In high schools around the world, children are learning about evolution and how much the Earth has changed over billions of years. There have been many periods in Earth’s history, each of which has resulted in fascinating geological and evolutionary breakthroughs. But there is one time period that many scientists find amusing: the “boring billion years,” a term coined by paleontologist Martin Brasil when he described the “pretty boring” billion years of the Proterozoic era.
The boring billion happened about 1800 to 800 million years ago. That’s a period of about a billion years in which Earth’s development seemed to stand still. Once in perpetual change, Earth suddenly underwent a “geochemical state” and prolonged glacial stagnation. To describe this “abnormal” billion, the scientist Roger Buick even paraphrased the immortal words of Winston Churchill: “Never in the history of the earth has so little happened so much.”
So just how boring is boring? Well, literally nothing seems to have happened. Although Earth was a much warmer planet at that time, there is no evidence of a period of significant and dramatic climate change. The oxygen levels in the air are so low that the world’s oceans have turned black and muddy and filled with iron and toxic hydrogen sulfide, which makes rotten eggs smell bad.
Without the freezing or heating of ice, everything is stale, barren and unfit for survival. Biological evolution slowed down, and all that thrived were extremely simple eukaryotes, tiny bacteria, and very primitive, unevolved single-celled organisms.
Scientists have long wondered what causes something as massive as our planet, with its many interconnected moving parts that cause each other to change and then stop changing.
Many theories have been proposed to try to explain the invariance. One is that the core begins to cool, slowing down all the usual changes and bringing a sense of stillness and stability to the surface, even to the often moving tectonic plates.
What’s impressive about Boring Billion, though, is that upon closer inspection, changes are happening on a microscopic scale. The building blocks of life that we take for granted today, primarily these simple eukaryotic cells, or cells with a core of genetic material, have quietly exploited billions of years of stagnation to evolve into more complex organisms.
We live today because of their evolution. They figured out how to adapt and needed very stable conditions to really get it right, and it took a billion years of trial and error to get it right.
Directed by: David Kelly
