Is there enough Oxygen?

Question

As I know:

All living beings breath in Oxygen and breath out CO2.

Trees/Plants release Oxygen during photosynthesis, but they also consume Oxygen.

Is there any other process (other than photosynthesis) due to which Oxygen is being produced in earth's atmosphere?

With so may living beings consuming Oxygen, isn't there a danger of consuming all the available Oxygen in earth's surface some time in future?

Environmentalists keep talking about growing CO levels and CO2 levels etc. and marine biologists talk about available oxygen content for acqua-beings. But, I haven't heard any one talking about total available Oxygen content.

Is there any one measuring total available Oxygen content in earth's atmosphere and how/whether it is either growing or depleting?

Answer 1

Yes there is plenty of O2, God made sure of that when he created the world.

Answer 2

first off...all living things don't breathe in oxygen.....all living things THAT BREATHE, breathe in oxygen...

but anyways...there's no way we will run out of oxygen... the majority of our oxygen produced actually comes from the sea.... there are way more plants and things that perform photosynthesis in the sea than there are humans breathing... as to the other question about measuring oxygen... I'm sure someone has....but there is so much that the value may as well be a sideways 8...

don't worry about holding your breath to conserve ; )

Answer 3

Plants consume less oxygen than the produce.  That means they produce a net amount of oxygen.  This oxygen offsets the amount required by the animals that eat them.  Too much CO2 is much more dangerous than too little oxygen, not just atmospherically, but biologically as well.  In other words, we'll be long dead from other atmospheric problems before we run out of oxygen.

Answer 4

Plants exhale O2 as a waste gas, the do not breath it in; they do use water though.

Plant life on the land put enough oxygen into the atmosphere to make it possible for animal life to crawl out of the ocean and still breathe.  Without plants we would have no oxygen.

One reason why the Co2 levels are rising is because we are burning fossil fuels; the remains of dead plants from the time of the dinosaurs.  So we are cutting down more trees, burning them, burning the trees from millions of years ago and have been doing this for thousands of years.  That is why the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen and started to cause global warming.

According to Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthe...

“A commonly used but slightly simplified equation for photosynthesis is:

6 CO2 + 12 H2O + photons → C6H12O6 + 6 O2 + 6 H2O

carbon dioxide + water + light energy → glucose + oxygen + water”

You can see that for ever 6 atoms of carbon dioxide absorbed 12 atoms (O2) of oxygen are created.  Yes some of the oxygen is used by the plant as is half the water absorbed by the plant.

According to Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_a...

"The Earth's atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the planet Earth and retained by the Earth's gravity. It contains roughly (by molar content/volume) 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, trace amounts of other gases, and a variable amount (average around 1%) of water vapor."

The Science Fiction TV series Sea Quest addressed the idea of a totally clear cut Amazon forest.  Genetically altered humans were breed who didn't need as much oxygen and oxygen generators were created for the rest of us.  That world also had a global warming problem and much of the land was flooded.

This is why stars like Harrison Ford want us to help save the Amazon Rain Forest.  Every year more and more of it and forest in New Guinea is clear cut by burning the trees to be replaced with civilization or less plant dense farms.  The loss of the tropical rain forests will result in less oxygen for the rest of the world to breathe.  Since the number of animals (humans) is increasing there is a real danger of eventually running out of oxygen.

The amount of oxygen present in the atmosphere used to be higher; the dinosaurs had more of it to breathe, which might explain why they were so active and so large.  The mega mammals that rose after them had the same advantage.  However, one possible adaption to a lower level of oxygen on the earth could be smaller species.

Originally most of the oxygen was locked up in iron oxide in the early earth, it wasn’t until the formation of land and the colonization of it by plants that that oxygen was released.

Anerobic animals (organisms that don't use oxygen) do exist, but they are far out numbered by the number of animal species that do use oxygen.

Kyle J is wrong man is upseting the balance of plants to animals and that will create a dangerous drop in oxygen levels.  However, this is a long term problem with a lot of time to address and solve.   However, the simplest solution is to stop burning down the rain forests.