Volcanoes are the number one source of oxygen on Earth

I thought about the Mahdi

A recent study by geologists at Rice University presents a new theory to explain the emergence of high concentrations of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago, which he called the "great oxidation event", as it explains the chemistry of surface geology that accompanied this event.

The study states that the greatest increase in oxygen occurred as a result of volcanic eruptions caused by tectonic plate activity, and the results of the study were published in the journal Nature Geoscience on the second of December.

Blue bacteria
Scientists have long pointed to photosynthesis as a possible source of increased oxygen during a great oxidation event, because the appearance of photosynthetic organisms can release oxygen, but were blue bacteria the primary source of a great oxidation event?

Blue bacteria were found on Earth 500 million years ago, but it took a long time to release oxygen to the atmosphere.

By analyzing the carbon content, the team found that one in every hundred carbon atoms is the carbon-13 isotope, and the other 99% is the carbon-12 isotope preferred by blue bacteria.

This 1 to 99 ratio was well documented in the carbonates that formed before and after the Lumagundi event, the event that followed the great oxidation event nearly 100 million years ago, which lasted for several hundreds of millions of years.

However, the carbon-13 isotope content reached 10% at the time, which explains the presence of a source other than blue bacteria.

Volcanoes and the mantle carbon release
The study presented a new scenario to explain the accumulation of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere as follows: The large increase in tectonic activity led to the formation of hundreds of volcanoes that caused carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, causing a warm climate, and increased rainfall, which in turn led to increased erosion factors Atmospheric, and chemical decomposition of rock minerals on the arid continents of the Earth.

These minerals were washed away to settle in the oceans, which resulted in a boom in both blue bacteria and carbonates, after which the organic and inorganic carbon deposited on the sea floor was recycled to return to the Earth's mantle in the areas where the oceanic plates meet below the continents.

Here, the inorganic carbon present in the carbon rocks plays an important role, as it is released again to return to the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions as a result of tectonic movements.

As for the organic carbon, it remained for millions of years, deposited deep in the mantle layer, to appear as carbon dioxide from active volcanoes on an island like Hawaii.

Lumagundi cycle
Lumagundi is known as the oldest and largest geological event of the ancient Avant-garde era, the first and longest of the three ancient ages, and it spanned from 2,500 to 1,600 million years ago. The event was marked by the fact that it maintained high levels of carbon isotopes C13.

About 2.4 billion years ago the amount of cyanobacteria increased, which also necessitated an increase in the oxygen concentration at that time, but the increase of cyanobacteria balance with the increase in carbonates.

Consequently, the ratio of the carbon-12 isotope to the carbon-13 isotope does not change until the carbonates and organic carbon from the blue bacteria settle deep in the ground.

When this happens, geochemistry plays its role, which results in the presence of these two forms of carbon in the mantle for different time periods.

Carbonate is readily released with magma (or magma), bringing it back to the surface in a very short period. Thus, the lumagundi begins when the carbon-13 isotope is released from the carbonate on the surface, and ends when the organic carbon enriched with the carbon-12 isotope later returns to a depth Earth to rebalance the ratio between them.