The Great Oxygenation Event 🦠
Jul 14, 2022
I've been imagining being a little methane-breathing creature 2.4 billion years ago when blue-green algae discovered photosynthesis, took over the planet, and pumped out unprecedented levels of poisonous gas… called oxygen.
I wonder what was it like to experience this first Great Extinction, where oxygen killed perhaps 99% of all life on earth?
The extinction lasted for an unfathomable ~300 million years. The algae's waste also oxygenated the atmosphere, creating the conditions for nearly everything we can see and call life today, to evolve. But as I imagine being a creature alive then, I imagine being enraged, convinced the "evil" algae screwed up Earth forever. And all my offspring (if they survived) would agree, unable to zoom out the billions of years required to see the incredible flourishing of new lifeforms that came from this catastrophe.
With Love, Jordan
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