Rising Sun Brightness May Lead to Oxygen Depletion

The presence of oxygen is very necessary for life on Earth. But scientists have said that the total amount of oxygen on Earth is decreasing. This may create a situation like suffocation for most of the life on Earth. Although life developed on Earth as an oxygen-rich planet, there was not always an abundance of oxygen on Earth.

Scientists have predicted that the presence of methane in the atmosphere will increase in the future. A situation with very little oxygen will be seen. Such a situation will be seen after another billion or one billion years. It is known that such an event of oxygen reduction occurred once about 2.4 billion years ago. Scientists call that event the Great Oxidation Event.

Kazumi Ozaki, an environmental scientist at Toho University in Japan, said, “The sun has been illuminating our planet for many years. The Earth’s life has evolved based on the carbonate-silicate geochemical cycle. According to one model, a deoxygenation or oxygen-free state is being predicted in the atmosphere.

In the future, the lack of atmospheric oxygen may create conditions similar to those of the Archean Earth in the past. Then, oxygen levels will drop sharply to such a level. Such a situation may arise before the onset of humid greenhouse conditions in the Earth’s climate system.”

The brightness of the sun is increasing. At the same time, the increase in the temperature of the earth will increase the rate of decomposition of carbon dioxide gas. Less carbon dioxide means that the functioning of photosynthetic organisms like plants will stop. As a result, there will be less oxygen.

Scientists have predicted in a previous report that “radiation from the sun will dry up our planet’s oceans in about 2 billion years. Then there will be a decrease in oxygen. This will lead to the death of many life forms on Earth.” Chris Reinhard, a scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, said that the amount of oxygen will decrease to a very extreme level. There will be about a million times less oxygen than today. The study on the estimated decrease in oxygen has been published in Nature Geoscience.