Billion-year-old lake deposit yields clues to Earth’s ancient biosphere

Published: 18 July 2018

A sample of ancient oxygen, teased out of a 1.4 billion-year-old evaporative lake deposit in Ontario, provides fresh evidence of what the Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere were like during the...

Mining ancient ores for clues to early life

Published: 10 December 2012

An analysis of sulfide ore deposits from one of the world’s richest base-metal mines confirms that oxygen levels were extremely low on Earth 2.7 billion years ago, but also shows that microbes were...

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