Saying Goodbye to Oxygen: Scientists Confirm When Earth’s Air Supply Will End

Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere will begin to fade in around a billion years, according to computer simulations conducted by two scientists from Toho University and NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science.

The specifics of Kazumi Ozaki and Christopher Reinhard’s simulation and its findings are described in their article, which was published in Nature Geoscience.

One thing all scientists agree on is that life will not always exist on Earth, as the sun will eventually run out of fuel and destroy the earth along with it.  

Scientists have recently confirmed when the Earth will run out of oxygen 

Long before that fiery end, rising temperatures will make survival more difficult. Determining the exact point at which the majority of plants and animals on Earth will no longer be able to survive was the goal of this study. They tried to pinpoint the exact moment when life runs out of steam. To determine when the world will no longer be a suitable habitat for the majority of life, scientists created a computer model that replicated the temperature, geology, and biological processes of the planet.  

But which is the most important factor in this puzzle? The time-varying behavior of the sun.  After that, scientists ran their simulation to see how Earth might fare in the future. For species that breathe oxygen, the outcome is not good. According to the study, carbon dioxide levels will begin to decline in roughly a billion years when the sun increases its heat and radiates more energy onto Earth. CO2 absorbs heat and finally disintegrates, which is why this occurs.  Additionally, the ozone layer would be fried in the process, making it unusable.

When CO2 starts to plummet, plants will struggle to survive, according to scientists

Plants will struggle to live as CO2 levels decrease since they depend on the gas to produce food. In 10,000 years, or a geological blink of an eye, plants would vanish entirely. In addition, creatures on land and in the ocean would starve to death if plants stopped producing oxygen. Moreover, methane concentrations would begin to increase, hastening the demise of organisms that breathed oxygen. Ultimately, all that would remain on Earth would be microscopic bacteria that do not require oxygen to survive—the same type of life that predates the emergence of plants and animals.  

To put it another way, Earth would return to its isolated, microbial past. The oxygen-rich atmosphere of Earth has roughly 1.08 billion years remaining before it runs out of fuel, according to the study’s researchers. For comparison, the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred 2.5 billion years ago, is when oxygen first started to accumulate in the atmosphere.  After that, oxygen levels probably stayed low for the majority of Earth’s history; only around 400 million years ago, when land plants began to evolve, did they approach current levels.  According to their estimates, Earth will continue to have surface water and be habitable for roughly 7.2 billion years. 

But the period when the planet’s atmosphere is genuinely rich in oxygen is substantially shorter, accounting for approximately 20% to 30% of that time. Why does this matter?  Suppose we were aliens searching the galaxy for life. We would probably look for signs of life, such as oxygen and ozone, in the atmospheres of faraway planets. Two billion years ago, or two billion years from now, we might not have seen those gases at all if our telescopes had occurred to focus on Earth. That might cause us to pass up the window when Earth truly had breathable air because we thought it was dead and moved on. As the scientists stated, this means that, in the long run, even a healthy world may be experiencing an “off day”; therefore, discovering life might be all about spotting planets at the proper time.