The oxygen levels on earth continue to drop, and scientists are struggling to find an explanation. There’s no cause for alarm yet, as the steady decline has been going on for roughly 800,000 years.
However, a new study on the phenomenon conducted by Princeton University researchers is creating considerable interest within the scientific community and raising questions about the possible effects of fossil fuel usage, according to a report from Gizmodo.
“We did this analysis more out of interest than any expectation,” Daniel Stolper, a Princeton University geochemist and lead author of the study, told Gizmodo. “We didn’t know whether oxygen would be going up, down, or flat. It turns out there is a very clear trend.”
The researches estimated that the atmospheric oxygen levels on earth have dropped by approximately 0.7 percent during the past 800,000 years, but they’re not certain about how steady the levels were prior to that.