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Elon Musk may be talking about sending humans to Mars, and Bill Gates may be talking about reversing climate change – but the very air we breathe may soon run out.
/ Our oxygen-rich atmosphere may only last for a billion years, according to a new study. Published in the newspaper in Geoscience of nature, called “The Future Lifespan of Earth’s Oxygenated Atmosphere,” explains that while it won’t happen in the near future, when the change does happen, it will happen quite quickly.
This change will return the planet to something like the state it was in before what is known as the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago. “The lifespan of oxygen-based biosignatures in the Earth’s atmosphere remains uncertain, especially for the distant future,” the scientists write in their paper.
They also explain what the lack of oxygen will look like, “with atmospheric O2 dropping sharply to levels reminiscent of Archean Earth, will most likely be triggered before the onset of humid greenhouse conditions in Earth’s climate system and before the significant loss of surface water from the atmosphere.
They also point out that this may be inevitable – “Future deoxygenation is an inevitable consequence of increased solar fluxes, as its precise timing is modulated by the flux of reducing power exchange between the mantle and the ocean-atmosphere system. -crust.”
Scientists had previously predicted that increased solar radiation would wipe ocean waters from our planet’s surface within about 2 billion years, but the new model – based on an average of just under 400,000 simulations – says reducing oxygen will kill life first.
“The drop in oxygen is very, very extreme,” said Earth scientist Chris Reinhard of the Georgia Institute of Technology. New scientist. “We are talking about a million times less oxygen than today.”
The researchers also pointed out that we may have to look for other biosignatures besides oxygen to have the best chance of spotting life.
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