![\"In-the-Distant-Future-All-Earth-Creatures-May-Asphyxiate-From-Lack-of-Oxygen-rapidnews\"](\"https:\/\/dailyrapidnews.com\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/In-the-Distant-Future-All-Earth-Creatures-May-Asphyxiate-From-Lack-of-Oxygen-rapidnews.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The study was part of NASA\u2019s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, an initiative to study the habitability of exoplanets. While the study paints a dire picture for life on Earth, the results could have larger implications for how we define a habitable planet \u2014 or at least if a planet once was capable of harboring life.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe drop in oxygen is very, very extreme \u2014 we\u2019re talking around a million times less oxygen than there is today,\u201d Georgia Tech researcher Christopher Reinhard\u00a0told\u00a0New<\/em>\u00a0Scientist<\/em>. That process could occur over the span of only 10,000 years, a blink in time considering our planet\u2019s age of\u00a0roughly 4.5 billion years.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This drop will \u201cmost probably be triggered before the inception of moist greenhouse conditions in Earth\u2019s climate system and before the extensive loss of surface water from the atmosphere,\u201d the team writes in\u00a0a paper\u00a0published in the journal\u00a0Nature Geoscience<\/em>\u00a0today.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The ozone will also be depleted, causing the Earth\u2019s surface to be bombarded with ultraviolet light from the Sun.<\/p>\n While oxygen plays a crucial part with how we understand life as we know it here on Earth, the study \u201csuggests that even for planets around other stars that are very similar to Earth, large amounts of oxygen may not be detected in their atmosphere, even if they can support, or have supported, complex life,\u201d Kevin Ortiz Ceballos at the University of Puerto Rico, who was not involved with the research, told\u00a0New Scientist<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" All complex aerobic life on Earth as we know it will eventually die as oxygen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"In-the-Distant-Future-All-Earth-Creatures-May-Asphyxiate-From-Lack-of-Oxygen-rapidnews-dailyrapid\"](\"https:\/\/dailyrapidnews.com\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/In-the-Distant-Future-All-Earth-Creatures-May-Asphyxiate-From-Lack-of-Oxygen-rapidnews-dailyrapid.jpg\")
<\/p>\n