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Our Atmosphere Is Leaking Oxygen and Scientists Don't Know Why (gizmodo.com)
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."
humans cause disaster?
1,2,3,4,5
Heat rises and with all the a-holes flapping, 'cause you know, everyone's got one, no wonder there's a huge updraft!
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.
BS. Read the Bible.
You mean that in a universe absolutely teeming with life, our planet won't support life forever? Why us?
Feeling your oxygen levels are too low these days?
Ever think back to the good old days where there was enough oxygen for everyone?
Well worry no more, dear Reader, we have the solution!
Ordinary water, the stuff you drink, the stuff you make your tea in, contains 2 important chemicals.
One of them is oxygen.
'So why aren't we getting the oxygens outta there?', I hear you say.
Separating the oxygen requires a little energy to pull it off from its other 2 partners: 2 hydrogen atoms. (Atoms are like little balls with velcro attached)
However, a fun feature of hydrogen is it ignites really easily.
So, you see where we are going! Use traditional fuel to start it off, get the hydrogen, burn it to get more oxygens!
We could have all the fuel and oxygen we'd ever need!
BUT!
This neat little trick is hated by the oil industry because they know it will ruin them in a day.
They have spread lots of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about the safety issues around hydrogen thaf it essentially killed all momentum.
Hello?! We use deep-fat friers in Kitchens every day! Don't see towns exploding do we?
To produce your own hydrogen revolution, order your free book below.
It outlines every step in detail, with pictures and where to buy the required tools.
Change "suck" to "blow".
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.
"A bit?" We have been in a continuous ice age for the past few million years. 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.
Elementist space border police are shooting oxygen elements at an alarming rate. This violence has to stop!
Let's start burning the planet in civil protest.
Cold on geological time-scales, not human ones, even historical or pre-historical.
If we loose the multi-millennial ice age chill we will be pretty miserable
- crops will suffer
- some types will fail across currently productive regions
- some will just show reduced efficiency (there is only so much even C4 photosynthesis can do about the temperature)
- areas will become to hot for human habitation that are currently occupied
- rain pasterns will become more focused and higher in total
- some areas will become too dry
- some areas will suffer from excessive rainfall
(and this is all excluding the direct effects of temperature CO2 acidifies water it is dissolved in, the coca-cola effect is not good for our supply of fish)
None of this is fatal but expensive inconvenient and unpleasant, I would like to avoid as much of this as we can so I am frustrated by these sorts of minimising comments. Yes the dinosaurs survived hotter, we are not dinosaurs, and I want to do more than just survive.
We lost the combination to the air shield? Quick! Someone check their luggage! It might be the same combination.
We'll make great pets
Perhaps it has something to do with us cutting down all the forests and paving the planet.
I can't make a proper BILLY MAYS HERE joke about oxi-clean using up all the O2 without ALL CAPS. :(
It's because of all the SUVs we started driving 800,000 years ago. We created too much CO2 and now it's pushing the oxygen out of our gravitational field.
It's bonded to carbon atoms...
That's not climate, that's weather. I'm really sick of these so-called "scientists" pulling this alarmist "research" out of their statist asses to garner yet more of that sweet sweet government giveaway grant money. This isn't "science" -- reproducible results or it didn't happen. Until then, I say we drive it like we stole it.
In the last 800,000 years there are reactions taking place that trap oxygen elsewhere?
...ok maybe it wasn't...but best to assume it was until we prove otherwise. In any case I can have a convincing looking graph that people agree with and change their lifestyles as a result ready by Monday.
não pára de chegar nego nessa merda de creche-puteiro do jeito de ser.
Guess this is what we have to look forward to :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Human population has expanded tremendously in the last part of those 800,000 years, and all of us consume oxygen. It probably can't explain the first 700,000 years, though, since total global hominid population was probably fairly constant, with one species supplanting another.
But what about methane? We know it leaks from places like hydrate ices underwater, especially when there is an earthquake and landslide, and of course since it exists underground as natural gas, we know it can leak from there, too, if an earthquake happens to rupture the ground enough. Methane is a light gas that will rise toward the stratosphere, and likely react in the ozone layer. I'm talking about a long term slow thing, not fast enough to deplete ozone as fast as solar ultraviolet makes more from atmospheric oxygen. But the reaction produces water and CO2, and takes oxygen out of the air.
People didn't know how metals work, but they were able to calculate odds of a coin toss. How does that work?
ya see why you dont want to use up all the water yet ...damn im thirsty
http://www.livescience.com/39938-earth-had-oxygen-earlier.html
I'm not a climate change denier, but this exact sort of thing, along with the link above is the reason a lot of people DO have a lot of doubt we're being fed a load of crap about global warming/climate change/ CO2 levels from a billion years ago...
we'll just 3D print more oxygen. It's the new way.
"Atmospheric oxygen levels have dropped by 0.7 percent..." Are we talking absolute percentage or percentage points? Air consists roughly 20.9% of O2. Does this mean that the 20.9% has come down from 21.6% (meaning 3.2% of total O2 is missing) or that it has come down from 21.05%?
The article didn't say which one was meant, and I generally don't trust sensationalist media to understand the difference.
Maybe because modern scientists today don't seem to know much of anything, either by ignoring research of the past and pretending it never happened, being lazy, ignorant, or emotionally or intellectually biased, or by flat out accepting bribes, or because nature is not binary and some mysteries really are outside of the grasp of logic-based thinking or algorithmic calculations, or, or, or. It isn't exactly an environment that is smiling on legitimate research these days.
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.
That's what error bars are for.
Ezekiel 23:20
Over population rears its ugly head again. Humans burn fuels. the more humans the more fuel is burned. Pollution and the destruction of nature all result from excessively large populations. But no politician dare touch the subject or he will be out of politics forever. Imagine talking about mandatory birth control in America and hoping to be re-elected to any position. And it is far from popular to mention that only a rigid form of government such as in China can regulate birth rates.
It is because there are too many craka's in the world and they are using up all the 02. Also America is evil and racist and hates puppies. President Obama in an order to fix the crakagenic planetwide oxygen deficiency has come up with a plan to fix the problem.
1) All first born white babies will be sent to planed parenthood to be aborted and given up for medical research
2) For every white baby that has been given to medical research, and poor disadvantaged Latino will be given be imported and sent to a govt run child support and protection agency. This will be paid for by sensical taxes on white people who caused the problem in the first place.
3) We will eliminate the military, and give it to President Putin and China. These more noble nations who are not the evil America will use our military to ensure peace and stability for the Ukraine and SE Asia.
If we just enact this common sense legislation, cracka genic planetwide oxygen deficiency can be eliminated. This change is coming to an executive order soon.
Its being sequestered. We can grow more plants to recover the oxygen.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?...
Do you have a 401k? If so, you are a hypocrite, because you cannot know what the stock market is going to do tomorrow, yet you are saying for certain that it's going to be higher 40 years from now.
Apparently it's the new "thing" !?
Because if not, there is no way I can see that "leaked" is the right word.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
http://i.imgur.com/1kvpLb6.jpg Scifi seems to always come true
If this doesn't do it, you most likely don't have kids yet or never want them. And you somehow think the rest of your life will be free of hard consequences from the environment. The alternative is that you think something more basic will get you such as war or famine.
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.
1. Many, many more people
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?
An all of this (many, many more people, ICEs, cutting down rainforests) happened over the last 800,000 years?
I can smell a Nobel prize! Someone has some revolutionary new chemistry theories to share!
Reduced isotope ratio does not *necessarily* mean that oxygen is "leaking". It could be trapped within compounds on the planet. Just as carbon levels have decreased due to carbon being fixed in other compounds.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Tell that to Mars; it has been losing its atmosphere for the last 4 billion years. Scientists currently blame the solar wind.
Which has to with what, exactly? The article headline said *OUR* atmosphere was leaking oxygen.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
get the hydrogen, burn the hydrogen with oxygen, get no more free oxygen
FTFY
I come here for the love
Case solved.
Many people call the rain forests of the Amazon Basin the lungs of the earth. That hasn't stopped us (human beings) from slashing and burning it mercilessly for decades. If the inherent beauty of system and the species won't motivate us to stop, would preservation of what's left help with some of the environmental existential threats that face us? I'm not sure that the oxygen leakage is really an existential threat but it doesn't sound like an ideal trend, especially when combined with other factors. The overall sense I get is steady decline until we start really feeling it and wake up. It's not hard to imagine a perfect storm, and it's not impossible to imagine a semi-friendly wake up call such as people noticing it's actually getting harder to breathe, degrading to gasping for oxygen.
It's because we're not burning enough fossil fuels to release CO2 that can be turned into oxygen by plants and algae.
So they say gas bubbles trapped in frozen H2O had slightly more O2 than outside air?
Did they also have more H2?
Plusieurs députés importants ont exclu de servir dans son cabinet fantôme. Chuka Umunna est l’un d’entre eux. Il avertit, clairement agacé par les agissements des proches du leader, que les appels au rassemblement ne suffiront pas: L’unité ne viendra pas d’exigences, de menaces, de violences sur internet comme on en a vu Andy Burnham, une autre figure influente du Labour, prévient qu’il n’y aura pas de paix miraculeuse.e bataille à venir concernera la sélection des candidats pour les élections législatives. Les limites géographiques des circonscriptions sont en train d’être revues, et l’entourage de Jeremy Corbyn espère en profiter pour écarter quelques nike tn gêneurs et mettre en place ses propres candidats.Avec des militants qui l’ont élu deux fois en douze mois, le leader actuel se retrouve dans une position intouchable, au moins à court terme. Mais ramener la paix au sein du Labour risque d’être très difficile.
errors bars are totally ignored by politicians looking to "protect" from doom's day...
Having the humility to say "I know nothing" is actually being in the right mindset..
Exactly!
Damn it feels good to burn my old tires. Hell I started it with used motor oil.
Good to know the science isn't settled, you almost had me going there. Here, now drink a glass of water from one of the slums of Rio, the science isn't settled on that Typhoid "thing".
Are here, and scientists don't know why yet!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Am I the only one that finds this articles title to be a click bait formatted.
Maybe we need to switch robo-maid from suck to blow.
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 it escapes it'll just float up to the top of the atmosphere, and beyond.
And it will escape -- an atom at a time, because it's good at leading through surfaces and past fittings, or in bulk when the balloons pop or the buoyancy cells vent, or whatever -- eventually.
So, all we need to replace that lost oxygen is to become spacefaring (for the ice runs) and practical fusion power (which is only 15 to 25 years away, as it has been for about half a century).
At that rate of loss, we have time to work out the practical details.
I've done the hard part. You youngsters just have to work out those details.
(You're welcome.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Over the past 220 million years, the earth has suffered some catastrophes of which I recall two; the end of the Permian and Jurassic Eras. After each, the oxygen level was markedly lower. Back in the Permian days, it was around 36% and the carbon dioxide level was a lot higher, too. Animals and the plants they ate grew huge. The end of the Permian Era was a mega-disaster that wiped out about 99% of the species. The crocodilians and a few others survived; talk about tough! Something happened that caused a line of volcanoes to erupt across what is now Siberia. The end of the Jurassic was milder by comparison and there was another drop in oxygen level after that event. Since then, there has been a lot of competition for that 28% remaining oxygen and if it wasn't for volcanoes and plants, we'd be in a lot of trouble. The environment tends to sequester carbon dioxide as carbonates and lock them up in rocks and shells taking the oxygen along for the ride. But then, the occasional volcano belches a bunch of CO2 back in the air that the plants then turn into oxygen and carbohydrates. Conclusion: We need some more volcanoes.
Did anybody check to see if there is a gigantic vacuum cleaner in orbit?
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.
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" bubbles. That sounds like a very small sample size to then ramp up to a total global atmosphere type assumptions. Could be that local conditions were particular to the small sample. Could also be that the material the air was trapped in contributed to the oxygen content depending on the definition of "Trapped"... Most things have a fair amount of permeability to them, and while they may block some things, not all depending on size etc...
At any rate early days by the sounds of it. Seems to be an inflamed title, "Oxygen levels dropping Scientists have no idea why! Would you like to know more?"
Could more accurately be described as scientists have observed in a small sample of trapped air that oxygen levels may have been greater in the past, and are unsure as to what is the best explanation for the slight difference. Less alarmist, and probably less readers.
Well, that took about 3 minutes. The paper is in Science. If you don't have a subscription, you'll need to try something like Sci-hub.
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 disagree. We present a record of P-O2 reconstructed using O2 / N2 ratios from ancient air trapped in ice. This record indicates that P-O2 declined by 7 per mil (0.7%) over the past 800,000 years, requiring that O2 sinks were ~2% larger than sources. This decline is consistent with changes in burial and weathering fluxes of organic carbon and pyrite driven by either Neogene cooling or increasing Pleistocene erosion rates. The 800,000-year record of steady average carbon dioxide partial pressures (P-CO2) but declining P-O2 provides distinctive evidence that a silicate weathering feedback stabilizes P-CO2 on million-year time scales.
So, for starters, it's evident that the researchers (though not the non-geologists at Giz-wotsit) appreciate the difference between erosion (the mechanical break up and movement of rock) and weathering (the chemical alteration of the minerals that comprise that weathered rock). They're also well aware that with two processes in place, and a critical factor (temperature) being considerably variable in both time and space, then deconvolving what is actually going on is going to be quite difficult, if not impossible without more data (perhaps from looking at mineralogy variations in sediments deposited in different areas with different mean temperatures.
contrary to the impression that many people have got (I guess from Giz-thingy, the researchers were specifically not looking at air bubbles in the ice, but at air dissolved in the ice. "(ii) Only analyses of bubble-free ice with clathrates were considered. (para 3)" (Do I need to remind people that "clathrate" does not only mean "crystalline compound of hydrocarbon gases and water"? Probably.) They also look at the argon - nitrogen ratio to monitor for changes in the dissolution of oxygen, argon and nitrogen relative to each other due to changes in the immediate environment of the accumulating snowpack.
Could this be an artefact of measurement? Well, they've certainly considered (and rejected) that : "Our hypothesis is further supported by the observation that data from all four ice cores individually exhibit the same general trends and magnitudes of decreasing dO2 /N2 with time (table S3), even though each was drilled, stored, and analyzed differently." So, they think it's a genuine atmospheric change.
CO2 recorded in the cores does not change sufficiently or sufficiently consistently to explain the changes observed, so they ascribe a lot of the change to the weathering of pyrite - a reduced iron mineral - into oxidised iron salts ("rust", or iron-rich clays e.g. the glaucony/ glauconite familes).
There's a reason that people write papers, instead of using journalists to report their findings. It's because the details matter.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.