Take a deep breath—while you still can. Scientists warn that Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere won’t last forever, and their latest prediction suggests we have just one billion years left before the air becomes unbreathable.
Researchers ran thousands of simulations to forecast how our planet’s atmosphere will evolve. The results, published in Nature Geoscience, point to a dramatic shift: oxygen levels will crash, reverting Earth to a primordial state filled with methane and devoid of the ozone layer. This “great deoxygenation” mirrors conditions before life as we know it flourished.
“The biosphere can’t survive the combination of rising heat and vanishing CO2,” explained lead scientist Kazumi Ozaki. Earlier models estimated two billion years, but this new study halves that timeline.
The good news? Humanity won’t be around to witness it—unless we master interstellar travel. The bad news? Earth’s era of abundant oxygen is just a fleeting phase in its 4.5-billion-year history.
