Abstract
The Fennoscandian Arctic Russia-Drilling Early Earth Project (FAR-DEEP) was designed to capture the sequence of environmental upheavals associated with the establishment of an aerobic biosphere in the Palaeoproterozoic as represented in several palaeobasins and greenstone belts in the Fennoscandian Shield; the Pechenga Greenstone Belt is one of them (Fig. 8.1). From weathering and deposition on Archaean basement overlain by evidence for “Huronian Glaciation,” through early evidence for atmospheric oxygen in the form of redbeds and highly oxidised lavas which themselves are coincident with evidence for massive perturbations of the global carbon cycle expressed through substantial shifts in δ13C, and ending with the deposition of high organic C rocks and strong evidence for modern-style early diagenetic environments with abundant sulphate reduction and diagenetic concretions, the FAR-DEEP cores preserve an invaluable archive of the “Great Oxidation Event” or GOE (Holland 2002, 2006) and related environmental consequences. This transition, known for decades to roughly coincide with the Archaean – Proterozoic boundary, is marked not only by the appearance of “red beds,” reddish sedimentary rocks, typically sand and silt particles coated in ferric oxides that were deposited in terrestrial environments, but also with the retention of Fe in ancient soil profiles or palaeosols and the end of uranium ore accumulation in detrital rocks as uranium-bearing conglomerates (reviews by Knoll and Holland 1995; Canfield 2005; Holland 2006). Other changes, especially the abrupt cessation (but episodic recurrence) of banded iron formation and an increase in the Fe(III)/Fe(II) ratio in shales (Bekker et al. 2003), reflect on the oxidation state of the oceans and diagenetic environments, not the atmosphere per se, and thus require additional consideration before they can be used as a proxy for atmospheric oxygen. As discussed below, the discovery of mass-independent fractionation of the sulphur isotopes exclusively in Archaean sedimentary rocks (Farquhar et al. 2000) provided the direct proxy for atmospheric oxygenation during the transition from the Archaean to the Proterozoic.
Keywords
- Band Iron Formation
- Oxygenic Photosynthesis
- Fennoscandian Shield
- Diagenetic Carbonate
- Transvaal Supergroup
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Kump, L.R., Fallick, A.E., Melezhik, V.A., Strauss, H., Lepland, A. (2013). 8.1 The Great Oxidation Event. In: Melezhik, V., et al. Reading the Archive of Earth’s Oxygenation. Frontiers in Earth Sciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29670-3_11
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