The Oxygen Holocaust

Day 272 / 365

Things have not been great for the environment this year. We had the Amazon fires, burning the forests which some term as the “lungs of the planet”. We have people trying to cut the Arrey forest to make space for the metro. Losing trees will not be good for us, as trees provide us with oxygen, something we can’t live without.

But could the earth have too much oxygen? what would that be like?

Something like that did happen once on earth, and it was known as the Great Oxidation Event or The Oxygen Holocaust. This wasn’t anytime recent though, it happened around 2.4 billion years ago.

During this period organisms in the oceans produced too much oxygen. Oxygen started getting accumulated in the earth’s atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere turned from a weakly reducing to an oxidizing one, and it killed almost all life on earth! This was the earth’s first mass extinction.

The oxygen in the atmosphere actually reacted with methane to created CO2, a relatively weak greenhouse gas. This called global cooling which lead to an ice age.

Luckily there were some organisms at that time that could consume oxygen. These organisms survived this mass extinction and shaped the life on earth today as we know it.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Productivity and deadlines