NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  1. Content with the tag: “australia

  2. Oxygen in Earth's Atmosphere Before Great Oxidation Event


    NAI’s Astrobiology Drilling Program supported researchers in 2004 to obtain subsurface core samples from the Hamersley Basin in Western Australia. Those samples, representing the time just before the Great Oxidation Event, have been analyzed, and two research papers detailing the results (Anbar, et al. and Kaufman, et al.) appear in September 28, 2007 issue of Science. Both groups found unexpected, correlated changes that reveal the presence of small but significant amounts of O2 in the environment 2.5 billion years...

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  3. Photosynthesis in the late Archean


    A new study on carbon isotopes in sedimentary rocks from Western Australia by researchers from NAI’s Penn State and Carnegie Institution of Washington Teams supports the idea that small, shallow pools of water containing photosynthetic microbes existed on the early Earth ~ 2.72 Gya, about 300 million years before the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere. Their findings suggest a “global-scale expansion” of these habitats, and a progression away from anaerobic ecosystems and toward photosynthetic communities before the oxygenation...

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  4. A Mild, Habitable Hadean?


    NAI’s Mark Harrison of the UCLA team co-authored a study published in this week’s Science describing a titanium thermometer technique used to measure the temperature at which ancient zircons from the Jack Hills in Western Australia formed. The results paint a mild picture of the Hadean, complete with an atmosphere and liquid water.

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