Atmospheric Oxygen

Published On: May 6, 2013
129 words
Views: 949

Ralph Keeling is the current program director of the Scripps CO2 Program. He is also a Professor and the Principal Investigator for the Atmospheric Oxygen Research Group at SIO.

Atmospheric Oxygen Levels are Decreasing

Oxygen levels are decreasing globally due to fossil-fuel burning. The changes are too small to have an impact on human health, but are of interest to the study of climate change and carbon dioxide. These plots show the atmospheric O2 concentration relative to the level around 1985. The observed downward trend amounts to 19 ‘per meg’ per year. This corresponds to losing 19 O2 molecules out of every 1 million O2 molecules in the atmosphere each year. scrippso2.ucsd.edu

Station Daily Averages of CO2 and O2/N2 scrippso2.ucsd.edu/plots

POPULAR

FinalCut Pro License Fundraiser

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

About the Author: Chris Machens

Chris Machens
Chris covers the climate since 2011, and when not posting articles to the site he usually works on our next video production.
    Subscribe
    Notify of
    guest

    2 Comments
    Oldest
    Newest Most Voted
    Inline Feedbacks
    View all comments
    trackback

    […] land life profoundly. Of particular concern is the ocean’s phytoplankton situation as it is responsible for roughly 50% of the atmosphere’s oxygen content. Warmer waters create coral bleaching, thus destroys the world’s coral reef’s, a ocean […]

    trackback

    […] land life profoundly. Of particular concern is the ocean’s phytoplankton situation as it is responsible for roughly 50% of the atmosphere’s oxygen content. Warmer waters increase storm intensity/precipitation and create coral bleaching, thus destroys the […]