The Great Suffocation Is (Almost) Upon Us!

You can forget climate change or global pandemics. Scientists have unveiled an even more devastating doomsday scenario:

We’re all going to suffocate. Nearly everything on Earth.

Eventually… like, a billion years eventually.

All complex aerobic life on Earth as we know it will eventually die as oxygen levels deplete in our planet’s atmosphere.

Fortunately, that won’t happen for another billion years or so, according to an international team of researchers. But eventually, New Scientist reports, Earth’s atmosphere will return to the considerably lower oxygen levels of its early history — and that will be bad news for any surviving inhabitants, including descendants of today’s humans.

Unless the green-left succeed in dismantling our industrialised society, our billion-years-hence descendents won’t even be hanging around on a small, unregarded planet in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy.

In any case, such a projected scenario would be something of a back-to-the-future for planet Earth. Slightly less than 3 billion years ago, the Earth had almost no oxygen in its atmosphere, which was instead made up of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. But then a bunch of upstart new organisms discovered photosynthesis. They feasted happily on the CO₂-rich atmosphere and belched out oxygen. A lot of oxygen. Over the next hundreds of millions of years, the Earth underwent the Great Oxidation Event, which dramatically altered the atmosphere to the oxygen-rich one we know and depend on today.

(A side effect of this massive oxygenation was that massive amounts of iron hitherto suspended in the oceans reacted with all the new-fangled oxygen. The seas literally rusted. Those gargantuan rust deposits are familiar to us today as such massive iron-ore deposits as in Australia’s geologically ancient west.)

In the distant future, those oxygen-starved days will return.

The team, made up of environmental scientists from Toho University in Japan and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta say that in about 1.08 billion years, atmospheric oxygen levels will drop to below one percent[…]

“The drop in oxygen is very, very extreme — we’re talking around a million times less oxygen than there is today,” Georgia Tech researcher Christopher Reinhard told New Scientist. That process could occur over the span of only 10,000 years, a blink in time considering our planet’s age of roughly 4.5 billion years.

As the Sun grows hotter, it will cause more carbon dioxide to absorb heat in the atmosphere. Eventually, these CO₂ levels will become low enough that plants will no longer be able to rely on photosynthesis, triggering a mass extinction event.

This drop will “most probably be triggered before the inception of moist greenhouse conditions in Earth’s climate system and before the extensive loss of surface water from the atmosphere,” the team writes in a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience today.

Filling in for the lack of oxygen, the atmosphere will see a considerable increase in methane gases, with levels rising as high as 10,000 times the amount when compared to today.

The ozone will also be depleted, causing the Earth’s surface to be bombarded with ultraviolet light from the Sun.

Futurism

So, not exactly fun times for all.

Remind me not to make any plans for 1 000 000 000 AD.

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