Archaeology, Cosmology, Earth Sciences

New finding shows climate change can happen in a geological instant

7 Oct , 2013  

“(Phys.org) —”Rapid” and “instantaneous” are words geologists don’t use very often. But Rutgers geologists use these exact terms to describe a climate shift that occurred 55 million years ago.  In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Morgan Schaller and James Wright contend that following a doubling in carbon dioxide levels, the surface […]

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Cosmology, Earth Sciences

Signs of oxygen in 3-billion-year-old soil

2 Oct , 2013  

“You’ve heard the story before: if it weren’t for our friends the photosynthetic cyanobacteria, you wouldn’t be able to read this out loud because there would be no oxygen to breathe—and also you would never have existed. Oxygen-producing photosynthesis changed Earth’s atmosphere and paved the way for multicellular life, which would run around eating the […]