2024-10-02 12:15:39
The Earth’s atmosphere It is the layer of gases that surrounds our planet and makes life possible. Thanks to the oxygen it contains, it allows most living beings to breathe and also regulates global temperature. However, throughout history, various factors have altered its balance, such as the increase in greenhouse gas emissions (GEI), caused by human activities.
In 2021, a group of scientists from Toho University and the Georgia Institute of Technology warned how much time the Earth’s atmosphere has left to remain as we know it. “We find that future deoxygenation is an inevitable consequence of increasing solar fluxes,” states the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
When will the Earth lose oxygen from its atmosphere?
Scientists found that the length of Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere is about 1 billion years. After that period of time, deoxygenation would cause the atmosphere to be similar to that of the primitive Earth, when it did not have oxygen among its components.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers carried out more than 400 thousand tests using a model of the Earth system with a simulator of climatic and biogeochemical processes (exchange of chemical elements between living beings and the environment that surrounds them).
21% of the Earth’s atmosphere is made up of oxygen. Photo: ESA
What will happen when the Earth’s atmosphere loses oxygen?
After losing his percentage of oxygenthe Earth’s atmosphere will still exist, but the ozone layer will not. Likewise, life forms that depend on these gases to survive would be extinct.