Introduction

Perhaps the most fundamental shift in the evolution of Earth's surface and atmosphere was the oxygen “revolution,” an event stretching over the Proterozoic eon when molecular oxygen levels in the atmosphere rose and carbon dioxide levels decreased. (Hereinafter, for brevity, we refer to molecular oxygen, which is O2, simply as oxygen.) In consequence, the fundamental chemical nature of the atmosphere and its interactions with life changed drastically. Life was responsible for, or at least helped to, precipitate the drastic increase in oxygen levels and, as a result, was set on a radical new course. Earth's atmosphere today is not the sedate, relatively unreactive carbon dioxide atmosphere as on Mars and Venus. Instead, it is an atmosphere far from equilibrium, held in a precarious chemical state by the biosphere. As Margulis and Sagan (1986) express it, the modern biosphere hums “with the thrill and danger of free oxygen.”

In this chapter we explore how this change came about on the Proterozoic Earth, by first examining the present-day oxygen cycle and the evidence in the rock record for an oxygen-poor Archean and early Proterozoic Earth. We then consider a model that, although approximate and based on mechanisms that are still debated, illustrates very well how the change might have taken place. Such models often have critical utility in science, in that they point the way toward new observations and investigations that will yield deeper insight into a particular process (even while proving the model itself to be incomplete or incorrect).