Wednesday 13 August 2014

Burrowing animals may have been key to stabilizing Earth's oxygen

6th August 2014

Evolution of the first burrowing animals may have played a major role in stabilizing the Earth's oxygen reservoir, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience.

Around 540 million years ago, the first burrowing animals evolved. When these worms began to mix up the ocean floor's sediments (a process known as bioturbation), their activity came to significantly influence the ocean's phosphorus cycle and as a result, the amount of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere.

"Our research is an attempt to place the spread of animal life in the context of wider biogeochemical cycles, and we conclude that animal activity had a decreasing impact on the global oxygen reservoir and introduced a stabilizing effect on the connection between the oxygen and phosphorus cycles", says lead author Dr. Richard Boyle from the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution (NordCEE) at the University of Southern Denmark.


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