Large amounts of carbon dioxide poses to be an issue in our society today but those little microbes way back then were probably so excited to be interacting with a new atmosphere that wasn't so hard to stay alive in. Science is really cool and without little microbes doing their thing, we wouldn't be here today.
Monday, March 20, 2023
As it turns out, we really do need oxygen to survive.
It might seem like an obvious thing, but oxygen really does make our world go round. About 4.6 to 2.5 billion years ago, there wasn't free oxygen in our atmosphere like there is today. In fact, methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, was the main control on our atmosphere. Only extremophiles could survive and exist in such conditions. That was until, the GREAT OXDIATION EVENT occurred!!! Thanks to the cyanobacteria that was able to survive in such extreme conditions, they were able to photosynthesize and release oxygen into our oceans and atmosphere. Through chemistry, the methane that was dominating interacted with the oxygen and created carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is still a greenhouse gas but it is much less potent than methane. So much so that the Earth actually cooled and was frozen over for nearly 30 million years.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Oscillatoria princeps dating profile- extra credit
Oscillatoria princeps 131 📍 10 miles away
-
GeoMicro 3753Fall 2018 Winogradsky Columns Well, It has been 12 weeks or so since the creation of our mad experiment. We took...
-
In this article from Scientific American , the authors discuss that global warming leading to melting of permafrost may result in the releas...
-
In the article Marine microbes:Small but might at capturing carbon by Devi Lockwood, researchers are attempting to better understand the mec...
No comments:
Post a Comment