoic Era Neoproterozoic Era Siderian Rhyacian Orosirian Statherian Calymmian Ectasian Stenian Tonian Cryogenian Ediacaran Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Oxygenation_Event&oldid=832224819 '' Categories : Proterozoic Origin of life Oxygen Climate history Events in the geological history of Earth Extinction events Hidden categories : Use dmy dates from July 2013 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from June 2017 Talk Contents About Wikipedia Afrikaans Башҡортса Català Dansk Deutsch Español فارسی Français Galego Bahasa Indonesia Italiano עברית Magyar Norsk nynorsk Polski Português Русский Simple English Tagalog Türkçe Українська Tiếng Việt 中文 15 more Edit links This page was last edited on 24 March 2018, at 16 : 31. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike License ; additional terms may apply. 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Question: when did oxygen start to accumulate in the atmosphere
Answer: around 2.45 billion years ago