Earth
Photo Source: NASA

This earth of ours has many problems. We are over populated, always at war somewhere, we have holes in our ozone layer and maybe we are even in a warming trend. We have been told that it is only a matter of time before we are struck by a large meteor and that we are losing our top soil at an ever alarming rate. Scientists are saying that some of our crops are in danger and in some areas of this world, people are starving from lack of food. If we wanted to, we could paint a pretty grim picture of our life. We are also blessed and many forget this. We have a beautiful blue sky overhead, clear water, livable climate in most places and many of us have enough food to eat.

We now have a new problem that doesn't seem to be as popular as any of the others, but yet, it could turn out to be more significant than any other problem that we face. It turns out the earthly oxygen supply has been decreasing since the late 1980s. I want to be fair about this, so I have to say that this was when we first began to measure it. The reason that I am stressing this point is that it might have been decreasing for thousands or even millions of years before that date, or it might have only started to decrease a few years prior. We will never know the answer to that question, but we still have to be ever diligent. When we say that we breathe oxygen we don't mean that we are breathing air that is actually composed of 100% oxygen. Our air contains about 21% oxygen along with a host of other gases. If we we were to breathe just pure oxygen then it most likely would harm us after a given period of time. Experiments on pigs breathing 100% oxygen at normal pressure have shown that they developed things like pulmonary edema, chest pains and even blindness to mention a few harmful results. If the pressure is reduced then pure oxygen can be breathed for a much longer time without any harmful side effects. The astronauts in the Gemini and Apollo programs breathed pure oxygen and were fine except for the terrible fire that killed several of them, that was due to the oxygen atmosphere igniting from a spark.

So what is causing this decrease in oxygen in our atmosphere. There are quite a few different theories and I even have one of my own. The most favored theory is that since plants create oxygen and we are cutting down rain forests at an accelerating rate, we are doing away with our oxygen factory. I have to admit that this does make a lot of sense and may be correct, but I think that my theory might also have some merit and may be at least partially right. The population on the earth is ever increasing. The population of the world in 1989 was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 billion people. The population today is about 6 billion people. That is about 1 billion more people breathing in air, which contains oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide The population had been increasing at a steady rate and thus my theory states that this alone could have reduced the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Some may argue that animal species are decreasing, thus balancing the increase in human population, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Some other causes that are being brought forth are that algae might be decreasing thus decreasing oxygen, others say more and more cars, truck and diesel trains are pouring into countries and that these things use up oxygen.

Oxygen Producing Trees
Photo Source: Blast CD

Some scientists state that the minimum amount of oxygen required for human life is 18%. I wonder about this figure because it would be right if we suddenly had less than 18% in the atmosphere. We would die, but by reducing the amount of oxygen very slightly over many thousands of years, our bodies might adopt to using a lesser amount. The human body is very adaptive as we all know, so I don't think that this is too far fetched. Maybe our lungs would get bigger and be able to store more oxygen from the atmosphere to make up for the shortfall. Also the fossil fuel burning will have stopped in a few hundred years as there will be no fuel available since all reserves will be used up. This will either slow the oxygen depletion or actually increase the amount of oxygen. One thing that I wonder about is will breathing less oxygen benefit us in the long run? Wouldn't it be something to find out that some of our diseases are caused by free radicals in oxygen?

Every time a carbon dioxide atom enters our atmosphere it bonds to two oxygen atoms. This in itself decreases the amount of oxygen available. Earth's photosynthetic capacity has declined. Countering the argument that algae and plankton may have decreased, most scientists state that they have remained steady and that the decrease in this process is due to less plants, which means forests. What really surprised the scientific community was the fact that air bubbles were found in amber and when they were analyzed, they were found to contain 38% oxygen. Folks, this means that we have lost almost 50% of our oxygen and we don't know what time period this has happened over. For all we know, we might have been at a steady 38% oxygen until the industrial revolution or even later, or on the other hand, maybe the earth has been exhibiting a decrease in oxygen since it was formed?

It is certainly hard to ponder this question without measurements from the past. Maybe a decrease in oxygen in the atmosphere is what really wiped out the dinosaurs. Maybe their huge bodies required more oxygen than they could get at some point? As for how much oxygen is really in our atmosphere, there seems to be a huge disagreement between scientists. The amount I cited was 21%, which seems to be the most popular guess, but estimates range all the way down to 16%, which is lower that the threshold for oxygen of 18%. Well there always seems to be disagreement on things like this.

So what can we do to increase the oxygen in the atmosphere? I guess there are two general approaches to this problem. One would be to reduce carbon dioxide and the other would be to increase oxygen or both. If we somehow eliminated all the carbon dioxide except for what animals and humans put out, that might increase the oxygen in the air. Planting trees in large areas and stopping the destruction of the rain forests would be another way of helping to increase oxygen. One impractical suggestion might be to transplant much of our population on other planets, but then the problem would start again there. What will happen when the population doubles before 2100? Remember we are not only talking about people here, but the things people get. If we are still relying on internal combustion by then, then the earth will truly be in trouble.