Since his training about 4.5 billion years ago, the rotation of the earth has gradually slowed down, and its days have gradually become longer.
Although the slowdown in the earth is not perceptible on human time scales, it is enough to make significant changes on the eons. According to a 2021 study.
More specifically, blue-green algae (or cyanobacteria) which emerged and proliferated approximately 2.4 billion years ago could have produced more oxygen as a metabolic by-product because the days of the earth increased.
Discover the video below for a summary on research.
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“A lasting question in earth sciences was the way in which the atmosphere of the earth has obtained its oxygen, and what factors have controlled when this oxygenation took place”, ” Gregory Dick microbiologist of the University of Michigan explained in 2021.
“Our research suggests that the speed at which the Earth turns – in other words, its duration of the day – may have had an important effect on the pattern and the moment of oxygenation of the earth.”
There are two major components in this story which, at first glance, do not seem to have much to do with each other. The first is that the earth spin slows down.
The reason for which the slowdown in the earth slows down is that the Moon has a gravitational traction on the planetwhich causes a deceleration in rotation since the moon Gradually moves away.
We know, on the basis of the fossil file, that day was just 18 hours 1.4 billion years ago, and Half an hour shorter That they are not today 70 million years ago. The evidence suggests that we win 1.8 milliseconds per century.
The second component is something known as Large oxidation event – When cyanobacteria emerged in such large quantities that the earth’s atmosphere has experienced a clear and significant increase in oxygen.
Without this oxidation, scientists think that life as we know could not have emerged; Thus, although cyanobacteria can Cop some side todayWe would probably not be there without them.
There are still a lot of things that we do not know about this event, including burning questions such as why it happened when it did and not earlier in the history of the earth.
It took scientists working with cyanobacterial microbes to connect the points. In the Middle Island chasm in Lake Huron, microbial carpets can be found which are considered a similar cyanobacteria responsible for the major oxidation event.
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Purple cyanobacteria Who produce oxygen via photosynthesis and white microbes that metabolize sulfur, compete in a microbial carpet on the lake bed.
At night, white microbes go up to the top of the microbial carpet and do their thing to climb sulfur. When the day breaks and the sun rises high enough in the sky, the white microbes withdraw and the purple cyanobacteria rises at the top.
“Now they can start to photosynthesize and produce oxygen”, ” says geomicrobiologist Judith Klatt of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany.
“However, it takes a few hours before they really start, there is a long gap in the morning. Cyanobacteria are rather late elevators than morning people, it seems.”
This means that the window of the day in which cyanobacteria can pump oxygen is very limited – and it is this fact that attracted the attention of the Oceanographer Brian Arbic from the University of Michigan. He wondered if the change of length of a day on the history of the earth had had an impact on photosynthesis.
“It is possible that a similar type of competition between microbes has contributed to the delay in the production of oxygen on the land of the beginning” ” Klatt explained.
To demonstrate this hypothesis, the team carried out experiments and measures on microbes, both in their natural environment and in a laboratory framework. They also carried out detailed modeling studies according to their results to link sunlight to the production of microbial oxygen and the production of microbial oxygen in the history of the earth.
“Intuition suggests that two days of 12 hours should be similar to a 24 -hour day. Sun light rises and falls twice as quickly, and oxygen production follows in locking,” explained the scientist Marin Arjun Chennu Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research in Germany.
“But the release of oxygen from bacterial carpets does not do so, because it is limited by the speed of molecular diffusion. This subtle decoupling of oxygen release from the sun is at the heart of the mechanism.”
These results were incorporated into global models of oxygen levels, and the team found that the days of elongation were linked to the increase in the oxygen of the earth – not only the major oxidation event, but another, the second atmospheric oxygenation called the Neoproterozoic oxygenation event About 550 to 800 million years ago.
“We are reading the laws of physics operating on very different scales, from molecular diffusion to planetary mechanics. We show that there is a fundamental link between the length of the day and the amount of oxygen can be released by” “” “microbes” ” Chennu said.
“It’s quite exciting. In this way, we are linking the dance of molecules in the microbial carpet to the dance of our planet and its moon.”
Research was published in Nature geoscience.
A previous version of this article was published in August 2021.