Our Atmosphere Is Leaking Oxygen and Scientists Don't Know Why (gizmodo.com) 167
The Earth's atmosphere has been leaking oxygen and scientists don't know why. Researchers discovered that over the past 800,000 years, atmospheric oxygen levels have dropped by 0.7 percent. How exactly did they discover the leak? By observing ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, which contain trapped air bubbles representing snapshots of our atmosphere over the past million-odd years. Gizmodo reports: By examining the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen isotopes within these cores, the researchers were able to pull out a trend: oxygen levels have fallen by 0.7 percent over the past 800,000 years, meaning sinks are roughly 2 percent larger than sources. Writing today in Science, the researchers offer a few possible explanations. For one, erosion rates appear to have sped up in recent geologic history, causing more fresh sediment to be exposed and oxidized by the atmosphere, causing more oxygen to be consumed. Long-term climate change could also be responsible. Recent human-induced warming aside, our planet's average temperature had been declining a bit over the past few million years. [Princeton University geologist Daniel Stolper] added that there could be other explanations, too, and figuring out which is correct could prove quite challenging. But learning what controls the knobs in our planet's oxygen cycle is worth the effort. It could help us understand what makes a planet habitable at all -- something scientists are rather keen on, given recent exoplanet discoveries. Stolper's analysis excluded one very unusual part of the record: the last 200 years of industrial human society. "We are consuming O2 at a rate a factor of a thousand times faster than before," Stolper said. "Humankind has completely short-circuited the cycle by burning tons of carbon."
Not a bad guess (Score:2)
But what about methane? We know it leaks from places like hydrate ices underwater, especially when there is an earthquake and landslide [google.com], and of course since it exists underground as natural gas, we know it can leak from there, too,
Re:Not a bad guess (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Not a bad guess (Score:2)
I don't think it's mammals.
Burning massive quantities of fossil fuels could be a factor (it's in the FA).
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We metabolise about 3kWh of energy per day by breathing, which is equivalent to about 90ml of diesel. All the machinery, heating and so on that we use consumes a lot more energy than that.
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each tonne of CO2 implying the consumption of about 360 kilograms of oxygen (mostly coal consumption)
Each tonne of CO2 implies the consumption of 720 kg (0.72 tonnes) of oxygen, as there are two oxygen atoms in each molecule of CO2. Burning hydrocarbon fuels however removes even more oxygen than just that which is bound as CO2, since the hydrogen is also burned to H2O. Acyclic (chain) hydrocarbons as commonly found in fuel oils have approximately twice as many hydrogen atoms as carbon atoms, so each tonne of CO2 produced from burning diesel or other fuel oils (or natural gas) will consume 720 kg of oxyge
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Oh, my bad. I don't know where the 360 figure came from, although I suspect I simply forgot to multiply it by two.
I don't think I have seen yet a breakdown of historical emissions in terms of fuel composition, so I simply went with 100% coal since it won't change the ballpark figure much (relative to total oxygen contents), and ignored hydrocarbons. (Obviously land use change, cement production etc. are yet other factors.)
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While out hiking in dense old-growth forests, I was curious if there was more oxygen there from being surrounded by so many trees. I wondered if, perhaps, there was enough additional oxygen in the air to have a clinical affect on my metabolism (perhaps I didn't breath quite as fast because of all that extra O2 generated by the forest). Some very quick research revealed that is definitely not the case, because there is simply already such a massive amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. If you took 100% of th
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Human population has expanded tremendously in the last part of those 800,000 years, and all of us consume oxygen.
It's worth remembering that Earth's total biomass is:
* 99.9% Prokaryote bacteria
* 0.1% Other (mostly plankton)
The tiny remainder that's not bacteria or plankton is mostly fish. Humans, sure, are reasonably successful within what's left over, but so are cattle, termites, ants, and krill.
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Fungi it the great unknown. It could be as much as 25%. It's hard to find a good overall breakdown, even of just plankton.
What's scary is that among mammals, and land-based verterbrates overall, humans and their domestic animals are the majority of the biomass.
Yes, but my whole point is that's like 0.01% of biomass. Don't confuse the familiar with the important.
Add our machines, which an order of magnitude more active than we are.
Crops are similar, though they go the other way with oxygen. But even at 10x, it's still a rounding error.
Re: Not a bad guess (Score:1)
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"all of us consume oxygen."
Actually, we process oxygen. And it gets 'recycled', that is, reprocessed.
And the combination is... (Score:1)
1,2,3,4,5
OMG (Score:1, Redundant)
Oxygen levels can't go up, where would the oxygen come from? It's very improbable that oxygen levels stay the same, over time nothing stays the same in nature. The only remaining option is that oxygen levels go down. Problem solved.
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The paper refers specifically to O2, and theres plenty of sources, as various chemical (and electrochemical , famously liberating O2 from water with electricity) sources.
Buuuut you'd have known that it was refering to O2 if you read the link instead of mashing post.
Re: OMG (Score:1)
>where would the oxygen come from?
Photosynthesis. It is also responsible for there being enough oxygen in the atmosphere for you to live in the first place.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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where would the oxygen come from?
Please tell me you're kidding. Did you sleep through plant biology in high school?
-jcr
You seem to be deaf to that whooshing sound above your head. But, hey .. let's parse it it out anyway.
In photosynthesis we basically have CO2 + 2H2O + photons => [CH2O] + O2 + H2O
Do you notice that there is the same number of O's on both sides of the equation? That means that no O was created in the process, which means your derision about the OP is unfounded as photosynthesis does not create O2, it merely frees O2. EG all the O we need and use already exists in the world.
Thus the OP was correct in st
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The discussion is about the amount of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere you dumb cunt, not the total number of oxygen atoms on the planets. Perhaps your lonely braincell isn't getting enough.
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How can you still fall for a trolling even after someone explains to you that it's a trolling?
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There is a limit to how much plants and algae can survive with existing nutrients, plus we've been killing them. Not to mention some stuff falls to the ground or the ocean bottom, never to return its oxygen again. Not everything rots.I imagine complex life having arisen and expanded even before we were around might have had something to do with it as well. Lots of animals eat plants.
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There is no shortage of algae, it is overgrowing waterways worldwide. The stuff that falls towards the ocean bottom is often eaten before it even gets there, and there is life in the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean working to turn the remainder of the waste into life again.
On the other hand, oceanic algae (which "produces" most of our breathable oxygen) has been driven subsurface by UV, which reduces respiration.
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Not to mention some stuff falls to the ground or the ocean bottom, never to return its oxygen again.
Never to be seen again on the human time scale, seen again rather quickly on the Geologic time scale. The oldest Ocean crust we know of is only ~200-400 million years old. Ocean crust both outgasses through cracks in the lithosphere ( including volcanic vents when melting occurs in subduction ), as well as being recycled back into mantle material that can and will eventually erupt again.
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> Oxygen levels can't go up, where would the oxygen come from?
"Oxygen levels can't do down, where would the oxygen go?"
You sound like this.
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To all the other responders: Whoosh.
Surely the title alone was a clue that there was implicit /s?
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The explicit marking of sarcasm is there for people who aren't naturally sarcastic to the core and can pick up on the sarcasm without the explicit marker. I had no trouble understanding that the comment wasn't serious. It was quite an effective trolling, as proven by the reply threads.
Re: OMG (Score:2)
Water?
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I have a solution (Score:2)
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that's an understatement (Score:5, Informative)
"A bit?" We have been in a continuous ice age for the past few million years [wikipedia.org]. Even the more dire predictions of climate models barely take us back to the already fairly cold temperatures at the beginning of the Pliocene era.
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And we know lots of carbon has been trapped under the ice, leading to doomsday predictions that it will begin to decay and increase non-human CO2 in the atmosphere as well as CH4, as we melt the tundra.
Re:that's an understatement (Score:4, Insightful)
People always make "doomsday predictions" about any change, whether it's the sexual revolution or climate change.
In reality, the amount of carbon trapped under ice is a small amount compared to other sources, and it would be quickly captured again by the vegetation that would soon grow in those newly temperate areas. So, sorry, no doomsday scenario there, and not even much of a potential for positive feedback.
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A Lot species already met their doomsday [wikipedia.org]. A lot of the late one are mainly due to human activities. We may well fall victim of our own stupidity.
>it would be quickly captured again by the vegetation that would soon grow
Nope. You need for that to be significant to re-convert agricultural land to forest (trees are the greatest CO2 trapping plants). And bad luck, those agricultural land are needed to feed peoples.
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In case you haven't noticed, it's starting to happen. So far it's a small effect compared to coal mine fires, but it's there, and increasing.
Re:that's an understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is fine, depending on how fast we get there.
It's like this: you're standing on the balcony of your Miami hotel room. It's on the top floor. It's a warm summer night and you look down at the pool. A dip would be just the thing, so you put on your bathing suit and take the elevator down to the ground level. Refreshment accomplished.
Now imagine the same scenario, only you decide to dive off your balcony into the pool. You've traveled exactly the same vertical distance, but the rate at which you did it (well, technically the rate at which you stopped doing it), made a difference.
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Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/
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[citation needed]
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You need a "citation" to understand that a fucking comic strip isn't a reliable source of scientific information?
You think a "citation" is going to fix your ignorance?
What you need isn't a "citation", what you need is, at a minimum, an education.
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Actually, that comic strip does provide references.
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You've heard about "lying with statistics"? By presenting data selectively and in a biased way, you can derive almost any conclusion from the literature.
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Good example. And the relevant analogy here is that anthropogenic climate change is like taking the elevator: it's man-made, and children and adults have all sorts of phobias about it, but it's actually not particularly dangerous. And because of your fears, you want to choose to cower in a corner in your beautiful hotel room and starve to death and force others to do the same.
See, the thing is that even under the unrealistically pessimistic scenarios of the IPCC, climate change is still slow compared to hum
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You should not argue with analogies if you don't understand their limitations.
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I'm not "arguing" with analogies at all. I'm trying to explain to you simple facts in a way that you might understand, using your own analogy as a starting point. To put this bluntly and without analogies: anthropogenic climate change is not fast enough to cause serious problems; furthermore, if humanity were to institute massive interventions in order to try to avoid it, it would lead to massive poverty and starvation across the world. Your attitudes towards climate change are irrational phobias.
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Mr. Munroe recently posted an excellent comic [xkcd.com] about the whole 'ice age' thing. You sound like either an oil shill, or a deliberately misinformed denier. Posting in the hopes that you are the latter.
Why would you fail to be concerned about the eventual extinction of the human species? This is everyone's responsibility.
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Air Shield (Score:5, Funny)
Pfffffftt 800,000 years??? (Score:3, Funny)
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Quick, someone get the spare Earth! We need a control group.
nitrogen fix (Score:2)
Guess this is what we have to look forward to :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sheesh (Score:3)
Or we could just figure that more Oxygen is getting bound up in other compounds. Not a leak, possibly of some concern, but probably not.
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What compounds do we use that bind atmospheric oxygen, and how do they compare to the scale of oxygen we've released from oxygen-bearing rocks (metal ores)?
Anyone have a summary of estimated oxygen sources and sinks?
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Not leaking (Score:2)
Its being sequestered. We can grow more plants to recover the oxygen.
"Leaking"??? Is it being lost into space? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oblig SB (Score:1)
finally: story to freak out anyone with pulse (Score:1)
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Yes. The only way to save our precious and volatile oxygen is to chemically bind as much as possible of it to something to make it stay put. I suggest carbon.
Re: finally: story to freak out anyone with pulse (Score:1)
Obvious possible reasons: (Score:1)
2. Many, many more machines that use oxygen in one way or another (ICEs, for instance)
3. Destruction of natural oxygen generation (i.e., cutting down rainforests)
4. (speculative) Could thinning of the ozone layer make our atmosphere more permeable to loss?
800,000 years (Score:2)
An all of this (many, many more people, ICEs, cutting down rainforests) happened over the last 800,000 years?
bad conclusion (Score:2)
Would stopping destruction of Amazon rain forest h (Score:1)
Trapped in H2O (Score:1)
So they say gas bubbles trapped in frozen H2O had slightly more O2 than outside air?
Did they also have more H2?
nike tn 2016 femme (Score:1)
Many things (Score:2)
Easily fixed (Score:1)
Bring in more oxygen. Plenty of sources to chose from, including: cometary ice, the Oort cloud, satellites of outer planets. Hard to say which is cheapest way to do it, at a fast enough pace. Bezos will probably pick some ways, Musk others.
Of course, there's that pesky hydrogen attached to it, but there's a solution to that: electrolysis powered by practical controlled fusion.
This has the advantage of producing helium as waste, which can be used for buoyancy of balloons, blimps, dirigibles, etc. When
Oxygen Level Used to be Higher (Score:1)
There is one suspect .. (Score:2)
trapped air bubbles (Score:2)
Wouldn't that explain it? Or something similar.
I'm sure not only A) there are plenty of mechanisms whereby oxygen can get trapped and out of the system for a period of time until released again. Odds are it isn't going anywhere but just sequestered somehow for a bit. B) Just like trapped air bubbles may contain more oxygen, I'm sure the opposite is true as well, when upon their release would alter said system.
On top of that simple error. 0.07 percent *total*, when measuring the scale of "trapped air" bubble
Find the actual paper, not gizmodo crap. (Score:2)
Well, that took about 3 minutes. The paper is in Science [sciencemag.org]. If you don't have a subscription, you'll need to try something like Sci-hub [sci-hub.cc].
Abstract: The history of atmospheric O2 partial pressures (P-O2) is inextricably linked to the coevolution of life and Earthâ(TM)s biogeochemical cycles. Reconstructions of past P-O2 rely on models and proxies but often markedly disag
Re:Deforestation (Score:5, Informative)
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There is not less algae in the world today. If anything, thanks to global warming, there is more.
But UV has driven it subsurface where it does less respiration.
Re:Deforestation (Score:5, Insightful)
"Forests are responsible for a miniscule portion of oxygen production"
Algae certainly is the main source, but the amount the forests produce definately isn't miniscule.
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Algae is definitely the single big player producing 70-80% of available atmospheric oxygen overall, and trees are a fraction of the remaining 20-30% so they aren't the definitely go-to overall. However, for a study like this it would only require trees to be roughly 7% of global free O2 production for a 10%ish drop in available forests to equate to a 0.7% reduction in atmospheric O2 versus other molecules.
This wouldn't even take into account an increase in the amount of atmospheric oxygen ending up as other
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You've left no room for bushes and grasses.
Bushes and grasses produce a lot of oxygen .
but it's not just oxygen production.
Offsetting use of a car for a year requires 5,000 pounds of woody material per year (not pure carbon he he but it is a lot of carbon).
Grass, bushes and algae do not lock up nearly as much carbon. Most of their carbon returns quickly to the environment as they are consumed and their smaller less sturdy bits rot quickly.
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You would think that perhaps the massive deforestation of the planet over the course of the past 400-500 years might have an impact. Combine that with massive increases in combustion on the planet you would think that it would be unsurprising that more free O2 would be contained within CO/CO2/SO2 etc than in the past.
Course that's out of my ass, and I don't know how you'd go around testing it.
Deforestation by man over the past 800,000 years?
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If you're including recent figures, then you need to figure in that oceanic pollution is disrupting the life of plankton, which produce most of the oxygen in the atmosphere. I doubt that the figures are recent enough to reflect the recent plankton die-offs, but expect the Oxygen levels of the atmosphere to take a sharp dip over the next few centuries. (it's a pretty slow cycle.)
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and also bonded to hyfrogen atoms
when you burn hydrocarbons you get H2O as well as CO2
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And iron, aluminium, silicon, and calcium atoms. Carbon and hydrogen are much less abundant than these.
Really? What planet are you posting from? Or are you a mole person?
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get the hydrogen, burn the hydrogen with oxygen, get no more free oxygen
FTFY
Re: f...k m thirsty (Score:2)
More water than oil.
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Adam Duritz, is that you?
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Snark aside, this is exactly right. When it comes to climate science, we have lost all humility for what we do not yet know, which is a critical element of science.
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Snark aside, this is exactly right. When it comes to climate science, we have lost all humility for what we do not yet know, which is a critical element of science.
Guys like you seem to assume if we don't know everything about climate science that's equivalent to knowing nothing.
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Having the humility to admit that scientists who make it their life's work to study a subject area probably know more than you do about it would be the right mindset to me.
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Where did I say that? Why is it impossible to have a normal conversation on this subject where you can process simple logic without spinning off into hyperbole? If you actually listen to climate scientists -- many of them anyway -- they are pretty damn reasonable about the limits of what we understand and sound a lot like me. But somehow I'm anti-science because I don't hold the position of hyperventilating politicians who wouldn't know science from a hole in the ground? Okay.
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Fucking MAGNETS! How do they WoRk!? It is the End Of PersonKind!
THe End oF Human/Person/MonkeyKind has been documented with utter clarity. See it and weep.
(Future cell phones are worse than today.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]