Because this video is kind of terminology heavy and I am not sure I adequately defined everything, here is a list of definitions to guide you if there is a term you don't know! -> Definition of jargon: Prokaryotes: Simple, non-organelle containing cells (bacteria & archaea). Eukaryotes: Complex, organelle containing cells (can be unicellular, like protists, or multicellular, like animals). Protists: Single-celled eukaryotes (such as algae, foraminifera, & radiolarians). Proterozoic: Eon that ranges from 2.5 billion years ago to ~540 million years ago (between the Archean Eon & Cambrian period). Anoxic: Lack of molecular oxygen (O2). Oxic: Abundant O2. Proliferation: Rise in abundance & diversification. Tectonic rifting: Separation of tectonic plates (in this case: supercontinent break up). Subduction: Pull of an oceanic tectonic plate under another oceanic or continental plate. PAL O2: Present-day atmospheric levels of molecular oxygen. GOE: Great Oxidation Event (began around 2.4 billion years ago). NOE: Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event (began around 800 million years ago). SRB: Sulfate-reducing bacteria (bacteria that ‘eat’ sulfate & produce sulfide). Euxinic: Anoxic & sulfide-rich. Chemocline: Transition in water column from upper well-oxygenated water to lower poorly-oxygenated water. Primary productivity: Production of organic food for life by autotrophs (organisms that use light and inorganic compounds (such as water and CO2) to produce organic carbon that feeds life below them)- At this time, major primary producers were cyanobacteria & algae. Anoxygenic photosynthesis: photosynthesis that produces non-oxygen products (such as sulfur compounds). “Boring”: Up to your interpretation ;)
@@a.randomjack6661 Thanks for noticing it wasn't pinned, I pinned it earlier, but sometimes it doesn't stay pinned for some reason. Anyway, hopefully this time is sticks :) Hope you have a nice day too! ;)
I know what an isotop is.. MS in health sci Thanks for reply. Where are the .8 billion year old rocks? I live outside Albany NY Thatcher Mt. Escarpment . Old ancient shallow sea the ancient Great lake. I collect many fosss there.
One thing I like about your videos is how dense they are in information. These are the sorts of videos you have to watch more than once to capture everything. As far as whether I think the boring billion was really boring, the video on it was certainly not boring, so I'm going to go with not.
I agree, it was only recently that I became aware how dramatically life has affected the chemistry of the planet. Truly fascinating, life does not just exist on a planet it shapes it.
The ediacaran is so fascinating. There has been lots of fossil discoveries recently around the White Sea in Russia and other locations. Some of the animals are just weird. Others show early examples of muscle fibers, burrowing behavior, etc.
Couldn't agree more! The precambrian in general is my favorite time in Earth's history, in part because of the weird organisms that dominated this time, but also because there are still so many mysteries that we don't understand yet about that time and we get to keep learning new things about it ;D
It seemed to me that the “boring billion” was perpetuated to speed up historical geology. Once you start to unravel it, it becomes more interesting. As I understand it, the lower sulfuric ocean layers made the oceans black and might have aided in keeping the climate warmer. The mountains visible from my backyard expose rocks from the bb, some of the oldest rock in NM. Keep up your good work!
Well, listening to you talk about it for 28 minutes wasn't boring, but I'm kind of glad I didn't have to sit through the whole billion years in real time.
It may have been a seemingly boring time in earths geologic history. But you made it interesting and challenging to understand. I mean a good challenging. Thank you!
😓 that was a heavy lesson! Boring or not, a billion years worth of learning is a hefty sum. And I would use the word 'calm' to describe it myself, especially comparing it to it's own bookcaps!
Interestingly I learned this week after the monthly meeting of the Geological Society of Finland that there is likely a large sequence of sedimentary rock dating to close to the middle of the Boring Billion (approximately 1,3 Ga) in the bottom of the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. Problem is, nobody as far as I know has ever done a drill core of it (we know it's there because geophysical methods can detect a large rift-zone down there which seems to be an underwater continuation of the rift associated with the ~1,3 Ga Satakunta sandstone formation). I hope somebody will eventually study it, as it might tell us somethign more about the depositional environment at the time which we currently know very little of (the sedimentary sequence is estimated to be about 400 m thick so it would cover a long period of time. A 200 m long drill core has been recovered from another rift in the sea between Sweden and Finland, and seems to show cyclical changes between marine and fluvial environment, but I don't recall the age of that one).
This was fantastic! It's great to learn how much connected planetology, geology, chemistry and biology is and how it is pieced all together to give a very good, convincing picture of times that were ""a billion years ago"".
Another excellent video, packed with information (I will need to watch again to make sure I caught it all) Keep it up. I am slowly catching up on your older clips, I am loving it all although some of the audio on your older videos left a little to be desired. Content was still awesome.
You're really great at this. I'm glad someone with your talent is going into this field. My grandmother was a geologist. My brother tried his hand at it and ended up a boat builder. I really enjoy your lessons. I shied away from geology myself, but you make me doubt my choice.
Oh wow, a boat builder! What a switch haha. Well I am so glad you enjoy my lessons! It's never too late to come back to geology, it will always be here for you ;)
Brilliant, as usual. The pauses in tectonic activity linked to chemistry climate and life is fascinating. The earliest eukaryotes were probably simpler given the intricacy of the internal organisation. When did all the organelles get in place? Chloroplasts were maybe the last...? You got me thinking...
Fantastic characterization of a period I didn't know much about previously! Life is all about the avaliable conditions, so it makes sense that we don't see the evolution of animals for such a long time corresponding to the stable conditions such as oxygen. Really puts into perspective what humans are capable of now as the first social being on earth, being able to change the conditions to suit our independent and creative interests.
Listening to this video I heard over and over again how microbial life modified the earth's environment. As a gas in the earth's atmosphere increased over time life adapted to use the increase in "food" source and they caused an increase in concentration of their waste product. As we change the atmosphere I wonder how microbial life will use the modified environment to create noticeable beneficial or negative changes.
No time period can be called "boring". One of these days, we'll be able to determine when the first primitive sponges developed in the Neoproterozic. Just for fun, I pulled out my (old as dirt) 200 level Historical Geology Textbook and found that my memory was correct. There were no subdivisions in the entire precambrian era mentioned, at all. This was back in the 60's. I can't remember if divisions were discussed in later classes. Another "new" development that I never learned about, is Anoxygenic phototrophs in the Proterozoic. It just made me wonder if all of the life on an exoplanet, could develop, by using just H2S? Thank you.
Yes, there are a lot of hypotheses regarding the potential life on other planets and moons and some of them suggest that S-based life would be the primary type of life on some worlds without oxygen, such as in Europa's ocean, so it's possible!
GEO GIRL you did an excellent describing this time period , very science based. I wonder if you would consider doing a video debunking young earth geologists arguments. Especially their claims against Radiometric dating ?
Thank you! Currently, the answer is no to debating or debunking anyone because I just feel it gives them more of a voice than they deserve, and it's also very difficult to argue with someone when one side is using real data and the other is only using conjecture, faith, and fake or disproved data... I just feel as though it's futile because they are no going to change their opinion because of anything I say because I will just say the same things as all the other scientists who told them before lol, so I just don't feel like I should give that argument the time of day. My purpose on TH-cam is to educate those who want to learn more about Earth either to pass a class or just for fun, but it's not to debate people who will never agree with me. Hope you understand ;)
I performed sub par on my school science results. Though I am and have always been facinated by Earth History and Evolutionary Biology (Richard Dawkins Books) its 3am lol. This video is very informative, thank you.
Yay! My favourite billion! (OK, I'll confess! I'm a nerd.) UPDATE: Yes it was boring! It was so boring that we should erect a new eon called "the Boringian eon".
@@GEOGIRL You're welcome! I've been binging your videos and showing them to friends who really liked them! I admit I hated giving TH-cam 30% of this tip. If you haven't considered it yet - I can recommend ko-fi as a "tip jar".
@@thygrrr I actually have a place on my website where you can donate if you want to forgo the 30% donation to TH-cam haha ;) you've given more than enough, but if you do want to give more here's the link: www.geogirlscience.com/support That's my bad for not advertising that better! Thank you again! :)
Yup. It's not monotone, it's not dull, she has a steady rhythm, it's not mind numbingly simple yet not too complicated...and her microphone doesn't make her sound like a Spirit airlines pilot that dropped his mic in his whiskey
I would suggest that it's likely that part of the "boring" wasn't lack of complex life, but lack of complex life of the kind that would easily leave fossil traces. The Cambrian Explosion isn't so much life coming out of nowhere, as life developing hard parts that start leaving more fossils, and it turning out that lots of complex life already existed. We only have a few examples of Ediacaran life not because it wasn't there, but because it didn't leave much of a record. Add to this the possibility that complex life first evolved on a tiny scale, inside the microbial mat on damp land, coastlines, and water surfaces...once again leaving little evidence... and things weren't boring, just undocumented. There's a similar problem with anthropologists thinking that organized humanity sprang up rather suddenly after the last ice age. But that involved a three hundred foot rise in sea levels, so that any earlier organized cultures are now out on coastal sea floors.
In the context of the Fermi Paradox, in Rare Earth scenarios, Earth's "boring billion" could be considered a potential Great or Medium Filter. If it is generally normal for Earth-like planets with a prokaryotic microbial biosphere to entire a boring billion equivalent (most young terrestrial planets should, after all, be expected to share features like a fairly warm mantle, and a fainter young sun) soon after the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis, rather than immediately transition to being an oxygenated world, and the events that trigger the end of said boring billion period are either stochastically unlikely, or need a significant time period of geological evolution of the planet before they can get going, then perhaps we may end up finding lots of inhabited planets in the galaxy with prevailing conditions analogous to Earth during the Boring Billion, populated by microbes up to eukaryotic grade, but with complex mullticellular lifeforms mostly absent.
It is beautiful dream catcher. (The wife here: he wanted me to explain that he spotted the dream catcher on the wall behind you and ran out of the words he needed.)
Naturally when you mention molybdenum as necessary for early life forms to function, I think of all the molybdenite occurrences in the New England area, and their associations. Sanford, ME with vesuvianite, Franconia, NH with magnetite and epidote, Lyme, NH with powellite and bismuthenite. Westmoreland, NH with apatite, Shrewsbury, VT with powellite. I have to wonder we're any of these associations related to the fixing of nitrogen or other processes at one time?
The Boring Billion wasnt boring to anyone with a microscope 🔬. Bacteria and archea are cool, but they're not much fun to watch compared to the busy, bustling, wiggly world of protists. Our tiny eukaryotic friends are ecosystems of their own with every niche and lifestyle you could imagine-- micro sized.
Yes! Microbes don't get enough credit, they are so incredible! The pure diverisity in metabolisms is amazing compared to animals that pretty much only do the one lol
@@GEOGIRL Also, multicellular red algae (Rhodophyta) appeared way before 1 Ba. Also other eukaryotic algae developed multicellularity, but latter that red algae. Fungal multicellularity were developing in parallel to metazoan multicellularity.
Yep. You explained it pretty well. Just one thing. Most non Precambrian geologists who don't focus on life make the same claim about tectonics. It's in no way a ding on you. Referring to a whole billion years as boring needs to be restricted to life and maybe the atmosphere. I don't know. I'm a structural geologist/geochronologist who dabbles in stratigraphy. I don't touch life. Actually, tectonically the earth was far from quiet. Laurentia alone had at least a dozen major events. Here's a list of a few. I hope I spelled everything right. Penokean Orogeny Yavapi Orogeny Baraboo interval Wolf River Event Mazatzal Orogeny Picuris Orogeny Ozark Interbal Belt-Purcell sediments Midcontinent Rift Grenville Orogeny The assembly and breakup of Nuna. As well as the assembly and breakup of Rodinia.
Ahh, that is crazy! Thank you so much for all this information! I was so surprised when reading my tectonics references that it was 'relatively quiet' but I didn't realize all these orogenies were going on. Thanks for bringing this to light!
Not boring to me! I think Eukaryotes spent that time evolving from living a completely unicellular existence into living within colonies of cooperative organisms. Those would go on to evolve specialized members performing specific tasks for the collective. And chief among those, and arguably the most significant biological innovation in all of Life's 3.8 billion-year history, were Gametes, whose function was to generate novel sets of genetic information. With that, sexual reproduction began. And any period that hosts the advent of SEX, I cannot call 'boring'.
So, non-Oxygen single cells can't come together to make mulit-cellular life? Well, they made those bacterial mats which has always been a favorite of mine(I always like to tell people that Martians probably never got much more interesting than the Stromatolite.
Well, life conquered photosynthesis at this time, and did symbiosis. These are certainly only two things in a pretty long time. It's certainly a very preliminary period compared to the multi-cellular period.
any chance the silarians snuck in a highly technocratic society superior to our own somewhere along the boring billy? 🤖 and i do apologize for asking that, but someone had to -- i'm taking it for the viewer team here.
"Silurians". It's a great question because, unlike lots of other biological traits that evolved many times (convergent evolution), human-level intelligence and technology only seems to have evolved once. Unless, of course, there is a layer of nano plastics somewhere in Earth's geological strata that geochemists have overlooked. There was no chance it could happen until complex life arose about half a billion years ago, and there won't be any chance after another half billion years when the oceans boil off. So there's maybe a billion year technology window for a G-type star and Earth-like planet.
I watched this largely because I've been watching videos about potential extraterrestrial life. Particularly, if/when life does emerge on other planets, how likely is it to progress from very simple forms to more complex forms? It seems a large part of that is what happened during this "boring billion" period, which, to me, makes it non-boring. Thanks!
Hey thank you for all your great vids! You are helping me write my epic poem! Question: Is the boring billion possibly a result from the mass extinction? Just like how organisms create a loop with earth, maybe 90% death rate stopped rapid change. Would love to know your thoughts!
Eukaryotic cells. Multicellular organisms. Evolution of sex. These are probably the most important things to happen to life making the boring billion the most interesting time in earth's history.
This is probably my absolute favorite of all your vids so far. I've become convinced that, while *simple* life began very, very early on Earth (just last summer a paper was published in the journal *Astrobiology* that reported long RNAs can polymerize on basaltic glass under prebiotic conditions), *complex life* like animals may require plate tectonics (which was probably needed for the NOE to occur). And if that's right, it means that when we look at Earth-like exoplanets we want to know whether they could have plate tectonics. Most of these Earth-like exoplanets are super-Earths, so that raises the question: what happens to mantle convection when you make Earth's radius bigger? The literature I've looked at has every answer from "Super-Earths never have plate tectonics, they just have stagnant lids" all the way to "Every super-Earth has plate tectonics, if it has an ocean". In other words, there is no consensus I can find. So I've been trying to get a geodynamics simulator called ASPECT to run on my laptop so I can explore this question further by making models of mantle convection with different planetary radii. But my laptop is one of Apple's newer ones that isn't Intel-based, and ASPECT was developed on Intel machines. But, hey, I'm a computer scientist by profession, so maybe I can get it to work 🙂?... But, no luck so far :( :( My suspicion is that most super-Earths may not have plate tectonics -- which could make complex life kind of rare in the galaxy. But I'm open to evidence to the contrary. If anyone here is interested in the "Fermi paradox", this might be a solution to it: rar(ish) plate tectonics. BTW, I really like how much information you packed into this video!
Can you elaborate on why your opinion is that super-earths wouldn't have plate tectonics? In my own exo-planetary reading I'd come to the conclusion that (hydrated) super-earths would have stronger tectonic activity but less volcanism, and I'd appreciate a more dedicated conclusion.
@@TlalocTemporal Plate tectonics requires brittle deformation of the lithosphere, and a super-earth has more internal heat which could make the lithosphere too ductile.
@@ellenmcgowen -- Too ductile, interesting. Would that not solve itself over time, simply pushing the habitable window farther down the timeline? Assuming it doesn't outlive the host star, the planet must cool down at some point, or would this crust be too ductile all the way down to forming a solid shell? Carbonaceous worlds must behave differently with their carbide, steel, and diamond crusts, but would that help or hinder? Hycean worlds would have different chemistry still, but again, no one has done the geochemistry to tell! Ahhh, so many questions!
@@TlalocTemporal Oceanic lithosphere cooling and becoming brittle enough to subduct might have played a role in the breakup of Rhodinia, so Earth's own "habitable window" for complex life may not have begun until ~.75 Ga. For a super-earth it might happen eventually but just take longer as you suggest. This is the sort of question I was hoping to model but the geodynamics models I looked at seem to require too many unknown constraints to apply them to exoplanets usefully. Also with the James Webb TRAPPIST-1 system data trickling out, we should get observational constraints on super-earth habitability, so I decided just to wait for that data. Carbon planets aren't expected to have water hydrospheres because all the oxygen and hydrogen would react with the crust and become bound. It's been speculated that they might have hydrocarbon hydrospheres like Titan. If there is life in such a place it wouldn't be life "as we know it". Hycean worlds at least have water oceans, and additional JWST observation time has been scheduled to try to pin down the dimethyl sulfide detection at K2-18 b.
We might add another Great Filter, explaining the the fact that our galaxy hasn't been paved over by now (so to speak) by advanced civilizations -- you need a "boring billion" to get a proliferation of macro-life animal analogues. Maybe there are a couple-few hundred multi-billion-year old biospheres in our galaxy, but none of them had such a long stable period.
Oh fascinating video with a whole channel to dive into*when I have time) love to see someone active in the field discussing all the cool nuances and discoveries in the literature that rarely make it to the general public, especially the fascinating and grossly underrepresented/discussed multidisciplinary aspects. Yeah the conditions of this time are fascinating and insightful in the ways they are challenging our preconceptions And after all before you can really look for life elsewhere in the universe you really should have some understanding how life on Earth has developed in lockstep with tectonics and the Sun. The other kinds of anaerobic photosynthesis really get grossly neglected as there seems to not only have been heterogeneity in ocean conditions in this period of time but what you might almost term an revolutionary flux competition between Euxinic Ferruginous and Oxic environments and the life that lives there and helps perpetuate those conditions. One major factor that ought to be discussed more in this context is the amount of energy it takes to extract the molecular/atomic forms of hydrogen for carbon fixation since this quite likely serves as the single biggest handicap for aerobic life. After all the amount of energy needed at minimum to strip hydrogen electrons and all away from oxygen is significantly higher than what is needed to strip hydrogen from hydrogen sulfide, methane or by converting dissolved hydrogen ions(protons) into free hydrogen using dissolved ions as electron donors. In quantum mechanics the work by Albert Einstein on the photoelectric effect tells us that there is an absolute minimum energy which is needed per photon to jump energy eigenstates and thus in this case perform certain reactions needed to fix carbon. It is because of this reason that the blue portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is the lowest energy photons which can directly be used by aerobic photosynthesis with no chemosynthetic substitutes being possible because there aren't any readily available chemical reactions which can perform this. Note that cyanobacteria and their descendants have found a way to absorb 3 "red" photons to convert effectively them into a "blue" thus increasing the amount of usable light and consequentially causing the only visible light colors that go unused to be green hence why the familiar forms of chlorophyll are green. This still requires at least visible light and thus the original point still stands. Other forms of photosynthesis have much lower minimum energy requirements reaching down to in some cases ~1000 nm wavelengths. This means they can perform photosynthesis in deeper waters than are required by aerobic life. Of course the flipside is that their reaction products result in far less accessible energy for metabolism since more energy is needed to be invested into performing the reaction as the reactants have less electronegativity. This is what makes oxygen so good for respiration but it comes at a cost for the carbon fixation direction. From what I have been able to read these photosynthetic microbes particularly the ones using metal ions are still quite abundant even if they have had to swap out the use of iron for other metal cations which have forms stable in oxidized environments due to this clever adaptation they can access a best of both worlds approach relying on anaerobic photosynthesis (or in some cases only prototrophy) and aerobic respiration. Looking in the literature there was even a report from the 1980's documenting a species of copepod collected from the mid water depths oxygen minimum zone in the Caribbean which incorporated some of these anaerobic microbes into its tissues so there is fascinating albeit under studied life down there. The big point is that in open ocean far from land where slow passive upwards diffusion of nutrients is the main source of nutrients in the open water column this means anaerobic phototrophs performing carbon fixation can easily outcompete their aerobic counterparts by depleting the water column of scarce nutrients from the water. www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10872-z#citeas As a consequence like you said the anaerobic metabolism and primary production can shut down its aerobic counterpart. Without some nutrient saturation or waters which have sunlit bottoms this is kind of a hard filter on aerobic proliferation. Its in this picture that I have come to suspect that the great supercontinent has had an underappreciated role in this whole picture which has some support based on the phylogenetic study of known extant cyanobacteria or cyanobacteria derived organelles which suggest they had limited if any tolerance for salinity particularly in the case of the line which chloroplasts appear to descend from for shallower more continental(freshwater) forms. As a potentially related bit of information the metagenomic surveys of continental waterways has identified new Asgard archaea which appear to be more closely related to Eukaryotes than the early examples we identified in the deep sea and recently cultured in 2020. That alone wouldn't mean much but together suggests that Eukaryotes or at least the endosymbiosis events associated with them likely happened on or adjacent to Columbia/Nuna. As for a geological factor which might be at play I have found the work related to mantle hydration particularly interesting especially the temperature dependence on the amount and structure of hydrated minerals that can form within the Mantle. There is suspiciously strong alignment between the timings of the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event and the cooling of the mantle enough to permit mobile upwelling hydrous mantle plumes to arise. In particular the chemistry of the Franklin Large Igneous Province which is associated with the break up of Rodinia and the onset of the Cryogenian glaciations has the sediment enrichment consistent with a hydrous source which notably includes phosphorus. www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43103-y#citeas That combined with some of the ancient oxygen isotope studies which were used to assess the air to water based contributions to chemical weathering of rocks from 3 billion years ago also could be part of the story as if all that water in the mantle was once in the oceans then Earth very well could have been a total water world which would necessarily limit aerobic primary production until the ocean depths became shallow enough for aerobic photosynthesis to become ecologically viable. The newer Moon formation models which include a much more violent and dynamic volatilization of both Theia and the proto Earth and recoalescence as a system of fluid bodies could very well support this since there would have been so much water and heat that you would have supercritical water thus completely skipping the need for a discrete phase transition. Earth would just have emerged out of the collision a water world well before the first solid crust could have started to form. Given that life has been found living in hydrothermal systems on the deep sea where supercritical water exists I have to wonder if this might have even created the conditions for abiogenesis but I'm digressing here. And as for another thing which was probably important that occurred in the boring billion there is some fascinating stuff related to links between the Nucleolus and the Nucleo-Cytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses(NCLDV) which suggests that the structure likely evolved as a viral replication factory the complexes viruses form as part of the evolutionary arms race between prokaryotes and viruses. The viral Eukaryogenesis hypothesis has many forms and variations but thus far its the only model which can explain how the decoupling of transcription and translation could have occurred. My suspicion is that because continental waters are vulnerable to isolation that means any viruses which can persist in that environment must adapt to a limited reservoir of hosts which may have forced viruses to be more generalists and thus get bigger and incorporate more of their hosts genetic machinery into their structure as well as preserve their host reservoir, a.k.a. become less deadly else they risk going extinct. Given enough time under those selective pressures could have led to total codependence. Given that the cultured Asgard Archaea has a very unequal symbiosis with smaller prokaryotes where it uses unusual tentacle like appendages to snare onto the other smaller prokaryotes which it can metabolically influence using stolen genes to support its own growth, I wouldn't be surprised if the decoupling of transcription from translation was the critical element missing for endosymbiosis to occur. Will be hard to test here's hoping they culture these newer Asgard archaea soon. The first ones took over a decade due to the slow growth rate of archaea. They probably aren't prefect analogs since as far as I am aware cellulose and Lignin probably didn't exist in their familiar forms some 2 billion years ago but there is a lot of interesting stuff out there in this whole area.
So, I wonder what was going on between the sun and the earth at the BB time? There could have been cloud gas or lots of "stuff" in between the sun and the earth. Instead of calling it the boring billion I would call it something like the "atmosphere accumulation" period.
The days got longer and the moon moved away. Life adepted to this, i dont remeber exactly but there were mats (?) that were purple at night and white at day. Maybe this is also reason for some important changes in microbiology.
I am somewhat sad that the theorized Gaboniota, which are thought to have evolved 2.1 billion years ago, seem somewhat elusive right now... It would fit the Oxydation event cycle, because at the time, Oxygen levels in the atmosphere for the first time rose above 10% (and fell again, creating the Banded Iron formations).
In case others needed to look up "Gaboniota" as I did From Wikipedia: The Francevillian biota (also known as Gabon macrofossils or Gabonionta) is a group of 2.1-billion-year-old Palaeoproterozoic, macroscopic organisms known from fossils found in Gabon in the Palaeoproterozoic Francevillian B Formation, a black shale province. The fossils are postulated to be evidence of the earliest form of multicellular life.[1] They were discovered by an international team led by the Moroccan-French geologist Abderrazak El Albani, of the University of Poitiers, France. While they have yet to be assigned to a formal taxonomic position, they have been informally and collectively referred to as the "Gabonionta" by the Natural History Museum Vienna in 2014.[2]
From what I can gather (you are too clever for my ancient brain), while there are many interconnected factors, the ultimate key to the stability of the BB was the cooling of the mantle, resulting in low tectonic activity ...?
Yea, since making this video, I've tried to read up a little bit more on precambrian tectonics, and I agree, I think that is one of the most significant factors because tectonics is often what kicks off major climatic and environmental changes. However, the more I read about precambrian tectonics the more I see that we have multiple ideas and we still don't have it nailed down completely, so it'd be interesting to see if our idea of the boring billion changes the further we understand ancient tectonic styles! :D
I’m disappointed in the lack of discussion of fossils of early eukaryotes like the red alga Bangiomorpha pubescens (1.2 Gya) and the green alga Proterocladus antiquus (1 Gya). Also of acritarchs, likely some one-called eukaryotes, though it’s hard to say much more. With fossils like those, the Boring Billion was not quite as boring.
Early on, I think during the GOE, there are some strange macrofossils called the Francevillian biota. They're bigger than acritarchs. It's as if life was ready to become complex that early if the O2 levels had supported it, but then O2 dropped back down during the Boring Billion. I think geology and ocean chemistry, not biology, was the limiting factor for complex life.
Bangiomorpha was named from its close resemblance to present-day Bangiaceae, which include Pyropa, the nori alga. These two algae indicate that the endosymbiosis of a cyanobacterium happened earlier in the Boring Billion, and maybe even near the end of the Great Oxidation Event. An upper limit can be found from the evolution of thylakoids in cyanobacteria, what plastids also have. That happened not long before the GOE, as did cyanobacterium multicellularity. Much of the early evolution of cyanobacteria was early in the BB, however, as was much of the early evolution of eukaryotes.
I would also have liked mention of our ancestors back then. Late in the BB, they were choanoflagellates (collar flagellates), and some time in the BB, their ancestors started growing those collars around their (single) flagella. I mention single because some protists have two, looking alike in some organisms, like some green algae, and looking different in some others (heterokonts). Some of them are covered with these structures: the ciliates.
Geological scale, it is called. Something beyond our ordinary perception. Much, much imagination required? Here's the series of videos which would help you have a great time intellectually! Accessible, no need to worry about!
When I was 18 or 19 I thought Geology was linked to rock only, but now I see it's incredible it's linked to life. 😮 I decide to study industrial engineering, but almost all sciences are very important for me.
@@GEOGIRL That was great seeing all parts (chem, tectonics, biology, etc) tied together. Did all the larger elements (P, Mo, Ca) come from land? Was that just from weathering of rock? I never knew Mo was so important! Where’d it come from?
@@FromTheNard Yep exactly, they come from land! From the rocks, that's why the great oxidation event was so important for SRB (sulfate reducing bacteria) because it wasn't until oxidative weathering of continental rocks that sulfate was transported to the oceans in abundance, same with molybdate (a Mo-O compound), which fueled N-fixation. The NOE was also really important as it's thought that this event really kick started major Ca, phosphate, and carbonate transport to the oceans which allowed animals to easily make skeletons of either Ca phosphate or Ca carbonate. Oxidative weathering was the driver of so much evolution and radiation! ;D
So the big question seems to be what spurred eukaryotes to suddenly form into early animals around about 550 million years ago (the Cambrian explosion that is).
Animals appeared 0.9-0.7 Ba (billion years ago). Cambrian explosion is another funny name like boring billion. This "explosion" was possible because of minerals in their external skeletons. Read about Ediacaran fauna. Read about opisthokonts (1.3 Ba).
Thanks for the very interesting discussion, not boring in the least. I believe that the warm stable time in the Mid Proterozoic was essential for gradual evolution from prokaryotic life to eukaryotes. It implies that life needs a very long, stable period to evolve into animals. Maybe this explains the Fermi Paradox. We may have a universe of Cyanobacteria, but no Mos Eisley Cantinas. 👽
The kind of weasely way you talk about the time periods involved is just stronger supporting the fact that the periodization of the Precambrian is just plain not done yet. The ICS chart isn't it, or lit, or good, but then that's kinda the whole issue is that the jury is still out on so much of this. While overall we can view the boring billion as relatively stable, there is some evidence for types of variation within it, you pointed out some here, and it's likely and I personally believe that even though it was a very stable period comparitively, our perception of it is heavily biased towards the data we have. For perspective, you talked about the Grenville orogeny causing a phanerozoic-like change in oxygen levels, but we don't talk about the phanerozoic as if it's "boring," and that's been going on for over 500 million years. Of course we don't, right? Because it has animals, like dinosaurs and trilobites and people, those things aren't boring. But what do we really know about Mesoproterozoic life? We got some acritarchs, some things that might be eukaryotes, some things that probably are, chemical evidence of stem groups, etc., but this stuff is difficult to interpret and understand. So I don't think that the actual events of that time were boring, I don't think Earthlings will sit still even under the most stable of circumstances and over the course of that time there may have been lots of radiation events and whole bizarre clades of organisms we have no remnants of today, and there were probably geologic events both local and world wide which we either just haven't yet gotten evidence for or do and maybe just haven't seen it for what it is yet. That said, until we have a large enough body of evidence to understand what was really going on back then, it... it's gonna look kinda boring from where we're standing. But also? Compared to the GOE, *EVERYTHING* is boring, so that is in no way a fair comparison. To take it back to periodization for a bit, the 2021 proposal kind of took this attitude to not fix what isn't broken (even though it's very much broken) and kept the current ICS Mesoproterozoic periods in place, chronometric boundaries and all. It's bad, it's a bad idea that doesn't work and isn't good... but at the same time, their reasoning is sound. Maybe we don't need four periods, maybe we do, whatever, but it's probably better to assume that there's more to the story than we know, than to assume a lack of evidence implies an evidence of absence. Kind of a thing. You know what I mean. I just can't believe the boring billion was actually boring, we just haven't fully figured out what the most exciting parts are yet. But until we do? Yeah it just... it sounds kinda boring I'ma be honest.
I agree. It's a mysterious period. I wonder if there were loads more microorganisms than there are now. On account of nobody eating them but other microorganisms. Or maybe that's a stupid idea lol I mean there weren't any filter-feeders back then. That started in the Ediacaran. So I wonder if that had an impact on their numbers then compared to now. It's a difficult timescale to imagine without much change. You can't imagine human society surviving for a billions years without going through dramatic upheaval.
I am sure it did heavily impact their numbers once larger animals and filter feeders evolved in the Ediacaran. I think the way I've most often heard it explained is that it's not that the Precambrian supported a crazy high amount of microorganisms, but rather that the post-Cambrian has caused their numbers to decrease because once Ediacaran fauna appeared and all other large complex life snowballed from that until today, the microbes were largely displaced and therefore had no choice but to decline in numbers to make room for the rest of life. A similar thing happened to stromatolites built by cyanobacteria. These cyanobacterial mats require warm, calm, shallow water, which is now occupied by other benthic animals, so they were displaced and dwindled in numbers. Thank goodness there are still some corners of the world we can find them though because they are so cool!! ;D
Bacteria and archaea have probably always been preyed upon by viruses. Of course viruses will never leave fossil traces but we can probably see ancient evidence of the biological ways prokaryotes defended themselves against viruses in mechanisms like endonucleases.
@@GEOGIRL Thank you for your answer, Rachel 😊 Must take up a lot of your time to make all of these videos and reply to viewers. It's nice to see someone really love what they study and what they do for a loving.
So, just my two cents. I think the Boring Billion is actually quite descriptive of the era as tectonic activity was low, biodiversity was low. We probably don't have a good count of how many prokaryotic and eukaryotic species actually existed at the time but from the way you are describing it there couldn't have been very many, especially considering the stable conditions prevailing during the era.
Because this video is kind of terminology heavy and I am not sure I adequately defined everything, here is a list of definitions to guide you if there is a term you don't know! ->
Definition of jargon:
Prokaryotes: Simple, non-organelle containing cells (bacteria & archaea).
Eukaryotes: Complex, organelle containing cells (can be unicellular, like protists, or multicellular, like animals).
Protists: Single-celled eukaryotes (such as algae, foraminifera, & radiolarians).
Proterozoic: Eon that ranges from 2.5 billion years ago to ~540 million years ago (between the Archean Eon & Cambrian period).
Anoxic: Lack of molecular oxygen (O2).
Oxic: Abundant O2.
Proliferation: Rise in abundance & diversification.
Tectonic rifting: Separation of tectonic plates (in this case: supercontinent break up).
Subduction: Pull of an oceanic tectonic plate under another oceanic or continental plate.
PAL O2: Present-day atmospheric levels of molecular oxygen.
GOE: Great Oxidation Event (began around 2.4 billion years ago).
NOE: Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event (began around 800 million years ago).
SRB: Sulfate-reducing bacteria (bacteria that ‘eat’ sulfate & produce sulfide).
Euxinic: Anoxic & sulfide-rich.
Chemocline: Transition in water column from upper well-oxygenated water to lower poorly-oxygenated water.
Primary productivity: Production of organic food for life by autotrophs (organisms that use light and inorganic compounds (such as water and CO2) to produce organic carbon that feeds life below them)- At this time, major primary producers were cyanobacteria & algae. Anoxygenic photosynthesis: photosynthesis that produces non-oxygen products (such as sulfur compounds).
“Boring”: Up to your interpretation ;)
Thanks! May I recommend you pin this comment?
Have a nice day🖖
@@a.randomjack6661 Thanks for noticing it wasn't pinned, I pinned it earlier, but sometimes it doesn't stay pinned for some reason. Anyway, hopefully this time is sticks :)
Hope you have a nice day too! ;)
Perhaps, one-click glossary-like option somewhere on the screen, or floating, with a cute icon would be nice.
I know what an isotop is.. MS in health sci
Thanks for reply. Where are the .8 billion year old rocks? I live outside Albany NY
Thatcher Mt. Escarpment . Old ancient shallow sea the ancient Great lake. I collect many fosss there.
Very well synthesized.
Most of the general public is only familiar with Pangea, so it's great to see a video covering the supercontinents that came before.
Suck you considering the CMV being flat
Great to see Rodinia finally getting some props.
😳 Whatever you do, don't tell the Americans where Laurentia is!!!
One thing I like about your videos is how dense they are in information. These are the sorts of videos you have to watch more than once to capture everything. As far as whether I think the boring billion was really boring, the video on it was certainly not boring, so I'm going to go with not.
Even the most interesting video would get boring if that's all you had to watch for a billion years 😂
@@Seafaring-protochordate That is probably true.
I legit take notes
I love the connection between geology and biology. I never realised eukaryotes have been around for so long.
Yes, of all the connections between different science fields, geobiology is my absolute favorite! :D
I agree, it was only recently that I became aware how dramatically life has affected the chemistry of the planet. Truly fascinating, life does not just exist on a planet it shapes it.
No geologic age is boring when Geo Girl discusses it. 😊
Simp
The ediacaran is so fascinating. There has been lots of fossil discoveries recently around the White Sea in Russia and other locations. Some of the animals are just weird. Others show early examples of muscle fibers, burrowing behavior, etc.
Couldn't agree more! The precambrian in general is my favorite time in Earth's history, in part because of the weird organisms that dominated this time, but also because there are still so many mysteries that we don't understand yet about that time and we get to keep learning new things about it ;D
It's fascinating how life evolved from mostly unicellur creatures to creatures of 5 cm to a meter length and great complexity during that time.
Yes the Ediacaran kinda broke my creationism theory occuring with the Cambrian 🙄
It fucks me up that priapulida still exist
Actual science in a TH-cam video. So refreshing. ❤
It seemed to me that the “boring billion” was perpetuated to speed up historical geology. Once you start to unravel it, it becomes more interesting.
As I understand it, the lower sulfuric ocean layers made the oceans black and might have aided in keeping the climate warmer.
The mountains visible from my backyard expose rocks from the bb, some of the oldest rock in NM.
Keep up your good work!
Wow, black oceans. Amazing!
Well, listening to you talk about it for 28 minutes wasn't boring, but I'm kind of glad I didn't have to sit through the whole billion years in real time.
Hahaha yea, me too ;)
It may have been a seemingly boring time in earths geologic history. But you made it interesting and challenging to understand. I mean a good challenging. Thank you!
😓 that was a heavy lesson! Boring or not, a billion years worth of learning is a hefty sum. And I would use the word 'calm' to describe it myself, especially comparing it to it's own bookcaps!
Interestingly I learned this week after the monthly meeting of the Geological Society of Finland that there is likely a large sequence of sedimentary rock dating to close to the middle of the Boring Billion (approximately 1,3 Ga) in the bottom of the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. Problem is, nobody as far as I know has ever done a drill core of it (we know it's there because geophysical methods can detect a large rift-zone down there which seems to be an underwater continuation of the rift associated with the ~1,3 Ga Satakunta sandstone formation). I hope somebody will eventually study it, as it might tell us somethign more about the depositional environment at the time which we currently know very little of (the sedimentary sequence is estimated to be about 400 m thick so it would cover a long period of time. A 200 m long drill core has been recovered from another rift in the sea between Sweden and Finland, and seems to show cyclical changes between marine and fluvial environment, but I don't recall the age of that one).
This was fantastic! It's great to learn how much connected planetology, geology, chemistry and biology is and how it is pieced all together to give a very good, convincing picture of times that were ""a billion years ago"".
Another excellent video, packed with information (I will need to watch again to make sure I caught it all)
Keep it up.
I am slowly catching up on your older clips, I am loving it all although some of the audio on your older videos left a little to be desired. Content was still awesome.
Thank you! ;D
You're really great at this. I'm glad someone with your talent is going into this field. My grandmother was a geologist. My brother tried his hand at it and ended up a boat builder. I really enjoy your lessons. I shied away from geology myself, but you make me doubt my choice.
Oh wow, a boat builder! What a switch haha. Well I am so glad you enjoy my lessons! It's never too late to come back to geology, it will always be here for you ;)
You're the best. Thank you 💕
Thank you! Also, love your username ;D
Brilliant, as usual. The pauses in tectonic activity linked to chemistry climate and life is fascinating. The earliest eukaryotes were probably simpler given the intricacy of the internal organisation. When did all the organelles get in place? Chloroplasts were maybe the last...?
You got me thinking...
Thanks for the Upload!
Fantastic characterization of a period I didn't know much about previously! Life is all about the avaliable conditions, so it makes sense that we don't see the evolution of animals for such a long time corresponding to the stable conditions such as oxygen. Really puts into perspective what humans are capable of now as the first social being on earth, being able to change the conditions to suit our independent and creative interests.
Listening to this video I heard over and over again how microbial life modified the earth's environment. As a gas in the earth's atmosphere increased over time life adapted to use the increase in "food" source and they caused an increase in concentration of their waste product. As we change the atmosphere I wonder how microbial life will use the modified environment to create noticeable beneficial or negative changes.
No time period can be called "boring". One of these days, we'll be able to determine when the first primitive sponges developed in the Neoproterozic.
Just for fun, I pulled out my (old as dirt) 200 level Historical Geology Textbook and found that my memory was correct. There were no subdivisions in the entire precambrian era mentioned, at all. This was back in the 60's. I can't remember if divisions were discussed in later classes.
Another "new" development that I never learned about, is Anoxygenic phototrophs in the Proterozoic.
It just made me wonder if all of the life on an exoplanet, could develop, by using just H2S?
Thank you.
Yes, there are a lot of hypotheses regarding the potential life on other planets and moons and some of them suggest that S-based life would be the primary type of life on some worlds without oxygen, such as in Europa's ocean, so it's possible!
This video was super boring, I mean extra boring, no no, I mean outside of boring. This video was interesting.
GEO is your 'training'.
.
TEACHER and COMMUNICATOR are your 'talents'.
.
I really enjoyed the last 27 minutes.
Thank you so much! ;D I absolutely love teaching so this makes me very happy :)
Thank you very much - I didn't even know that unoxic photosythesis really does exist!
GEO GIRL you did an excellent describing this time period , very science based.
I wonder if you would consider doing a video debunking young earth geologists arguments. Especially their claims against Radiometric dating ?
Thank you!
Currently, the answer is no to debating or debunking anyone because I just feel it gives them more of a voice than they deserve, and it's also very difficult to argue with someone when one side is using real data and the other is only using conjecture, faith, and fake or disproved data... I just feel as though it's futile because they are no going to change their opinion because of anything I say because I will just say the same things as all the other scientists who told them before lol, so I just don't feel like I should give that argument the time of day. My purpose on TH-cam is to educate those who want to learn more about Earth either to pass a class or just for fun, but it's not to debate people who will never agree with me. Hope you understand ;)
@@GEOGIRL I agree, debunking religion-based anti-science is just letting them set the agenda for science education, something they have not earned.
Not boring as my life 🙂
I performed sub par on my school science results. Though I am and have always been facinated by Earth History and Evolutionary Biology (Richard Dawkins Books) its 3am lol. This video is very informative, thank you.
Yay! My favourite billion! (OK, I'll confess! I'm a nerd.) UPDATE: Yes it was boring! It was so boring that we should erect a new eon called "the Boringian eon".
Wow, these videos are excellent and go into much more detail than the average youtube fare! Thank you, GEO Girl. More stuff like this is needed.
Wow, thank you so much! You are too kind! I am so glad you enjoy my videos and appreciate the amount of info I stuff into them haha ;) Thanks again :)
@@GEOGIRL You're welcome! I've been binging your videos and showing them to friends who really liked them!
I admit I hated giving TH-cam 30% of this tip. If you haven't considered it yet - I can recommend ko-fi as a "tip jar".
@@thygrrr I actually have a place on my website where you can donate if you want to forgo the 30% donation to TH-cam haha ;) you've given more than enough, but if you do want to give more here's the link: www.geogirlscience.com/support
That's my bad for not advertising that better!
Thank you again! :)
Yup. It's not monotone, it's not dull, she has a steady rhythm, it's not mind numbingly simple yet not too complicated...and her microphone doesn't make her sound like a Spirit airlines pilot that dropped his mic in his whiskey
Boring no, provocative yes. Nice job!!
Thank you for all these great videos GEO GIRL!!!
Of course! So glad you enjoy them ;D
Geo Girl csn make a billion videos and never be boring
🎉😊
I know all about Boring, I live in Norfolk, England. That really qualifies as boring.
...or we clicked on this video because we're one of your 25.5k subscribers who watches pretty much every video of yours. :P
I suppose that is an okay reason as well ;) haha Thank you!!
Showing this to my plants to acknowledge their photosynthetic superiority
Hahaha I hope they enjoy it ;)
@@GEOGIRL My plants reciprocate the recognition and implored me to subscribe. PBS Eons doesn't quite fill their ego
The topic may be about a boring event, but your presentation, as always, was far from boring. Thank you for some more quite interesting education.
Thank you! ;D
I would suggest that it's likely that part of the "boring" wasn't lack of complex life,
but lack of complex life of the kind that would easily leave fossil traces.
The Cambrian Explosion isn't so much life coming out of nowhere,
as life developing hard parts that start leaving more fossils,
and it turning out that lots of complex life already existed.
We only have a few examples of Ediacaran life not because it wasn't there,
but because it didn't leave much of a record.
Add to this the possibility that complex life first evolved on a tiny scale,
inside the microbial mat on damp land, coastlines, and water surfaces...once again leaving little evidence...
and things weren't boring, just undocumented.
There's a similar problem with anthropologists thinking that organized humanity sprang up rather suddenly after the last ice age.
But that involved a three hundred foot rise in sea levels, so that any earlier organized cultures are now out on coastal sea floors.
In the context of the Fermi Paradox, in Rare Earth scenarios, Earth's "boring billion" could be considered a potential Great or Medium Filter. If it is generally normal for Earth-like planets with a prokaryotic microbial biosphere to entire a boring billion equivalent (most young terrestrial planets should, after all, be expected to share features like a fairly warm mantle, and a fainter young sun) soon after the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis, rather than immediately transition to being an oxygenated world, and the events that trigger the end of said boring billion period are either stochastically unlikely, or need a significant time period of geological evolution of the planet before they can get going, then perhaps we may end up finding lots of inhabited planets in the galaxy with prevailing conditions analogous to Earth during the Boring Billion, populated by microbes up to eukaryotic grade, but with complex mullticellular lifeforms mostly absent.
It would definitely been boring to actually be there. What you gonna do? Sit on a beach and watch the tide go in and out for a billion years ?
It is beautiful dream catcher. (The wife here: he wanted me to explain that he spotted the dream catcher on the wall behind you and ran out of the words he needed.)
Thank you so much! I've always loved dream catchers :)
Rachel I admire her beauty and her intelligence 🥰🥰🥰🤩🤩😍😍😍😍❤️
Thank you so much! :)
Naturally when you mention molybdenum as necessary for early life forms to function, I think of all the molybdenite occurrences in the New England area, and their associations. Sanford, ME with vesuvianite, Franconia, NH with magnetite and epidote, Lyme, NH with powellite and bismuthenite. Westmoreland, NH with apatite, Shrewsbury, VT with powellite. I have to wonder we're any of these associations related to the fixing of nitrogen or other processes at one time?
The Boring Billion wasnt boring to anyone with a microscope 🔬. Bacteria and archea are cool, but they're not much fun to watch compared to the busy, bustling, wiggly world of protists. Our tiny eukaryotic friends are ecosystems of their own with every niche and lifestyle you could imagine-- micro sized.
Yes! Microbes don't get enough credit, they are so incredible! The pure diverisity in metabolisms is amazing compared to animals that pretty much only do the one lol
@@GEOGIRL My compost pile LOVES microbes :)
@@barbaradurfee645 So does the pond!
@@GEOGIRL Also, multicellular red algae (Rhodophyta) appeared way before 1 Ba. Also other eukaryotic algae developed multicellularity, but latter that red algae.
Fungal multicellularity were developing in parallel to metazoan multicellularity.
Yep. You explained it pretty well. Just one thing. Most non Precambrian geologists who don't focus on life make the same claim about tectonics. It's in no way a ding on you.
Referring to a whole billion years as boring needs to be restricted to life and maybe the atmosphere. I don't know. I'm a structural geologist/geochronologist who dabbles in stratigraphy. I don't touch life.
Actually, tectonically the earth was far from quiet. Laurentia alone had at least a dozen major events. Here's a list of a few. I hope I spelled everything right.
Penokean Orogeny
Yavapi Orogeny
Baraboo interval
Wolf River Event
Mazatzal Orogeny
Picuris Orogeny
Ozark Interbal
Belt-Purcell sediments
Midcontinent Rift
Grenville Orogeny
The assembly and breakup of Nuna. As well as the assembly and breakup of Rodinia.
Ahh, that is crazy! Thank you so much for all this information! I was so surprised when reading my tectonics references that it was 'relatively quiet' but I didn't realize all these orogenies were going on. Thanks for bringing this to light!
@@GEOGIRL Condie rants about it the same way I do. I love your videos. Keep them coming!
Thank you. This was informative.
Not boring to me! I think Eukaryotes spent that time evolving from living a completely unicellular existence into living within colonies of cooperative organisms. Those would go on to evolve specialized members performing specific tasks for the collective. And chief among those, and arguably the most significant biological innovation in all of Life's 3.8 billion-year history, were Gametes, whose function was to generate novel sets of genetic information. With that, sexual reproduction began.
And any period that hosts the advent of SEX, I cannot call 'boring'.
Lol I love this criteria for what counts as boring, and I agree 100% that it was not boring at all! ;D
So, non-Oxygen single cells can't come together to make mulit-cellular life? Well, they made those bacterial mats which has always been a favorite of mine(I always like to tell people that Martians probably never got much more interesting than the Stromatolite.
Well, life conquered photosynthesis at this time, and did symbiosis. These are certainly only two things in a pretty long time. It's certainly a very preliminary period compared to the multi-cellular period.
Breakups are hard, especially for Rodina.
any chance the silarians snuck in a highly technocratic society superior to our own somewhere along the boring billy? 🤖
and i do apologize for asking that, but someone had to -- i'm taking it for the viewer team here.
"Silurians". It's a great question because, unlike lots of other biological traits that evolved many times (convergent evolution), human-level intelligence and technology only seems to have evolved once. Unless, of course, there is a layer of nano plastics somewhere in Earth's geological strata that geochemists have overlooked. There was no chance it could happen until complex life arose about half a billion years ago, and there won't be any chance after another half billion years when the oceans boil off. So there's maybe a billion year technology window for a G-type star and Earth-like planet.
Thankyouforagreatvideoiddidlikedthisalot
I watched this largely because I've been watching videos about potential extraterrestrial life. Particularly, if/when life does emerge on other planets, how likely is it to progress from very simple forms to more complex forms? It seems a large part of that is what happened during this "boring billion" period, which, to me, makes it non-boring. Thanks!
Slow but sure gets it done, it's the long game.
Thanks young geo scientists your presentation is excellent
Thank you! ;)
Hey thank you for all your great vids! You are helping me write my epic poem!
Question: Is the boring billion possibly a result from the mass extinction? Just like how organisms create a loop with earth, maybe 90% death rate stopped rapid change. Would love to know your thoughts!
Eukaryotic cells. Multicellular organisms. Evolution of sex. These are probably the most important things to happen to life making the boring billion the most interesting time in earth's history.
This is probably my absolute favorite of all your vids so far. I've become convinced that, while *simple* life began very, very early on Earth (just last summer a paper was published in the journal *Astrobiology* that reported long RNAs can polymerize on basaltic glass under prebiotic conditions), *complex life* like animals may require plate tectonics (which was probably needed for the NOE to occur). And if that's right, it means that when we look at Earth-like exoplanets we want to know whether they could have plate tectonics. Most of these Earth-like exoplanets are super-Earths, so that raises the question: what happens to mantle convection when you make Earth's radius bigger?
The literature I've looked at has every answer from "Super-Earths never have plate tectonics, they just have stagnant lids" all the way to "Every super-Earth has plate tectonics, if it has an ocean". In other words, there is no consensus I can find.
So I've been trying to get a geodynamics simulator called ASPECT to run on my laptop so I can explore this question further by making models of mantle convection with different planetary radii. But my laptop is one of Apple's newer ones that isn't Intel-based, and ASPECT was developed on Intel machines. But, hey, I'm a computer scientist by profession, so maybe I can get it to work 🙂?... But, no luck so far :( :(
My suspicion is that most super-Earths may not have plate tectonics -- which could make complex life kind of rare in the galaxy. But I'm open to evidence to the contrary. If anyone here is interested in the "Fermi paradox", this might be a solution to it: rar(ish) plate tectonics.
BTW, I really like how much information you packed into this video!
Can you elaborate on why your opinion is that super-earths wouldn't have plate tectonics? In my own exo-planetary reading I'd come to the conclusion that (hydrated) super-earths would have stronger tectonic activity but less volcanism, and I'd appreciate a more dedicated conclusion.
@@TlalocTemporal Plate tectonics requires brittle deformation of the lithosphere, and a super-earth has more internal heat which could make the lithosphere too ductile.
@@ellenmcgowen -- Too ductile, interesting. Would that not solve itself over time, simply pushing the habitable window farther down the timeline? Assuming it doesn't outlive the host star, the planet must cool down at some point, or would this crust be too ductile all the way down to forming a solid shell? Carbonaceous worlds must behave differently with their carbide, steel, and diamond crusts, but would that help or hinder? Hycean worlds would have different chemistry still, but again, no one has done the geochemistry to tell! Ahhh, so many questions!
@@TlalocTemporal Oceanic lithosphere cooling and becoming brittle enough to subduct might have played a role in the breakup of Rhodinia, so Earth's own "habitable window" for complex life may not have begun until ~.75 Ga. For a super-earth it might happen eventually but just take longer as you suggest. This is the sort of question I was hoping to model but the geodynamics models I looked at seem to require too many unknown constraints to apply them to exoplanets usefully. Also with the James Webb TRAPPIST-1 system data trickling out, we should get observational constraints on super-earth habitability, so I decided just to wait for that data.
Carbon planets aren't expected to have water hydrospheres because all the oxygen and hydrogen would react with the crust and become bound. It's been speculated that they might have hydrocarbon hydrospheres like Titan. If there is life in such a place it wouldn't be life "as we know it". Hycean worlds at least have water oceans, and additional JWST observation time has been scheduled to try to pin down the dimethyl sulfide detection at K2-18 b.
We might add another Great Filter, explaining the the fact that our galaxy hasn't been paved over by now (so to speak) by advanced civilizations -- you need a "boring billion" to get a proliferation of macro-life animal analogues. Maybe there are a couple-few hundred multi-billion-year old biospheres in our galaxy, but none of them had such a long stable period.
Oh fascinating video with a whole channel to dive into*when I have time) love to see someone active in the field discussing all the cool nuances and discoveries in the literature that rarely make it to the general public, especially the fascinating and grossly underrepresented/discussed multidisciplinary aspects.
Yeah the conditions of this time are fascinating and insightful in the ways they are challenging our preconceptions And after all before you can really look for life elsewhere in the universe you really should have some understanding how life on Earth has developed in lockstep with tectonics and the Sun.
The other kinds of anaerobic photosynthesis really get grossly neglected as there seems to not only have been heterogeneity in ocean conditions in this period of time but what you might almost term an revolutionary flux competition between Euxinic Ferruginous and Oxic environments and the life that lives there and helps perpetuate those conditions.
One major factor that ought to be discussed more in this context is the amount of energy it takes to extract the molecular/atomic forms of hydrogen for carbon fixation since this quite likely serves as the single biggest handicap for aerobic life. After all the amount of energy needed at minimum to strip hydrogen electrons and all away from oxygen is significantly higher than what is needed to strip hydrogen from hydrogen sulfide, methane or by converting dissolved hydrogen ions(protons) into free hydrogen using dissolved ions as electron donors.
In quantum mechanics the work by Albert Einstein on the photoelectric effect tells us that there is an absolute minimum energy which is needed per photon to jump energy eigenstates and thus in this case perform certain reactions needed to fix carbon. It is because of this reason that the blue portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is the lowest energy photons which can directly be used by aerobic photosynthesis with no chemosynthetic substitutes being possible because there aren't any readily available chemical reactions which can perform this.
Note that cyanobacteria and their descendants have found a way to absorb 3 "red" photons to convert effectively them into a "blue" thus increasing the amount of usable light and consequentially causing the only visible light colors that go unused to be green hence why the familiar forms of chlorophyll are green. This still requires at least visible light and thus the original point still stands.
Other forms of photosynthesis have much lower minimum energy requirements reaching down to in some cases ~1000 nm wavelengths. This means they can perform photosynthesis in deeper waters than are required by aerobic life. Of course the flipside is that their reaction products result in far less accessible energy for metabolism since more energy is needed to be invested into performing the reaction as the reactants have less electronegativity.
This is what makes oxygen so good for respiration but it comes at a cost for the carbon fixation direction.
From what I have been able to read these photosynthetic microbes particularly the ones using metal ions are still quite abundant even if they have had to swap out the use of iron for other metal cations which have forms stable in oxidized environments due to this clever adaptation they can access a best of both worlds approach relying on anaerobic photosynthesis (or in some cases only prototrophy) and aerobic respiration. Looking in the literature there was even a report from the 1980's documenting a species of copepod collected from the mid water depths oxygen minimum zone in the Caribbean which incorporated some of these anaerobic microbes into its tissues so there is fascinating albeit under studied life down there.
The big point is that in open ocean far from land where slow passive upwards diffusion of nutrients is the main source of nutrients in the open water column this means anaerobic phototrophs performing carbon fixation can easily outcompete their aerobic counterparts by depleting the water column of scarce nutrients from the water.
www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10872-z#citeas
As a consequence like you said the anaerobic metabolism and primary production can shut down its aerobic counterpart. Without some nutrient saturation or waters which have sunlit bottoms this is kind of a hard filter on aerobic proliferation.
Its in this picture that I have come to suspect that the great supercontinent has had an underappreciated role in this whole picture which has some support based on the phylogenetic study of known extant cyanobacteria or cyanobacteria derived organelles which suggest they had limited if any tolerance for salinity particularly in the case of the line which chloroplasts appear to descend from for shallower more continental(freshwater) forms.
As a potentially related bit of information the metagenomic surveys of continental waterways has identified new Asgard archaea which appear to be more closely related to Eukaryotes than the early examples we identified in the deep sea and recently cultured in 2020. That alone wouldn't mean much but together suggests that Eukaryotes or at least the endosymbiosis events associated with them likely happened on or adjacent to Columbia/Nuna.
As for a geological factor which might be at play I have found the work related to mantle hydration particularly interesting especially the temperature dependence on the amount and structure of hydrated minerals that can form within the Mantle. There is suspiciously strong alignment between the timings of the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event and the cooling of the mantle enough to permit mobile upwelling hydrous mantle plumes to arise. In particular the chemistry of the Franklin Large Igneous Province which is associated with the break up of Rodinia and the onset of the Cryogenian glaciations has the sediment enrichment consistent with a hydrous source which notably includes phosphorus.
www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43103-y#citeas
That combined with some of the ancient oxygen isotope studies which were used to assess the air to water based contributions to chemical weathering of rocks from 3 billion years ago also could be part of the story as if all that water in the mantle was once in the oceans then Earth very well could have been a total water world which would necessarily limit aerobic primary production until the ocean depths became shallow enough for aerobic photosynthesis to become ecologically viable.
The newer Moon formation models which include a much more violent and dynamic volatilization of both Theia and the proto Earth and recoalescence as a system of fluid bodies could very well support this since there would have been so much water and heat that you would have supercritical water thus completely skipping the need for a discrete phase transition. Earth would just have emerged out of the collision a water world well before the first solid crust could have started to form. Given that life has been found living in hydrothermal systems on the deep sea where supercritical water exists I have to wonder if this might have even created the conditions for abiogenesis but I'm digressing here.
And as for another thing which was probably important that occurred in the boring billion there is some fascinating stuff related to links between the Nucleolus and the Nucleo-Cytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses(NCLDV) which suggests that the structure likely evolved as a viral replication factory the complexes viruses form as part of the evolutionary arms race between prokaryotes and viruses. The viral Eukaryogenesis hypothesis has many forms and variations but thus far its the only model which can explain how the decoupling of transcription and translation could have occurred.
My suspicion is that because continental waters are vulnerable to isolation that means any viruses which can persist in that environment must adapt to a limited reservoir of hosts which may have forced viruses to be more generalists and thus get bigger and incorporate more of their hosts genetic machinery into their structure as well as preserve their host reservoir, a.k.a. become less deadly else they risk going extinct.
Given enough time under those selective pressures could have led to total codependence. Given that the cultured Asgard Archaea has a very unequal symbiosis with smaller prokaryotes where it uses unusual tentacle like appendages to snare onto the other smaller prokaryotes which it can metabolically influence using stolen genes to support its own growth, I wouldn't be surprised if the decoupling of transcription from translation was the critical element missing for endosymbiosis to occur. Will be hard to test here's hoping they culture these newer Asgard archaea soon. The first ones took over a decade due to the slow growth rate of archaea. They probably aren't prefect analogs since as far as I am aware cellulose and Lignin probably didn't exist in their familiar forms some 2 billion years ago but there is a lot of interesting stuff out there in this whole area.
WOW! This is some good information. I never learned these details in high school, college or 25+ years subscribing to Scientific American.
So, I wonder what was going on between the sun and the earth at the BB time? There could have been cloud gas or lots of "stuff" in between the sun and the earth. Instead of calling it the boring billion I would call it something like the "atmosphere accumulation" period.
That tectonic stasis is probably part of the reason it's got the "boring" moniker. Tectonic stability means reduced fossilization.
Very nice video...geo girl..✨✨👏
The days got longer and the moon moved away. Life adepted to this, i dont remeber exactly but there were mats (?) that were purple at night and white at day. Maybe this is also reason for some important changes in microbiology.
What Geogirl knows that we mere mortals do not realize is that Molybdenum is the secret to life, the universe and everything.
Geo Girl seems to rattle off her knowledge as if she has completely memorized it. And she has visual aids to go along with it. What the heck?
Anomalacarids have always been one of my favorite ancient sea critters. 😊 Thanks!
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Rachel the Boring Billion stops becoming boring when you present it!
Aw, this made my day, thank you!! ;D So glad to hear that!
Now I understood the weathering brings phophorus to the soil. And rivers carry as well to the oceans. 🤔
I am somewhat sad that the theorized Gaboniota, which are thought to have evolved 2.1 billion years ago, seem somewhat elusive right now... It would fit the Oxydation event cycle, because at the time, Oxygen levels in the atmosphere for the first time rose above 10% (and fell again, creating the Banded Iron formations).
In case others needed to look up "Gaboniota" as I did From Wikipedia: The Francevillian biota (also known as Gabon macrofossils or Gabonionta) is a group of 2.1-billion-year-old Palaeoproterozoic, macroscopic organisms known from fossils found in Gabon in the Palaeoproterozoic Francevillian B Formation, a black shale province. The fossils are postulated to be evidence of the earliest form of multicellular life.[1] They were discovered by an international team led by the Moroccan-French geologist Abderrazak El Albani, of the University of Poitiers, France. While they have yet to be assigned to a formal taxonomic position, they have been informally and collectively referred to as the "Gabonionta" by the Natural History Museum Vienna in 2014.[2]
Excellent, thank you.
From what I can gather (you are too clever for my ancient brain), while there are many interconnected factors, the ultimate key to the stability of the BB was the cooling of the mantle, resulting in low tectonic activity ...?
Yea, since making this video, I've tried to read up a little bit more on precambrian tectonics, and I agree, I think that is one of the most significant factors because tectonics is often what kicks off major climatic and environmental changes. However, the more I read about precambrian tectonics the more I see that we have multiple ideas and we still don't have it nailed down completely, so it'd be interesting to see if our idea of the boring billion changes the further we understand ancient tectonic styles! :D
@@GEOGIRL Thanks for replying. So mantle cooling is only one factor? Funny thing, cooling can cause earthquakes but it can also quell volcanism.
wtf - this was really happennign on our planet? Love it and thnx for the video!
I’m disappointed in the lack of discussion of fossils of early eukaryotes like the red alga Bangiomorpha pubescens (1.2 Gya) and the green alga Proterocladus antiquus (1 Gya). Also of acritarchs, likely some one-called eukaryotes, though it’s hard to say much more. With fossils like those, the Boring Billion was not quite as boring.
Early on, I think during the GOE, there are some strange macrofossils called the Francevillian biota. They're bigger than acritarchs. It's as if life was ready to become complex that early if the O2 levels had supported it, but then O2 dropped back down during the Boring Billion. I think geology and ocean chemistry, not biology, was the limiting factor for complex life.
Bangiomorpha was named from its close resemblance to present-day Bangiaceae, which include Pyropa, the nori alga. These two algae indicate that the endosymbiosis of a cyanobacterium happened earlier in the Boring Billion, and maybe even near the end of the Great Oxidation Event.
An upper limit can be found from the evolution of thylakoids in cyanobacteria, what plastids also have. That happened not long before the GOE, as did cyanobacterium multicellularity. Much of the early evolution of cyanobacteria was early in the BB, however, as was much of the early evolution of eukaryotes.
I would also have liked mention of our ancestors back then. Late in the BB, they were choanoflagellates (collar flagellates), and some time in the BB, their ancestors started growing those collars around their (single) flagella.
I mention single because some protists have two, looking alike in some organisms, like some green algae, and looking different in some others (heterokonts). Some of them are covered with these structures: the ciliates.
Also fungi were ignored. There were developing in parallel to animals. Opisthokonts appeared somewhere 1.3 Ba.
Geological scale, it is called. Something beyond our ordinary perception. Much, much imagination required? Here's the series of videos which would help you have a great time intellectually! Accessible, no need to worry about!
Thank you geogirl.
Thanks!
Great video/ Thank you! D.A., J.D. NYC
yeah a billion years is kind of a long time? .
#ProjectStrix #GirlPower
I love your videos so much, thank you for making them!
Thank you so much! I am so glad you enjoy them ;D
Hey, a term list, cool!
This channel rocks! 😂 (I'll see myself out).
When I was 18 or 19 I thought Geology was linked to rock only, but now I see it's incredible it's linked to life. 😮
I decide to study industrial engineering, but almost all sciences are very important for me.
So glad you had this realization! ;D I had a similar one years ago and now I am obsessed with the beauty of how connected the science fields are :)
I don't know about the BB, but GEO GIRL is definitely NOT boring. I want my granddaughters to grow up to be like her!
You are too sweet! Thank you for the kind words ;)
😑 I was so Benthic all that time. I'm better now.
It was so boring that I posted a joke and nobody responded.
Great video, would love a heavy metals for life video. I was suprised Molybdenum played such a big role.
Oh that is a great idea, thanks!
@@GEOGIRL That was great seeing all parts (chem, tectonics, biology, etc) tied together. Did all the larger elements (P, Mo, Ca) come from land? Was that just from weathering of rock? I never knew Mo was so important! Where’d it come from?
@@FromTheNard Yep exactly, they come from land! From the rocks, that's why the great oxidation event was so important for SRB (sulfate reducing bacteria) because it wasn't until oxidative weathering of continental rocks that sulfate was transported to the oceans in abundance, same with molybdate (a Mo-O compound), which fueled N-fixation. The NOE was also really important as it's thought that this event really kick started major Ca, phosphate, and carbonate transport to the oceans which allowed animals to easily make skeletons of either Ca phosphate or Ca carbonate. Oxidative weathering was the driver of so much evolution and radiation! ;D
Thank you for tour detailed explanation
So the big question seems to be what spurred eukaryotes to suddenly form into early animals around about 550 million years ago (the Cambrian explosion that is).
Animals appeared 0.9-0.7 Ba (billion years ago).
Cambrian explosion is another funny name like boring billion. This "explosion" was possible because of minerals in their external skeletons. Read about Ediacaran fauna. Read about opisthokonts (1.3 Ba).
I think just about anything is interesting, until you throw in math and then I'm done. Numbers, ages, things like that don't bother me, just math.
Trust me, I understand, I feel the same way lol!
Thanks for the very interesting discussion, not boring in the least. I believe that the warm stable time in the Mid Proterozoic was essential for gradual evolution from prokaryotic life to eukaryotes. It implies that life needs a very long, stable period to evolve into animals. Maybe this explains the Fermi Paradox. We may have a universe of Cyanobacteria, but no Mos Eisley Cantinas. 👽
wow, that was nice. Very clear and straightforward. One wonders what stromolites can tell us since they span the entire boring billion.
I know right! ;D
Right, I know/knew what's that :-)
Here's an odd question. Due to the existence of iron oxide on the surface of Mars, do you think that Mars also went though a great oxidation event?
The kind of weasely way you talk about the time periods involved is just stronger supporting the fact that the periodization of the Precambrian is just plain not done yet. The ICS chart isn't it, or lit, or good, but then that's kinda the whole issue is that the jury is still out on so much of this. While overall we can view the boring billion as relatively stable, there is some evidence for types of variation within it, you pointed out some here, and it's likely and I personally believe that even though it was a very stable period comparitively, our perception of it is heavily biased towards the data we have. For perspective, you talked about the Grenville orogeny causing a phanerozoic-like change in oxygen levels, but we don't talk about the phanerozoic as if it's "boring," and that's been going on for over 500 million years. Of course we don't, right? Because it has animals, like dinosaurs and trilobites and people, those things aren't boring. But what do we really know about Mesoproterozoic life? We got some acritarchs, some things that might be eukaryotes, some things that probably are, chemical evidence of stem groups, etc., but this stuff is difficult to interpret and understand.
So I don't think that the actual events of that time were boring, I don't think Earthlings will sit still even under the most stable of circumstances and over the course of that time there may have been lots of radiation events and whole bizarre clades of organisms we have no remnants of today, and there were probably geologic events both local and world wide which we either just haven't yet gotten evidence for or do and maybe just haven't seen it for what it is yet. That said, until we have a large enough body of evidence to understand what was really going on back then, it... it's gonna look kinda boring from where we're standing. But also? Compared to the GOE, *EVERYTHING* is boring, so that is in no way a fair comparison.
To take it back to periodization for a bit, the 2021 proposal kind of took this attitude to not fix what isn't broken (even though it's very much broken) and kept the current ICS Mesoproterozoic periods in place, chronometric boundaries and all. It's bad, it's a bad idea that doesn't work and isn't good... but at the same time, their reasoning is sound. Maybe we don't need four periods, maybe we do, whatever, but it's probably better to assume that there's more to the story than we know, than to assume a lack of evidence implies an evidence of absence. Kind of a thing. You know what I mean. I just can't believe the boring billion was actually boring, we just haven't fully figured out what the most exciting parts are yet. But until we do? Yeah it just... it sounds kinda boring I'ma be honest.
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I was bored out of my mind.
At .75 speed this is perfect.
I agree. It's a mysterious period. I wonder if there were loads more microorganisms than there are now. On account of nobody eating them but other microorganisms. Or maybe that's a stupid idea lol I mean there weren't any filter-feeders back then. That started in the Ediacaran. So I wonder if that had an impact on their numbers then compared to now.
It's a difficult timescale to imagine without much change. You can't imagine human society surviving for a billions years without going through dramatic upheaval.
I am sure it did heavily impact their numbers once larger animals and filter feeders evolved in the Ediacaran. I think the way I've most often heard it explained is that it's not that the Precambrian supported a crazy high amount of microorganisms, but rather that the post-Cambrian has caused their numbers to decrease because once Ediacaran fauna appeared and all other large complex life snowballed from that until today, the microbes were largely displaced and therefore had no choice but to decline in numbers to make room for the rest of life. A similar thing happened to stromatolites built by cyanobacteria. These cyanobacterial mats require warm, calm, shallow water, which is now occupied by other benthic animals, so they were displaced and dwindled in numbers. Thank goodness there are still some corners of the world we can find them though because they are so cool!! ;D
Bacteria and archaea have probably always been preyed upon by viruses. Of course viruses will never leave fossil traces but we can probably see ancient evidence of the biological ways prokaryotes defended themselves against viruses in mechanisms like endonucleases.
@@GEOGIRL Thank you for your answer, Rachel 😊 Must take up a lot of your time to make all of these videos and reply to viewers. It's nice to see someone really love what they study and what they do for a loving.
So, just my two cents. I think the Boring Billion is actually quite descriptive of the era as tectonic activity was low, biodiversity was low. We probably don't have a good count of how many prokaryotic and eukaryotic species actually existed at the time but from the way you are describing it there couldn't have been very many, especially considering the stable conditions prevailing during the era.