Earth's Oceans Were Purple for Nearly 2 Billion Years; Why this Occurred 

It's the nicest color to compliment a gray alien with.

Really enjoy these one-off videos with pieces of Earth's history that isn't entirely geological.

Saw something about this on Anton Petrov's channel last night. Love seeing information from several different channels though.

I love you're covering more things now, I hope you enjoy making these too. Not enough people make interesting videos about the Earth's history because it takes so much fact-checking and consensus-checking, while lots of things about the planet's history is simply not known or outright ignored by very religious people who still claim the Earth can't be that old and just scoff at dates/techniques/assumptions/estimates. It's a niche on RU-vid that's bathed in comments that end in a prayer emoji.

I'm not the smartest guy on the planet but earth sciences fascinate me. Thank you for the effort you put into making things understandable to the layman. You are a favorite channel.

showed my gf this one, purple is one of her favorite colors. awesome to learn something new!

I can't explain why this lifted me 🤷🏽 thank you for your work

Love the video, there is currently a bloom in a german lake unless it has stopped and the colour is a little closer to royal purple due to a more uniform depth

Love this kind of info! Thank you!!

This is the only channel on my feed that commands my complete attention from start to finish. And many rewinds to study the graphics.

Fascinating! Thank you.

Wow! you and Anton Petrov are on top of this study! i just watched a video from him on this yesterday. nice!

Thanks for all of your hard work man!

Reminds me of Chemical Plant Zone from Sonic 2 💀

Wow, I had no idea. That's pretty neat!

I remember when Snowball Earth was a mind-blowing concept.

This is so cool!!! Love your channel so much!

The more we learn, isn't it unbelievable how many factors had to be in line to enable earth carrying life as we know it today?

Michigan iron bands,not talking about Bob Seger either!

Thanks for telling this story. I didn't know that. Interesting.

Great topic

How very interesting! Thank you! 🙌🏼

Cue the song “Purple Rain” 😬

Thanks so much Geology Hub, as always! We all know of Algol's history of the Earth video, and it shows a purple Earth between the break up of the supercontinent of Columbia and the formation of the supercontinent of Rodinia. Thanks again for producing this video, as it will alleviate remaining confusion among people. Earth's coloration in the past was very interesting. It possibly had greenish oceans, then purple oceans, blood-red oceans, light-purple oceans, and finally blue oceans.

Thanks.

Were you able to see aurora last night?

Fascinating, I have two plants in my garden, one purple the other red. Both are very attractive, and I remember reading long ago the many land plants were also purple. I guess it’s a similar reason, thanks, maybe a vid on purple land plants?

The Prince-iest of all the Planets. Con-Tro-Ver-Sy!

Cool, thank you!!!

So crazy how macrobiotic life is still the predominate lifeform on our planet and will be the primary driver of the climate.

Thank you SO much for these informative and very educational videos regarding the formation of our biological planet. I’m personally curious about the great Oxygenation event you mention and wonder if Diatom blooms play a huge factor in that period. Any chance you can elaborate on that time period with another video? Also any chance you can talk more about Diatoms and how they significantly oxygenize our planet for us to this day? I literally had to educate a couple people recently insisting that trees are the number one factors in oxygenating our planet

Sooooo cooool!!!!

Retinal is also the light receptive pigment in the rods of vertebrate retinas (and probably some invertebrates as well).

That was really interesting. It still seems strange to me that plants couldn't have evolved a solution for absorbing green in an oxygen atmosphere. Perhaps literally none exists or it's very hard to reach because of the fitness landscape? I suppose we should be thankful that plants aren't efficient absorbers of visible light or all our forests and grasslands would be black.

👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾 EXCELLENT!!!! ¡EXCELENTE!

Nothing is scarier than snowball earth.

The purple dawn theory.

Planet Saints? I can dig it.

Violet is my favorite color, but I'll take the Purple [not the same color, guys.] Thank you for the info!

Shiva was planting seeds...

this reminds me of some analysis of old old writing from the Mediterranean describing the sea as "wine dark" and other allusions to what we now consider a reddish color and posit that our perception of the color blue has possibly changed over time

Two billion years too late, the story of my life...

Still get pink coloured salt enriched "salt" lakes. Apparently caused by an algal life form. Is "pink" at the short wavelength or long wavelength of the visible spectrum?

3:56 where is that located?

Earth’s mauve period never was going to stay in style.

Hello wonderful people - GH and Anton Petrov obviously just read the same study.

I would love to live on a purple Earth.

The UFO aliens are still looking for the purple planet so they can stock up on food. Their ancestors must have written the wrong location.

But was there Purple Rain?

Better a purple one for billions years than a blue one for few days

"I love being purple!" -the earth, apparently

if you eat enough psilocybin mushrooms, earth is still purple !

💜

I guess that makes my eyes photosynthetic

You mean, if anaerobic lifeforms had prevailed, and oxygenic photosynthesis hadn't been invented - thus no eukaryotic lifeforms but different ones - which also could have developed into higher lifeforms - then everything would be purple today? Do I get it right?

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

The oceans were also purple after the Great Dying caused by the Siberian traps/large igneous province.

I caution that we don't know for sure this is true and to what extent it would have applied. Anxiogenic photosynthesis comes in multiple forms with aerobic photosynthesis having likely inherited its color from green sulfur reducing bacteria. However there e is likely another strong factor limitation why aerobic photosynthetic organisms are green which comes down to the principals of quantum mechanics namely the quantization of light and minimum energy thresholds. Specifically photosynthesis reactions of all types rely on mixing hydrogen with carbon dioxide(or sometimes monoxide for anaerobic forms) with the main factor many of the differ by being the source of hydrogen. Aerobic photosynthesis uses water as its source of hydrogen much as their sulfur reducing relatives utilize hydrogen sulfide and photoferrortrophs and other metal ion based metabolisms use metal ions as electron donors to convert dissolved hydrogen ions(i.e. protons) into chemically usable forms. One of the main things that sets aerobic photosynthesis apart is that oxygen is the most electronegative element after Fluorine which means separating hydrogen atoms from oxygen requires a lot of energy the threshold for minimum energy being in the blue part of the electromagnetic spectrum. At some point organisms developed the capacity to capture/convert the energy of 3 "red" photons into an effective "blue" photon capable of powering this reaction and some plants particularly understory plants do utilize green light through a similar mechanism. Either way the higher minimum energy constraint appears to be in large part responsible for the delayed take over of the open oceans by aerobic phototrophs since the energy balance of open pelagic ecosystems in the absence of strong erosional supplementation results in a ecology fueled by mineral nutrients diffusing upwards which strongly favors organisms which can utilize those resources first and anaerobic photosynthesis is capable of using light with wavelengths down into the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum ~1000nm. Surprisingly many of these anaerobic photosynthetic organisms are still around in our open oceans fueling the oxygen minimum zone as they have swapped metal ions to use oxygen compatible metal ions. For more on this kind or process and its likely role in delaying the onset of the Neoproterozoic second oxygenation and modern complex life check out the following. Ozaki, K., Thompson, K.J., Simister, R.L. et al. Anoxygenic photosynthesis and the delayed oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere. Nat Commun 10, 3026 (2019). doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10872-z I should note one of what may perhaps be the strongest lines of supporting evidence that colonization of pelagic environments was the trigger for the Neoproterozoic climatic fluctuations is that based on phylogenetic mapping and molecular clock analysis with fossil calibration there is no evidence to support the existence of pelagic aerobic photosynthesis prior to the Neoproterozoic. Rather the most ancestral lineages of extant cyanobacteria show no adaptation to the upper water columns and more interestingly most of these ancestral lineages are highly salt intolerant only able to survive in low salinity waters i.e. freshwater or intermediate brackish waters. This is particularly true in the case of the closest relatives of chloroplasts which are obligate freshwater organisms. In essence if there ever was an older open ocean adapted cyanobacteria lineage that dates back to before the Tonian it has left no fossil or molecular fossil evidence of having ever existed. Also the curious bit related to cyanobacterium that became chloroplasts being freshwater obligates is one line of evidence supporting Eukaryotes as arising within terrestrial waterways the other bit of supporting evidence being the metagenomic sampling results of the Asgard superphylum which show the closest relatives among the Asgard archaea are today found in freshwater or terrestrial soil environments specializing in the decomposition of hard to break down molecules such as complex carbohydrates. The molecular clock estimates of Eukaryotes arising also fits with this timeline as it was the same timeframe where major mountain building was occurring on the ancient supercontinent Nuna/Columbia a.k.a. proto Rodinia. Ergo I suspect the Oceans were entirely anaerobic beyond the continental shelves which only began to form as we know them late in our planets history. If this was the case then the timing of the billion year gap between Neoproterozoic oxygenation after the Paleoproterozoic oxygenation becomes fairly trivial with the gradual transition to and emergence of the modern form plate tectonics becoming a relatively trivial tectonic driven development. Geology and biology are inseparably coupled here on Earth.

Yes, I recall reading about this in an issue of New Scientist back in the early 1990s.

We all a symulacras of Solaris ocean!

welcome to planet grape fanta.

Is it possible that bacteria of nowadays would develop retinal absorption again? I would imagine they'd have little competition with chlorophyll users

Lean earth !!!!!!!!!!

TLDR. Deep Purple is the oldest rock band in the geological record.

@0:35 (Insert ending theme of Neon Genesis Evangelion.)

I did end up sleeping through the aurora 😭

Ah, yes, Eve from Kerbal Space Program.

Huh. So “wine dark sea” was actually real once

Basic boys.

Earth was also a volcano

Wonder what color the earth will be a billion years from today ? 🤔

You sound like you might have a cold or something. Good video, but are you all right?

Saying the earth water was purple kind of sounds like a conspiracy theory 😂😂😂. But fr thooo what if the earth oceans we're still purple until today and what would happen if we swam in purple water?

How do i find old civilization origin story's that talk about a purple world. 😮 iv always thought they meant something else by that. 🤯

no wonder some vegetables and fruit are purple... i always called them caveman's fruits and vegetables 😂😂😂 when fruits and vegetables turned green human hate eating i, now i see why.

2 billion years, you say? Then how on Earth was the "Purple Dawn" recorded by some of the oldest human writings?

boring billion

Long ago earth existed inside a purple environment. Get that shit right please

First comment

Earth's colors are blue, white, brown and green. . . . DUUuuUUUHHH!!!!!!!

Long ago, earth was strangely covered in deep abyss Gen1:2

Let's argue about colour. Blue and black or gold and white. What colour was the dress? Who really knows really? It's all just waves of various lengths, and the colour debate only happens in your head. It's all in your head. There is no colour. Only an interpretation of some radiation. It's violet in my opinion. Purple is just a kind of blue. It's all 50 Shades of Grey or Gray whatever.

METEOR IMPACT NEW MEXICO USA / Shatter Cones / EXPOSED Heart of a CRATER / UNUSUAL GEOLOGY

You are talking about "The Purple Dawn of Creation" myths spoken of by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand. They also call it The Dreamtime. They say their ancestors witnessed this approximately 50,000 years ago. It's been passed down from generation to generation. The Earth was in the plasma sheath of the brown dwarf star, Saturn. This allowed vegetation to grow very large, and eventually animals grew very large. Then a catastrophe took place where the Earth was pushed away from Saturn as the sheath was blown off by our current star, Sol. This enabled these ancient peoples to see the stars for the very first time which leads to the next myth of the 7 Sisters which is the Plaides. We've been taught wrong about our history by those pushing evolution theory. This did not happen millions of years ago. And the Earth is not that old. The academics have only been pushing the millions of years theory since the 1930s. Yes, it is a theory. It's not fact. If one is taught wrong they teach wrong, and the cycle continues.

Dude Cut the BULSHIT AND KEEP ON TRACK

Ooh um hydration and teeth brushing please. Lotsa mouth noise going on.

Earth is flat

Dont worry, I believe someone can know what color the earth use to be LOL. All they have to do is say something, call it science, and the masses will believe it.

This never happened.