4 ms·
What I find fascinating is the sheer length of time of "the great rust" when oxygen was being absorbed almost as fast as it was produced and "Deposition of band
by SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
What I find fascinating is the sheer length of time of "the great rust" when oxygen was being absorbed almost as fast as it was produced and "Deposition of banded iron formation" happened.
This took around 750 million years. Rust, slowly raining down onto the seabed, for three quarters of a billion years. Deep time is chilling.
And also the fact that it was "banded" indicates that there may have been periodic local surges of oxygen like an "agal bloom", which would have been self-limiting when the producing organisms were poisoned by their own wastes.
- arethuza 5y ago"The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton%27s_Unconformity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton%27s_Unconformity
- marcosdumay 5y agoFor comparison, the animals appeared ~600 million years ago, and life took ~1 billion years to develop all the way to create photosynthesis after it appeared at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth