Sulfur analysis supports timing of oxygen's appearance

Sulfur analysis supports timing of oxygen's appearance

6 years ago
Anonymous $hM_jrxqbr-

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-sulfur-analysis-oxygen.html

Torres, a Rice assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, and his colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that the balance of sulfur isotope anomalies in Archean rock, a marker of the "great oxygenation event," can also be recognized and measured in the rivers that erode it.

The researchers sampled water from two of the few places on Earth where Archean rock is exposed in abundance: at the Superior Craton in Canada and in South Africa. They determined that while individual samples of rock may still show an imbalance (the anomalies) of sulfur isotopes, careful analysis of the water that diffuses and transports sulfur from thousands of miles of rock to the ocean shows that the contents are ultimately in alignment with bulk Earth's sulfur signature.