Mechanisms and climatic-ecological effects of the Great Oxidation Event in the early Proterozoic

This paper briefly introduces the conception and research history of the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) in the early Paleoproterozoic and summarizes the primary geological and geochemical records of this event. On the basis of these, we overview the significant progress in three fields of the GOE: the timing and process of its startup, its mechanisms, and its climatic-ecological effects. The records of mass-independent fractionation of sulfur isotopes suggest that the startup of the GOE might be multi-episodic, which is obviously inconsistent with the single-episodic opinion obtained from atmospheric model simulations. The fundamental mechanism of the GOE was the source of the atmospheric O 2 exceeding the sink, but it remains uncertain whether it was due to the increase in the source or the decrease in the sink. The GOE substantially affected the climate, biological evolution, and biogeochemical cycles, but the specific processes remain elusive. In consideration of the current progress, we propose four aspects for future explorations, including the construction of geological and geochemical proxies for extremely low atmospheric oxygen content ( p O 2 ), how the GOE changed the evolutions of Earth’s habitability and the processes in deep Earth, and constraining the mechanism of the GOE by coupling geological events with different time scales.