UC Riverside geoscientists help tie spike in ancient oceanic
oxygen levels to ‘Snowball Earth’ event
An international team of scientists, including geochemists
from the University of California, Riverside, has uncovered new evidence
linking extreme climate change, oxygen rise, and early animal evolution.
A dramatic rise in atmospheric oxygen levels has long been
speculated as the trigger for early animal evolution. While the direct
cause-and-effect relationships between animal and environmental evolution
remain topics of intense debate, all this research has been hampered by the
lack of direct evidence for an oxygen increase coincident with the appearance
of the earliest animals — until now.