The mysterious disappearance of oxygen from Earth's atmosphere

American scientists have discovered that oxygen is slowly disappearing from the Earth's atmosphere and the cause of the phenomenon remains a mystery.

The amount of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is decreasing and scientists have not found the cause. Photo: News Nation.

A research team at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, found that the amount of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere has decreased by 0.7% over the past 800,000 years by analyzing air bubbles accumulated in ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, according to Science Alert. The research results were published on September 23 in the journal Science.

But figuring out why is difficult because Earth’s oxygen is constantly recycled by humans, plants, animals, and even silicate rocks. For now, studying ice cores is the best way for researchers to get a permanent record of how much oxygen is still present. Even though the amount of oxygen lost is small, the data can shed light on how Earth became habitable.

Scientists have proposed the erosion hypothesis to explain the decline in oxygen. Erosion causes more oxidization of sediments, which further reduces the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Another plausible cause is the impact of climate change over the past few million years, which has caused the Earth to rapidly warm, leading to increased oxygen consumption.

The air we breathe today is made up of oxygen (21%), nitrogen, argon, and carbon dioxide (CO2). The effects of the decline in oxygen are not as severe as those caused by CO2, but it does affect the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface and its climate.

According to VNE