Earth’s Oxygen Rise Helps Search for Life
By analyzing the oxygen content of ancient, iron-rich sedimentary rocks, scientists determined just how low oxygen levels were before life began to flourish.
A lot of times in science, to understand where you are and what will be, you have to look back at where you came from. In the search for life beyond Earth, with our sample size of just one, we are compelled to understand everything we can about how life came about here on our pale blue dot. That way we have some idea of what to look for on other worlds.
It’s not a simple process. Earth, so far, has proven to be unique, and we’re not 100% certain just what ingredients were needed to allow life to not only develop but flourish. There are thousands upon thousands of known exoplanets out there, but we haven’t found that perfect Earth 2.0 that will give us a possible sample size of, well, two.
So we look back into Earth’s past to try and understand how life arose and maybe find a clue for something we can find elsewhere that will tell us, “Yes, that planet has life.”
In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists analyzed the oxygen content of iron-rich sedimentary rocks from around the world…
