Phosphorous and the Sky?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100510132159.htm

Did phosphorous really contribute to the way our skies are blue, and did it cause complex evolution? Domonic Papineau says so. Billions of years ago, when geologic activity was occurring, heavy amounts of phosphorous poured into the oceans. From the phosphorous, algal plants started growing in the oceans and then pumped many tons of oxygen into the then-methane-filled-air. Back when Earth's sky was filled with methane, the sky was orange. When the oxygen took over, the sky turned blue. The reason for evolution changes was because of the oxygen, how the organisms began to develop cell structures, called mitochondria, which burn oxygen to produce energy. Because they pumped so much energy, many fossils are able to be found, and most of those fossils are parts of organisms that were alive during the Cambrian Explosion. Papineau also found that the atmospheric changes contributed with many phosphate deposits, which is probably the cause for different patterns in continental rifting and the different changes in climate. Those changes in the patterns in the rifting and climate would lead to different amounts of chemical weathering and other erosion, leading to more phosphorous being poured into the ocean.


This article wasn't really that interesting. I clicked on it to see what kind of information it had, because in science class I was wondering what the atmosphere was like before oxygen came, and why our sky is blue. I thought that learning about the way methane filled the air before oxygen was pretty neat, especially how some plants and organisms survived and adapted to the methane atmosphere. What one thing is that I would like to know would be which organisms actually adapted, so I could see where some of our current-day species evolved from. I think that would be interesting. And, how long it took for those species to adapt from methane to oxygen, and what species died off and the species that became new from the adaptation. This is the kind of science that fascinates me, learning about the geologic history of Earth and the interdependence of all the different organisms living on Earth at different times at different places.