rhube:
helloitsbees:
jumpingjacktrash:
historical-nonfi...
For about seven-eights of the Earth’s history, its oceans were extremely rich in sulfides. This would have prevented animals and plants from surviving in 70% of the planet. But it was a great habitat for photosynthetic bacteria that require sulfides and sunlight to live. Known as purple and green sulfur bacteria (because those are the two colors it comes in) these single-celled microbes can only live in environments where they simultaneously have access to sulfides and sunlight.
That they thrived in the sulfide-rich ocean has been confirmed with the finding of fossilized pigments of purple sulfur bacteria in 1.6 billion-year-old rocks from the McArthur Basin in Northern Australia.
i looked up purple sulfur bacteria and now i’m laughing bc the ocean must’ve looked like a giant glass of grape juice, these things really are purple
Annoyingly obliged to point out that this isn’t at all what they meant, though; they just had different colour concepts to us. See also the sky being bronze. Things like vibrancy mattered more to them in terms of colour classification.
I’m sorry, I know I get boring about this shit but I know too much about sensory experience and someone has to suffer for it.
