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Earth’s Great Oxidation Event facilitated by the rise of sedimentary phosphorus recycling

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Abstract

The rise of atmospheric oxygen during the Great Oxidation Event some 2.4 billion years ago was a defining transition in the evolution of global biogeochemical cycles and life on Earth. However, mild oxidative continental weathering and the development of ocean oxygen oases occurred several hundred million years before the Great Oxidation Event. The Great Oxidation Event thus represents a tipping point, whereby primary productivity and O2 production overwhelmed the input of reduced species that consume O2, and its timing is determined by the input of phosphate, the major limiting nutrient, and the dynamics of the solid Earth. Here, we determine the phase partitioning of phosphorus in 2.65 to 2.43 billion year old drill core samples from the Transvaal Supergroup, South Africa, to investigate the sequence of events that facilitated persistent atmospheric oxygenation. On the basis of the elevated C/P ratios found within sulfidic sediments, relative to the Redfield ratio, we suggest that, as oxidative continental weathering increased the influx of dissolved sulfate and hence dissolved sulfide in the oceans, bioavailable phosphorus became more abundant due to anoxic recycling of sedimentary phosphorus phases. Biogeochemical modelling indicates that this initiated a positive feedback on primary productivity and shows that the evolution of phosphorus recycling may have been a critical step that enabled Earth’s transition to a persistently oxygenated atmosphere.

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Fig. 1: Stratigraphy and geochemistry of the studied drill cores.
Fig. 2: Relationships between organic carbon and different phosphorus pools.
Fig. 3: Long-term trends in the phosphorus content and the sulfur isotope composition of marine sediments, highlighting Stages 1 to 3 in the progressive oxygenation of the early Earth.
Fig. 4: Steady-state model solutions for a fixed reduced gas flux.

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Data availability

The geochemical dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14186114.

Code availability

Model code and output data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

L.J.A. was funded by a Leeds Anniversary Research Scholarship. S.W.P. acknowledges support from a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. S.W.P. and B.J.W.M. acknowledge financial support from NERC (NE/R010129/1). Participation of A.B. was made possible with funding from NSERC Discovery and Accelerator grants.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Lewis J. Alcott, Benjamin J. W. Mills & Simon W. Poulton

  2. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

    Andrey Bekker

  3. Department of Geology, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Andrey Bekker

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  1. Lewis J. Alcott
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Contributions

S.W.P., L.J.A., B.J.W.M. and A.B. designed the research and collected the samples. L.J.A. and S.W.P. performed geochemical analyses and interpreted the data. B.J.W.M. guided the biogeochemical modelling, and A.B. provided geological context. All authors contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Lewis J. Alcott.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Dominic Papineau and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Rebecca Neely, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–12, Tables 1–4 and discussion to support interpretations.

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Alcott, L.J., Mills, B.J.W., Bekker, A. et al. Earth’s Great Oxidation Event facilitated by the rise of sedimentary phosphorus recycling. Nat. Geosci. 15, 210–215 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-00906-5

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