Living in Their Heyday: Iron‐Oxidizing Bacteria Bloomed in Shallow‐Marine, Subtidal Environments at ca. 1.88 Ga
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The majority of large iron formations (IFs) were deposited leading up to Earth's great oxidation episode (GOE). Following the GOE, IF deposition decreased for almost 500 Myr. Subsequently, around 1.88 Ga, there was widespread deposition of shallow‐water granular iron formations (GIF) within a geologically short time interval, which has been linked to enhanced iron (Fe) supply to seawater from submarine hydrothermal venting associated with the emplacement of large igneous provinces. Previous studies of Fe‐rich, microfossil‐bearing stromatolites from the ca. 1.88 Ga Gunflint Formation on the Superior craton suggested direct microbial oxidation of seawater Fe 2+ (aq) by microaerophilic, Fe‐oxidizing bacteria (FeOB), as a driver of GIF deposition. Although Fe‐rich, microfossil‐bearing stromatolites are common in 1.88 Ga GIF deposits on several cratons, combined paleontological and geochemical studies have been applied only to the Gunflint Formation. Here, we present new paleontological and geochemical observations for the ca. 1.89 Ga Gibraltar Formation GIFs from the East Arm of the Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada. Fossil morphology, Rare Earth element (REE) concentrations, and Fe isotopic compositions support Fe oxidation by FeOB at a redoxcline poised above the fair‐weather wave base. Small positive Eu anomalies and positive ε Nd (1.89 Ga) values suggest upwelling of deep, Fe‐rich, hydrothermally influenced seawater. While high [Fe 2+ (aq) ] combined with low atmospheric pO 2 in the late Paleoproterozoic would have provided optimal conditions in shallow oceans for FeOB to precipitate Fe oxyhydroxide, these redox conditions were likely toxic to cyanobacteria. As long as local O 2 production by cyanobacteria was strongly diminished, FeOB would have had to rely on an atmospheric O 2 supply by diffusion to shallow seawater to oxidize Fe 2+ (aq) . Using a 1‐D reaction dispersion model, we calculate [O 2(aq) ] sufficient to deplete an upwelling Fe 2+ (aq) source. Our results for GIF deposition are consistent with late Paleoproterozoic pO 2 estimates of ~1%–10% PAL and constraints for metabolic [O 2(aq) ] requirements for modern FeOB. Widespread GIF deposition at ca. 1.88 Ga appears to mark a temporally restricted episode of optimal biogeochemical conditions in Earth's history when increased hydrothermal Fe 2+ (aq) sourced from the deep oceans, in combination with low mid‐Paleoproterozoic atmospheric pO 2 , globally satisfied FeOB metabolic Fe 2+ (aq) and O 2(aq) requirements in shallow‐marine subtidal environments above the fair‐weather wave base.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".