Fossil fuel formation: Key to atmosphere’s oxygen?
Date:
December 30, 2016
Source:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Summary:
For the development of animals, nothing -- with the exception of DNA -- may be more important than oxygen in the atmosphere. A study now links the rise in oxygen to a rapid increase in the burial of sediment containing large amounts of carbon-rich organic matter.
FULL STORY
This black shale, formed 450 million years ago, contains fossils of trilobites and other organic material that, by removing carbon from Earth's surface, helped support increases in oxygen in the atmosphere.
Credit: Jon Husson and Shanan Peters/UW-Madison
For the development of animals, nothing -- with the exception of DNA -- may be more important than oxygen in the atmosphere.
Oxygen enables the chemical reactions that animals use to get energy from stored carbohydrates -- from food. So it may be no coincidence that animals appeared and evolved during the "Cambrian explosion," which coincided with a spike in atmospheric oxygen roughly 500 million years ago.
It was during the Cambrian explosion that most of the current animal designs appeared.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161230185406.htm
