New paper out now in Science Advances!
The second paper from my PhD has now been published and is free to read. For this piece of work, my co-authors and I constructed a numerical box model of the Earth and used isotope mass balance of carbon isotopes to generate predictions of atmospheric oxygen levels for the last 1.5 billion years. What we found is that during the Neoproterozoic Era atmospheric oxygen levels jumped around a lot - from roughly half of what they are at the present day, to a miniscule fraction of the atmosphere only a few tens of millions of years later (that's fast on geologic timescales)! This happens at the same time as we start to see evidence of the first animals in the oceans, implying that they might have evolved during a time of really changeable conditions on Earth. This could have interesting implications for finding complex life, such as animals, elsewhere in the Universe. Our results have brought about some media attention, please see the relevant page for more details!
The second paper from my PhD has now been published and is free to read. For this piece of work, my co-authors and I constructed a numerical box model of the Earth and used isotope mass balance of carbon isotopes to generate predictions of atmospheric oxygen levels for the last 1.5 billion years. What we found is that during the Neoproterozoic Era atmospheric oxygen levels jumped around a lot - from roughly half of what they are at the present day, to a miniscule fraction of the atmosphere only a few tens of millions of years later (that's fast on geologic timescales)! This happens at the same time as we start to see evidence of the first animals in the oceans, implying that they might have evolved during a time of really changeable conditions on Earth. This could have interesting implications for finding complex life, such as animals, elsewhere in the Universe. Our results have brought about some media attention, please see the relevant page for more details!
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Model codes from the papers that have been published are publicly available from my Github. If you click on the button below this will take you to the relevant page. I write my models in MATLAB, so a copy of this will be required to run them.
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