Elon Musk can talk about sending people to Mars, and Bill Gates can talk about reversing climate change – but even the air we breathe could soon be exhausted.
/ Our oxygen-rich atmosphere can only last another billion years, a new study finds. Published in the journal in Geoscience of nature, called “The future life of the Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere,” explains that even if it doesn’t happen in the near future, when change comes, it will happen fairly quickly.
This change will take the planet back to something similar to 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 falling sharply to levels reminiscent of Archaean Earth, it will most likely be triggered before wetland conditions begin to set in the Earth’s climate system and before widespread loss of surface water in the atmosphere. ”
They also explained that it may be inevitable – “Future deoxygenation is an inevitable consequence of increased solar fluxes, while its precise timing is modulated by the flow of reducing power exchange between the mantle and the ocean-atmosphere-crust system.”
Scientists have previously predicted that rising radiation from the Sun will wipe the ocean’s waters off our planet in about 2 billion years, but the new model – based on an average of just under 400,000 simulations – says reducing oxygen will kill more first of life.
“Oxygen depletion is very, very extreme,” said Chris Reinhard, an Earth scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The new scientist. “We’re talking about a million times less oxygen than it is today.”
The researchers also pointed out that we may need to look for biosignatures other than oxygen in order to have the best chance of observing life.