Technical comment on "Reexamination of 2.5-Ga 'whiff' of oxygen interval points to anoxic ocean before GOE"

Ariel D Anbar; Roger Buick; Gwyneth W Gordon; Aleisha C Johnson; Brian Kendall; Timothy W Lyons; Chadlin M Ostrander; Noah J Planavsky; Christopher T Reinhard; Eva E Stüeken

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abq3736

Technical comment on "Reexamination of 2.5-Ga 'whiff' of oxygen interval points to anoxic ocean before GOE"

Sci Adv. 2023 Apr 7;9(14):eabq3736. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3736. Epub 2023 Apr 7.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University. Tempe, AZ, USA.
² School of Molecular Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
³ Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
⁴ Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
⁵ Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
⁶ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA.
⁷ Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Falmouth, MA, USA.
⁸ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
⁹ Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA .
¹⁰ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK.

Abstract

Many lines of inorganic geochemical evidence suggest transient "whiffs" of environmental oxygenation before the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). Slotznick et al. assert that analyses of paleoredox proxies in the Mount McRae Shale, Western Australia, were misinterpreted and hence that environmental O₂ levels were persistently negligible before the GOE. We find these arguments logically flawed and factually incomplete.