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How Photosynthesis Has Changed The Earth

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Claim Photosynthesis has changed the Earth in many different ways including causing The Great Oxygenation, causing the first ice age, and creating aerobic life.
What Is Photosynthesis? Photosynthesis is how the first oxygen came to Earth. For photosynthesis to happen there has to be three key elements present; water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight. Plants capture sunlight using chlorophyll as stated in http://www.ducksters.com/science/photosynthesis.php, “Plants capture sunlight using a compound called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is green, which is why so many plants appear green.” A lot of people think producing oxygen is why organisms use photosynthesis but actually they use photosynthesis as a way of making food for themselves. Oxygen is just a byproduct of photosynthesis. Another byproduct of photosynthesis is water vapor. Caused The Great Oxygenation The Great Oxygenation was caused by cyanobacteria creating oxygen using photosynthesis and sending Oxygen into the atmosphere. Cyanobacteria was the first organism to produce Oxygen through photosynthesis. As it states in http://forces.si.edu/atmosphere/02_02_02.html, “2.7 billion years ago, bluish-green microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria flourished in Earth’s oceans. They made gaseous, or free, …show more content…

Only a small percentage of life survived through the ice age. The large amount of oxygen killed off a lot of the anaerobic life and the small amount of anaerobic life that survived hid in places with no oxygen like geysers. After the first ice age, multicellular life started appearing. Most of the life that appeared used oxygen to survive because it was a very good source of energy and it was everywhere. According to the timeline on http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/history_of_the_earth#timeline, “The first Eukaryotes appeared 1.5 billion years ago. Eventually, they started evolving and evolving until they became complex life like plants and animals.

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