Insights from a dynamical system approach into the history of atmospheric oxygenation

Atmospheric oxygen levels are traditionally viewed to have been relatively stable throughout Earth’s history with several-step increases. Emerging evidence, however, suggests extremely dynamic atmospheric oxygen levels through large swaths of Earth’s history. Here, we provide a new perspective on at...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2024-08, Vol.15 (1), p.6794-10, Article 6794
Main Authors: Fakhraee, Mojtaba, Planavsky, Noah
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/106/35/823
704/47
704/47/4112
Anoxic conditions
Carbon
Carbon cycle
Dynamical systems
Humanities and Social Sciences
Hydrogen
Mass balance
Mass balance models
multidisciplinary
Oxidation
Oxygen
Oxygenation
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Stochasticity
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Summary:Atmospheric oxygen levels are traditionally viewed to have been relatively stable throughout Earth’s history with several-step increases. Emerging evidence, however, suggests extremely dynamic atmospheric oxygen levels through large swaths of Earth’s history. Here, we provide a new perspective on atmospheric oxygen evolution using a dynamical analysis to explore the relative importance of previously proposed feedbacks on the global oxygen and carbon cycles. Our results from a stochastic analysis of oxygen mass balance in this framework suggest there are multiple steady states for atmospheric oxygen, but only three stable states. One stable state under anoxic conditions (
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-024-51042-0