Will oxygen on Earth run out? – Kompas.com

KOMPAS.com – Oxygen supports life on Earth, for example for large and complex organisms such as humans which need the gas to survive.

However, conditions on Earth are not always like that. Scientists predict that in the future, Earth’s atmosphere, which is made up of 21 percent oxygen, will return to an atmosphere full of methane and low in oxygen.

Also read: Not Trees, These Are the Largest Oxygen Producers on Earth

But when will that happen?

up to oxygen

Quoting Science Alert, Friday (17/11/2023) one billion years from now, Earth’s atmosphere will contain very little oxygen, making it uninhabitable by complex life.

Kazumi Ozaki of Toho University in Funabashi, Japan, and Chris Reinhard of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta modeled Earth’s climate, biology, and geology systems to predict how atmospheric conditions on Earth will change.

Researchers say Earth’s atmosphere will have high oxygen levels for the next billion years before dramatically returning to low levels, as happened in the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago.

“We found that Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere will not be a permanent feature,” Ozaki said.

One of the main reasons for this change is that, as we age, the sun gets hotter and releases more energy.

The researchers calculated that this would lead to a decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because CO2 absorbs heat and then decomposes.

Ozaki and Reinhard estimate that within a billion years, carbon dioxide levels will be so low that photosynthetic organisms, including plants, will not be able to survive and produce oxygen.

Also read: Where does the oxygen on Earth come from?

The mass extinction of these photosynthetic organisms will be the main cause of a large reduction in oxygen.

“The decline in oxygen is very extreme. We are talking about millions of times less oxygen than there is today,” explained Reinhard.

Researchers also estimate that there will be an increase in methane up to 10,000 times the amount currently in the atmosphere.

Oxygen on Earth will run out in…

Once changes in the Earth’s atmosphere begin to occur, they are quickly followed by other rapid changes.

According to New Scientist, the team’s calculations show that the atmosphere could lose oxygen in only about 1000 years.