Technical comment on “Reexamination of 2.5-Ga ‘whiff’ of oxygen interval points to anoxic ocean before GOE”

Abstract

Many lines of inorganic geochemical evidence suggest transient “whiffs” of environmental oxygenation before the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). Slotznick et al. assert that analyses of paleoredox proxies in the Mount McRae Shale, Western Australia, were misinterpreted and hence that environmental O2 levels were persistently negligible before the GOE. We find these arguments logically flawed and factually incomplete.