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The Rise of Oxygen Caused Earth's Earliest Ice Age


May 7, 2009

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Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth. Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland colleague James Farquhar, and a team of scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the US, uncovered evidence that the oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere coincided with the first widespread ice age on the planet.Full Story

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University of Maryland

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