ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
A productivity collapse to end Earth's Great Oxidation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Revisiting the greatness of Earth's great oxidation.Communications earth & environment · 2026Review
- Marine phosphorus and atmospheric oxygen were coupled during the Great Oxidation Event.Nature communications · 2025Article
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- Commensal resilience: ancient ecological lessons for the modern microbiota.Infection and immunity · 2025Review
- Interspecies hydrogen transfer between cyanobacteria and symbiotic bacteria drives nitrogen loss.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Marine sulphate captures a Paleozoic transition to a modern terrestrial weathering environment.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Cooperative environmental engineering via biofilm formation can stabilize consumer-resource systems.PloS one · 2025Article
- Origin and Evolution of thePlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Article
- Macroevolutionary constraints on global microbial diversity.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Sulfate triple-oxygen-isotope evidence confirming oceanic oxygenation 570 million years ago.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Scientific novelty beyond the experiment.Microbial biotechnology · 2023Article
- Oxygen toxicity causes cyclic damage by destabilizing specific Fe-S cluster-containing protein complexes.Molecular cell · 2023Article
- Reconciling discrepant minor sulfur isotope records of the Great Oxidation Event.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Reduced Nucleotides, Thiols and OAntioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Anthroponumbers.org: A quantitative database of human impacts on Planet Earth.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Triple oxygen isotope constraints on atmospheric OProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Temporal variation of planetary iron as a driver of evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Current Knowledge on Mechanisms Preventing Photosynthesis Redox Imbalance in Plants.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Introduction-First Billion Years: Habitability.Astrobiology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has been hypothesized that the overall size of-or efficiency of carbon export from-the biosphere decreased at the end of the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) (ca. 2,400 to 2,050 Ma). However, the timing, tempo, and trigger for this decrease remain poorly constrained. Here we test this hypothesis by studying the isotope geochemistry of sulfate minerals from the Belcher Group, in subarctic Canada. Using insights from sulfur and barium isotope measurements, combined with radiometric ages from bracketing strata, we infer that the sulfate minerals studied here record ambient sulfate in the immediate aftermath of the GOE (ca. 2,018 Ma). These sulfate minerals captured negative triple-oxygen isotope anomalies as low as ∼ -0.8‰. Such negative values occurring shortly after the GOE require a rapid reduction in primary productivity of >80%, although even larger reductions are plausible. Given that these data imply a collapse in primary productivity rather than export efficiency, the trigger for this shift in the Earth system must reflect a change in the availability of nutrients, such as phosphorus. Cumulatively, these data highlight that Earth's GOE is a tale of feast and famine: A geologically unprecedented reduction in the size of the biosphere occurred across the end-GOE transition.
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