https://www.sciencealert.com/enjoy-it-while-you-can-dropping-oxygen-will-eventually-suffocate-most-life-on-earth

(Aaron Foster/The Image Bank/Getty Images)ENVIRONMENT

Enjoy It While You Can:

DAVID NIELD9 OCTOBER 2021

For now, life is flourishing on our oxygen-rich planet, but Earth wasn’t always that way – and scientists have predicted that, in the future, the atmosphere will revert back to one that’s rich in methane and low in oxygen.https://39e044c1400623755f8709ae964ab15e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

This probably won’t happen for another billion years or so. But when the change comes, it’s going to happen fairly rapidly, the study from earlier this year suggests.

This shift will take the planet back to something like the state it was in before what’s known asthe Great Oxidation Event(GOE) around 2.4 billion years ago.

What’s more, the researchers behind the new study say that atmospheric oxygen is unlikely to be a permanent feature of habitable worlds in general, which has implications for our efforts to detect signs of life further out…