Unfortunately, there will not always be life on Earth. Because the ever hotter sun will continue to lower the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere. Now researchers at NASA have calculated when our planet will finally run out of air. But until the demise of civilized life on Earth, fortunately, thousands of years will pass.
Scientists have long known that the Earth is doomed. That’s because the sun will cut off the Earth’s oxygen supply sooner or later. Now, two researchers from the U.S. space agency NASA have calculated approximately how long it will take before Earth runs out of oxygen and humanity can no longer live on the planet. For their prediction,
Kazumi Ozaki of Toho University in Funabashi, Japan, and Chris Reinhard of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta worked with climatic, biological and geological systems to model Earth’s future evolution. This project took place as part of a NASA project looking at planetary habitability. “We found that Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere will not last,” Ozaki told the international science magazine Newscientist.com, explaining the findings. However, according to the researchers, it will take almost a billion years before the Earth runs out of air. Only then the Suaerstoffgehalt of the air sinks under a border, which prevents aerobic life on earth.
Blame for this development is the ever hotter becoming sun, which will lead sometime then to a dramatic decrease of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As a result, carbon dioxide levels will then drop so low in the future that even photosynthesizing organisms such as plants will no longer produce oxygen. Aerobic life on earth will then gradually die out. In the future, the earth will produce less and less oxygen. At the same time, the methane content in the atmosphere is expected to increase by a factor of ten thousand, which will further increase this greenhouse effect. “The decline in oxygen is very, very extreme – we’re talking about about a million times less than today,” the scientists write in the
science journal Nature Geoscience. Initially, however, the formation of oxygen will increase, before it will then abruptly reduce. Once started, the process of oxygen loss will then proceed in a period of only 10,000 years. Until it is so far however still some million years will drag into the country. It is quite possible that by then another cause will have led to the extinction of mankind, or that humans will have long since left this planet.
