oxygen catastrophe
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.48 in modern English
35
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
5
Syllables
13
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An event during the oxygenation event of Earth's past, where the level of free oxygen in the environment exceeds the tolerance levels of most extant anaerobic life.
name
Etymology
From oxygen + catastrophe. From the accumulation of atmospheric oxygen, which was toxic to the anaerobic organisms existing at the time. This process led to a widespread extinction of those life forms.
Inflected Forms
oxygen catastrophes (plural)
the Oxygen Catastrophe (canonical)