TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – One billion years from now, oxygen Earth’s atmosphere will be depleted, rendering the planet uninhabitable for complex aerobic life. That period goes back to the beginning of Earth’s history when oxygen levels were much lower than they are today.
Today, oxygen makes up about 21 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. Its oxygen-rich nature makes Earth ideal for large and complex organisms, such as humans, that need the elemental gas to survive.
Kazumi Ozaki from Toho University in Funabashi, Japan, and Chris Reinhard from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA, are modeling Earth’s geological, biological, and climate systems to predict how the Earth’s atmospheric conditions will change. The results are published in the journal Nature March 1, 2021.
They say Earth’s atmosphere will maintain high oxygen concentrations for the next billion years, before dramatically returning to low concentrations that existed before what was known as the Great Oxidation Event some 2.4 billion years ago. “We found that Earth’s oxidized atmosphere is not a permanent feature,” Ozaki said.
One major factor in this shift is that, as it ages, sun will get hotter and release more energy. The researchers calculated that this would lead to a reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as this gas absorbs heat and then breaks down.
Ozaki and Reinhard estimate that in the next billion years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will be so low that photosynthetic organisms – including plants – will not be able to survive and produce oxygen.
The mass extinction of these photosynthetic organisms will in turn be the main cause of oxygen depletion. “The reduction in oxygen would be very, very extreme – we’re talking about a million times lower than the current level,” said Reinhard.
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The researchers also predict that there will be, simultaneously, an increase in methane levels to as high as 10,000 times the amount in the atmosphere today. Once changes start to occur in Earth’s atmosphere, they will rapidly expand: The research team’s calculations predict the atmosphere will lose oxygen only in 10 thousand years later.
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