Geologists have named the timing of the onset of the oxygen catastrophe on Earth. In their opinion, a global change in the composition of the planet's atmosphere occurred 2426-2460 million years ago. A related study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists came to their conclusions by dating igneous rocks from South Africa. In the samples studied using the uranium-lead method, the authors found chemical evidence of a sharp increase in the oxygen content in the ancient atmosphere, which, according to scientists, corresponds to the timing of the onset of an oxygen catastrophe.
At this time, about 2.45 billion years ago, the planet was almost completely covered with snow and ice (the polar caps extended almost to the equator), and the hydrosphere was practically isolated from the atmosphere.
Scientists previously believed that the oxygen catastrophe occurred about a hundred million years later than new research suggests. In a paper published in May 2016 in the journal Nature Geoscience, geophysicists named tectonic activity as the reason for the oxygen enrichment of the planet's atmosphere.