“It’s the end of the world as we (now) know it”: Earth’s oxygen supply has an expiration date

There are numerous investigations, books and and even films dealing with the search for planets that can support human life. All of them fueled by a critical and increasingly realistic view of the state of health of the earth as a day will come when the oxygen on the planet will run out.

A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, led by environmental scientist Kazumi Ozaki, has carefully analyzed the evolution of gases in the atmosphere. Through almost 400,000 simulations of climatic, biological and geological systems, they have concluded that the earth will be abundant in methane and that, over time, oxygen will run out.

“We used a combined biogeochemical and climate model to examine the likely time scale of oxygen-rich atmospheric conditions on Earth,” they say in the study. They therefore attribute the rise in methane to changes in the Sun’s luminosity and variations in carbon dioxide, among other reasons.

Will humans suffer from this deoxidation?

The answer is reassuring, for the moment. According to the researchers, this phenomenon will occur within a billion years. And the main reason for the depletion of oxygen is the ageing of the Sun. “We discovered that future deoxygenation is an inevitable consequence of the increase in solar flux”, say the researchers. An increase that will cause an increase in the temperature of the star and, therefore, release more energy, which will lead to a reduction in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

This whole apocalyptic situation is not new to the long history of the earth. According to the study, the planet experienced a similar stage in the Archean Eon, a period in which the atmosphere lacked free oxygen, 2.4 billion years ago.

Oxygen is currently essential for large, complex organisms and is crucial for life to flourish on the planet. It occupies 21% of the atmosphere and science now knows that, once again, the Earth will run out of breathable air.

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