The oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is essential to almost every animal alive today — but when it first started accumulating in the air roughly 2.4 billion years ago, it triggered the most lethal pollution event in the planet's history, wiping out the vast majority of spec - Space Daily
science 2026/05/30 17:15:42

The oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is essential to almost every animal alive today — but when it first started accumulating in the air roughly 2.4 billion years ago, it triggered the most lethal pollution event in the planet's history, wiping out the vast majority of spec - Space Daily

Source:Space Daily
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Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, the atmosphere of the Earth underwent the most consequential chemical change in the planet’s history. Free oxygen, a gas that had been present only in trace amounts for the previous two billion years, began accumulating in the a…