Transient episodes of mild environmental oxygenation and oxidative continental weathering during the late Archean
Open accessAbstract
It is not known whether environmental O2 levels increased in a linear fashion or fluctuated dynamically between the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and the later Great Oxidation Event. New rhenium-osmium isotope data from the late Archean Mount McRae Shale, Western Australia, reveal a transient episode of oxidative continental weathering more than 50 million years before the onset of the Great Oxidation Event. A depositional age of 2495 ± 14 million years and an initial (187)Os/(188)Os of 0.34 ± 0.19 were obtained for rhenium- and molybdenum-rich black shales. The initial (187)Os/(188)Os is higher than the mantle/extraterrestrial value of 0.11, pointing to mild environmental oxygenation and oxidative mobilization of rhenium, molybdenum, and radiogenic osmium from the upper continental crust and to contemporaneous transport of these metals to seawater. By contrast, stratigraphically overlying black shales are rhenium- and molybdenum-poor and have a mantle-like initial (187)Os/(188)Os of 0.06 ± 0.09, indicating a reduced continental flux of rhenium, molybdenum, and osmium to seawater because of a drop in environmental O2 levels. Transient oxygenation events, like the one captured by the Mount McRae Shale, probably separated intervals of less oxygenated conditions during the late Archean.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Based on Re-Os isotope analyses, the whiff data can be confidently considered primary signals.
“based on Re-Os isotope analyses, these data can be confidently considered primary signals (Kendall et al., 2015).”
From Iron formations: A global record of Neoarchaean to Palaeoproterozoic environmental history (2017) · cites this paper as Kendall et al., 2015
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 60 · Cited by 86
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- [22]W. W. Fischer, S. Slotznick, J. E. Johnson, S. M. Webb, B. Rasmussen, T. D. Raub, J. L. Kirschvink, Archean ‘whiffs of oxygen’ tied to post-depositional processes, paper presented at the Goldschmidt Conference, Sacramento, CA, 8 to 13 June 2014.
- Authors
- Kendall, B., Creaser, R. A., Reinhard, C. T., Lyons, T. W., & Anbar, A. D.
- Affiliations
- University of Waterloo (CA)
- University of Alberta (CA)
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- University of California, Riverside (US)
- Arizona State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kendall, Brian
- Venue
- Science Advances
- Published
- 2015-11-06
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- e1500777-e1500777
- ISSN
- 2375-2548 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4681338
- OpenAlex
- W2179653789
- Cited by
- 86
- References
- 60
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 5
- FWCI
- 5.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nc
- Locations
- Science Advances (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Arizona State University Library Digital Repository (Arizona State University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- UWSpace (University of Waterloo) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (ID0E2CAI3967, ID0EIIAI3968)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Paleontology and Stratigraphy of Fossils
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Geophysics › Geological and Geochemical Analysis
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Geochemistry and Petrology › Geochemistry and Elemental Analysis
- Keywords
- Late Archean, Great Oxidation Event, Re-Os isotopes, osmium isotopes, molybdenum, rhenium, black shales, ocean redox
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
