Talk:Great Oxidation Event

message: The "Great Oxygenation Event" (G.O.E.) has the SAME colored visual or line-graph that appears at the START of the "Geological history of oxygen", a much-better and more readable Wiki article.
However, we need some illustrations for G.O.E.  So either we should (1) colorfully revise the current graphic as -- say -- a differently-colored histogram/barchart, or (2) come up with better alternative illustrations -- e.g., a diagram, flow-chart, photo, cartoon, artwork, or colorful data.
The illustrated subject could be Cyanobacteria, fossil Stromatolites, Aerial castrophe, Oxygenation, Banded iron formations, Oxidation, Extinction events, or whatever...
For more ideas, I recommend Prof. Edward Tufte's colorful how-to books on how to present statistics, science and history.
In short, we should avoid redundancy, plagiarism, dejavu, and confusion with the other article(s).  And I'm way too old and too retired to fuss with all the details...   Dr.Bastedo (talk) 02:07, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introductory color visual or graph 

message: This 2006 paper by Heinrich Holland lucidly reviews the subjects covered in this article. Professor Holland has kindly released figure 10 from his article under GFDL, for us to be able to use it in Wikipedia. These graphs illustrate the estimated evolution of atmospheric \ P_ and the concentration of O2 in the shallow and deep oceans. Your assistance is now needed to adapt these graphs for use in Wikipedia, and update our articles with the information provided in the said paper. Regards, Lior 17:03, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans 

message: I thought that ozone layer appeared 500 millions years ago, when land became habitable (see Timeline of evolution). However this article relates its appearance with the much earlier Oxygen Catastrophe. Is it a real discrepancy, or are we talking about two different phases in its forming (i.e. for a stable 21% oxygen atmosphere one needs a much thinner ozone layer compared to the one needed for the land to become habitable)? Dan Gluck 09:41, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  When did ozone layer appear? 

message: *The use of capitals in phrases like "Oxygen catastrophe" is unwarranted. --Wetman 18:56, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Capitalization

message: What does 'A', 'B', and 'C' in the image caption refer to?  There are no such labels in the image itself.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.228.39.223 (talk) 08:28, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The source paper of the diagram does not seem to suggest these time frames either (PDF available here). Strangely, the phases A, B,C are in addition to the stages 1-5, which are not linear in time. Linear time scale is indicated at the bottom of illustration. --83.76.186.14 (talk) 21:08, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The image caption refers to the old image (see right) that was replaced apparently without updating the image caption as well. - tameeria (talk) 20:00, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Image caption

message: Oxygen Catastrophe to oxygen catastrophe
* Oppose as it refers to a specific and not a generic event. 70.51.11.191 (talk) 00:48, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested Move 

message: I didn't find anything that actually explained what was so catastrophic to justify the title. What/how much actually happened ? Did existing lifeforms disappear, move underground, evolve ? Anaerobic organisms still exist. The availability of O2 seems more like a great opportunity than a catastrophe.Rcbutcher (talk) 02:53, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Eris, do you have any source for that statement? If so, exactly what would have killed off the previous species? What were the previous species? --Mlewan (talk) 15:34, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

text: The catastrophe was only ever hypothetical, there is no actual evidence of mass extinctions after the oxgen content of the atmosphere started rising. A recent paper (Energy metabolism among eukaryotic anaerobes in light of Proterozoic ocean chemistry, Royal Society, 2008) summarises current ideas about the issue. The idea of an oxygen catastrophe is based on ideas about the evolution  of the biosphere that originated in the 1970s. Evidence found by microbiologists and geochemists since the 1990s paints a different picture, although the oxygen catastrophe hypothesis is still widely written about by scientists who are not specialists in these fields (Google Scholar give tons of hits for "oxygen catastrophe" but only a few for "oxygen catastrophe" evidence). The biological evidence consists of the existence of non-aerobic eucaryotes throughout the eucaryote family tree, not just in a few "primitive" groups - some plants and fungi are obligate (full-time) anerobes, and some plants, fungi and animals are facultative anerobes (can live without oxygen if circumstances require it). The geochemical evidence indicates that until about  the oceans remained anoxic and sulphidic, except possibly in the top 100-200 meters where there was enough light to support photosynthesis. (end of summary of paper). IMO it's very likely that oxygenation had effects on life from the start, but these were nowhere near as massive and abrupt as the phrase "oxygen catastrophe" implies. --Philcha (talk) 12:03, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That link doesn't work for me, BTW. --Michael C. Price talk 08:28, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

text: 'Catastrophe' doesn't refer to mass extinction but to the abrupt rise in oxygen levels (compare ultraviolet catastrophe; the reference is to how the graph looks, not to disastrous events speifically). 165.91.174.196 (talk) 07:31, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Not quite.  The UV catastrophe refers to the diaster implied by the shape of the graph. Similarly the reference here is to the associated mass extinction (real or imaginary) of the anerobes. --Michael C. Price talk 08:24, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

text: 'Catastrophe' can be read both ways: A lethal event and a "sudden shift in behavior arising from small changes in circumstances" (see Catastrophe theory). As a name for what happened to the oxygen levels I find it apt. -- Zirconscot (talk) 23:10, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  I feel that the article still needs to speak about the name Oxygen Catastrophe-  if it is true that for years it was percieved as a catastrophic death etc, then we need to say something about realising that this is not known, since books and other media have long called it a Catastrophe.  Don't get me wrong, I was one of those who wanted it to have another name etc, I just feel that if only in a historical context the common word Castastrophe needs explaining.
IceDragon64 (talk) 23:17, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

text: The specific catastrophe, though not mentioned here, was the systematic extinction of all species that used amino alcohols, favoring a switch to the more oxygen-stable amino acids. Amino alcohols are simple prebiotic compounds formed by the reaction of methane, ammonia, and water. They can polymerize into a variety of functional proteins and catalyze reactions, and there should be a whole branch of the tree of life that uses them, but oxygen causes amino alcohols to break down, and so any life trying to use amino alcohols on Earth was doomed to have their proteins fall apart. The mechanism of conversion to amino acids is surprisingly simple: all you have to do is add formic acid (HCOOH). Life solvated by ammonia or methane (like on Titan) uses amino alcohols and oxygen is toxic to them, but hydrogen cyanide is essential for them, since it condenses into nucleobases like adenine. Life solvated by water uses amino acids and the mitochondria use oxygen, but hydrogen cyanide is toxic to them, since the cyanide ion inhibits hemoglobin and cytochrome c oxidase. You get some, you lose some. See Hemiaminal for a list of geminal amino alcohols that can be converted into amino acids by condensation reactions with formic acid. See Alkanolamine for a slightly biased view of amino alcohols with a note on the Great Oxygenation Event that will probably end up being deleted. There's no way to prove that there was ever life that used amino alcohols on Earth, since any fossils necessarily don't contain proteins and certainly don't contain monomers like amino alcohols, but the life that used amino acids had to come from somewhere, and evolving from amino alcohol using life, adapting by converting their amino alcohols to amino acids using formic acid is really the only logical explanation for the species that survived the Great Oxidation Event. Zuloo37 (talk) 05:45, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: What exactly was the "catastrophe" ?

message: Recent publications suggest we need to re-examine the whole idea of an "oxygen catastrophe". I'm going to start collecting sources here, with brief notes. If we get enough, it may be necessary to re-organise the list into sub-sections. Please contribute, using a similar format. If you wish to discuss any of these items, please do so in separate sections, so that this remains a simple list.--Philcha (talk) 12:14, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources

message: Am I missing something?  There are two different coloured lines on the graph and only one atmostpheric constituant discussed, so what does the other line mean and which is which?
IceDragon64 (talk) 21:03, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Graph Lines? 

message: This is intended as a stub until either I or anyone else can fully illustrate the significance of this portion.
By many accounts, the Drake Equation is roughly 13 to 14 orders of magnitude higher than we are experiencing, taken even for when the anecdotially reported myriad forms of intelligent extraterrestrial life are accounted, totalling roughly more than one, perhaps 10, and far fewer than 100 distinctly differeing species.  In order to rectify the Equation, I postulate that the condition of the earliest times of the planetary evolutionary cycles be admitted as another variable to the Drake Equation, somewhere between fℓ and fi, considering the exegesis of particularly protozoan life from those same conditions on early planet Earth.
This is not necessarily a case of making the equation fit the data results, although it appears to be exactly so.
It is my hypothesis that this hypothetical Great Oxygenation Event, which seems to have formed the Ozone Layer, atmospheric and oceanic oxygen, and many useful minerals for life on Earth, could happen only extremely rarely, and could perhaps wholly account for the remaining roughly 1/10,000,000,000,000 (1 in 10 quadrillion) chance that life evolved here and not everywhere else.  The quantification of the rarity of this event would help to define one element of the proposed additional variable to establish a realistic number for the Drake Equation.  The additional rarity of the progression of life on Earth to anti-photosynthetic form could possibly have been predicated by a disruption of another extremely large impactor into the atmosphere, and is also deserved another element of this proposed variable, although these two do not comprise the exclusivity of that variable.
This other part of the entire hypothesis is that it appears to me that the entirety of the Canadian Shield, including Greenland, seems to be formed from a giant impactor which formed the crater now known as most of the Hudson Bay area.  I would like it if more research was done to confirm or deny whether or not the Hudson Bay area in general, and the Canadian Shield at large is the result of a rather large and early (c.2,700M-3,400M years ago) impactor against the surface and early atmosphere of the Earth.  When one compares the Canadian Shield to the Hellas Basin on the surface of Mars, the geological similarities are convincingly striking, albeit in roughly half the size, and although certainly not conclusive.  More work, specifically using core samples from various locations surrounding the Hudson Bay area, would be requisite to begin to either confirm or deny this hypothesis.
The number for this variable may be revised upward if we do find through telescopic radiometry and spectrography a larger prevalence of oxygenated worlds in other solar systems within the galaxy.  
This section in its entirety is being cited as an original derivative work, from my own making.
This is all posted as a postualtive, and not under copyright, although attribution would be appreciated under Creative Commons License.
IllegalKnowledge (talk) 14:02, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Your speculations are nonsense and will be removed as they violate 2 policies of WP, No original research and Verification. --Philcha (talk) 17:54, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Drake Equation 

message: Why not 2.4 billion?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.230.200.94 (talk) 20:59, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  2,400 million years ago? 

message: The article does not make clear what the current consensus is about the total atmospheric composition before, during, and after the event. Meaning percentage of nitrogen, carbon oxides, hydrogen, methane, ammonia, noble gases, etc., as well as the rise in free oxygen. It's odd to see, for example, a paragraph about the reduction in atmospheric nickel without actual numbers for the much larger constituents. --173.76.64.248 (talk) 21:40, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Atmospheric composition 

message: This article does not address the theory that this event was caused by volcanic changes rather than cyanobacteria. For example, see this article in Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7368/full/nature10460.html or the studies of H.D. Holland (Harvard). It appears that there is some debate in the scientific literature over what actually caused this event.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.135.168.103 (talk) 15:48, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Volcanism 

message: In the timeline in the "Role in mineral diversification" section, the Quaternary period spills over onto its own row (at least in my browser), where it is aligned with a large chunk of the early Paleoproterozoic era.  This is obviously very misleading, but I don't understand the timeline template well enough to fix it.  Can someone help? Ravi12346 (talk) 21:03, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timeline formatting problem 

message: perhaps I've just misunderstood it (in which case it could do with more labels). EdwardLane (talk) 12:24, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  table broken? 

message: Oxygen started appearing in the atmosphere around 2.3 billion years ago, yet the Cambrian Explosion did not occur until much later around 550 million years ago. This page says oxygenation allowed diversification, but does not mention the time gap between the two. It would be helpful just to have a little clarification with that.
Kkennedy657 (talk) 22:13, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Effects on Life

message: Quote: It took 100 million years for oxygen levels in the oceans and atmosphere to increase to the level that allowed the explosion of animal life on Earth about 600 million years ago - See more at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1215/181215-earth-oxygenation prokaryotes (talk) 21:45, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: New study

message: In the section "Late evolution of oxy-photosynthesis theory", a term is introduced yet not explained. I Googled this term, and found that it has its origin in this Wikipedia article, and that all references to the "marine sulfur pool" anywhere on the Web are clones of this article. If anyone knows what is meant by "homogenization of the marine sulfur pool" and can rewrite this paragraph using less-obscure wording, they would do the world a favor. The cited article from PNAS uses the term "homogenization of the S pool"; unfortunately that article is beyond my comprehension, and the term "homogenization of the S pool" is unique to this article.--97.120.35.87 (talk) 18:47, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Homogenization of the marine sulfur pool"? 

message: Is there at least a source for that name being in even occasional use? It seems like a ludicrous appropriation of a phrase that specifically refers to intentional genocide.86.149.158.184 (talk) 10:47, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I did a search and immediately found a Wikipedia echo chamber, repeating what's written here. This word has legs we should not facilitate without the strongest source. — MaxEnt 16:31, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed via  -- atropos235 ✄ (blah blah, my past) 18:33, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Oxygen holocaust"? 

message: In 1999, the late Heinrich Holland (then a Professor at Harvard University) named the first rise of oxygen in the Paleoproterozoic the "Great Oxidation Event"  and this is the common usage by virtually all of other scientists in this area. Later, Holland (2006) specifically defines it: "the period between 2.4 and 2.0 Ga has become known as the Great Oxidation Event". A recent review in Nature by Lyons et al. says the step increase is "now popularly know as the Great Oxidation Event or GOE". In another scholarly review of the topic by Catling (2014), "Great Oxidation Event" is used in the title (which is a dead giveaway as to what the correct name is). Surely, it is unacceptable that this wikipedia page, written by people who have done none of the original research on the topic (unlike Holland or Lyons et al. or Catling or others), decide to rename the GOE the Great Oxygenation Event?  I also agree with the comment above about questioning use of the phrase "oxygen holocaust", which is similarly unjustified. In fact, the over-emphasis on "oxygen catastrophe" on the page is unsupported by evidence. But my main point is that the page name needs to be changed to Great Oxidation Event as a matter of accuracy and to reflect the common, consensus definition of 'GOE' in the scientific literature. This point has been made earlier (see Hartmann Schedel) above and was ignored. I'm adding to his argument to say that what he said is obviously and unequivocally correct. Charliecat1 (talk) 04:51, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: It is mentioned in the lede and there is a redirect to this article from "Great Oxidation Event", agree about "oxygen holocaust" and "oxygen catastrophe". More "scholarly articles" on Google for "oxidation" than oxygenation. I don't know how to move a page or I'd do it. Raquel Baranow (talk) 19:46, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page is misnamed: GOE is defined by leading researchers in this area as Great Oxidation Event in the scientific literature 

message: The increased production of oxygen set Earth's original atmosphere off balance.
In my experience, "balance" has more truck in Humorism than in geophysics or ecology.  A more precise word is "equilibrium".  By virtue of being more precise, one can immediately see why it shouldn't be used here (to usefully discuss an "equilibrium" requires a broadly accepted mathematical framework, which I doubt we have concerning the earth's conditions at 3 Gya). 
"Brought a new dynamic into play" would be a rough order of magnitude less grievous, which perhaps brings it into the territory of the barely palatable. — MaxEnt 16:29, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not appropriate language 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: "Before the GOE, any free oxygen they produced was chemically captured by dissolved iron or organic matter. The GOE was the point in time when these oxygen sinks became saturated, at which point oxygen, produced by the cyanobacteria, was free to escape into the atmosphere."
It looks like there must have been two overlapping phases to the oxidation event: oxidation of minerals dissolved in water, and oxidation of land minerals. The paragraph above discusses water, while another paragraph discusses land rock, but there doesn't seem to be anything joining the two, so that if you don't notice you may think that the oxidation only applied to one. Scott McNay (talk) 18:31, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Water/atmosphere 

message: 2001:BB6:4703:4A58:ED30:9F33:3B3:D255 (talk) 16:07, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Findings 

message: Although many biology sources state this as a fact, the evidence isn't that strong. Nick Lane put it like this:
I think this viewpoint should be mentioned Robert Walker (talk) 16:45, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks like a reliable source and an important viewpoint. WP:BOLD. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 01:06, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Was the great oxygenation event a mass extinction? 

message: The abstract of the paywalled source does not say rise in O2 caused extinctions.  Rather, it notes that an extinction is observed in the fossil record, and suggests that hiccups in phosphorous availability was to blame. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:32, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I partially agree. The source abstract suggests that rise in O2 set in motion other changes - that led to restricted phosphorous availability - which then caused the extinctions. At minimum, the sentence needs elaboration, to give a plausible chain of consequences from increased atmospheric O2, to extinctions. I haven't read the source, so I don't know whether it has those details, or references a source that explains a possible mechanism. ToolmakerSteve (talk) 22:46, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It was recently added here, I think it should be deleted. Raquel Baranow (talk) 05:02, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious 

message: First issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oxygenation-atm-2.svg refers in stage 3 to the absorption of oxygen after outgassing. However, there are virtually no further details about this in the main text.
Second issue: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1900325116 finds large decrease in nutrients supplied to the biosphere that, in turn, marked the conclusion of the GOE. There is also no description of this in the main text.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:2454:8D55:500:CE2:26BF:E8DB:6FDE (talk) 07:02, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Missing details about land sinks and productiviy collapse