UNLV physicist Ashkan Salamat was one of just 46 university professors nationwide – and the first from UNLV – to earn an Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science.
Read the UNLV News and Publications article here.
The rise of dioxygen is arguably the most important environmental change in our planet’s four-and-a-half billion-year history. This revolution occurred approximately 2.3 billion years ago, roughly at the mid-way point in Earth’s history. It was ultimately driven by a biological innovation: the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis. Oxygen rewrote life’s recipe book, facilitating evolution of the richness we associate with our modern biosphere.
We will present observations from a range of perspectives including genomes, chemistry, and the ancient sedimentary rock record to show how this process emerged two-and-a-half billion years ago. We will also compare and contrast the geological records of Earth and Mars to generate expectations for the occurrence of oxygen (and perhaps life) on planets outside our solar system.
