So say the New York Times. Not for some of us: anyway,
What’s even more astonishing is that Earth started out with an oxygen-free atmosphere. It took billions of years before there was enough of the element to keep animals like us alive.
Although scientists have been struggling for decades to reconstruct the rise of oxygen, they’re still making fundamental discoveries. In just the past two weeks, for example, Dr. Canfield and his colleagues have published a pair of studies that provide significant clues about some of the most important chapters in oxygen’s history. They’re finding that our weirdly oxygen-rich atmosphere is the result of a complicated dance of geology and biology.