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Wouldn't oxygen producing organisms such as plants and trees be a cause for oxygen levels taking off?
by omarchowdhury 10y ago
Wouldn't oxygen producing organisms such as plants and trees be a cause for oxygen levels taking off?
- Udo 10y agoThey're certainly sufficient but not necessary. There's no reason why single celled organisms couldn't do that. Maybe not at 20% but close.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoI thought even today phytoplankton produced more oxygen than all the multicellular plants put together. I might just be imagining that factoid though.
- HCIdivision17 10y agoThat was my understanding as well. The idea being that there is a lot of volume in the first few meters of ocean surface area churn. It's not hard to imagine that does better in surface area than (even a lot) of plants.
- ethbro 10y agoNot forgetting the fact that it seems like it would be substantially easier for a faintly mobile fluid filled bag(s) of DNA to survive and reproduce in an aqueous environment!
- ori_b 10y agoMost oxygen (even today) is produced by single-celled algae in the ocean.
- dredmorbius 10y agoYou're getting ahead of yourself a bit. By a billion or two years. The lifeforms that oxygenated the atmosphere were rather more primitive than trees. Generally cyanobacteria. Technically, yes, plants.