Imagine if, just for five seconds, all the oxygen on Earth disappeared. What would happen? How would it affect everything around us? Let’s find out in this exciting “what if” scenario.
Oxygen is super important for life on our planet. It makes up about 21% of the air we breathe, while most of the rest is nitrogen. Without oxygen, plants, animals, water, and humans like us wouldn’t be able to survive.
Five seconds may not seem like a long time to be without oxygen. Most of us can hold our breath for at least thirty seconds. During those five seconds, our bodies might not even notice anything strange. But the world around us would change a lot.
Without oxygen, things made of concrete, like the Hoover Dam and the Pantheon dome, would collapse right away. Oxygen is like a special glue that holds concrete together. Also, any metal that doesn’t have a special protective layer would instantly stick together. It would be like gluing metal pieces together without any glue!
If you were chilling at the beach when this happened, you would get a bad sunburn. The ozone layer, which is made of oxygen, protects us from the sun’s harmful rays. Without oxygen, that layer would be gone, and the sun would become dangerous for our skin. It would be like staying out in the sun for too long without any sunscreen.
Losing oxygen would also make the air pressure drop a lot. It would feel like going down 2,000 meters in an instant! Our ears wouldn’t have time to adjust, and they might even burst.
Not only that, but things would stop working too. Cars and planes that don’t run on electricity wouldn’t work anymore. They need oxygen for the engines to work. So, planes would fall from the sky, and cars would stop moving. It would be like everything suddenly stopped, and it would be very dark outside because the sky wouldn’t reflect as much sunlight.
And guess what? The Earth’s surface, called the crust, would break apart. The crust has 45% oxygen, so without it, everything would crumble. It would be like walking on a floor that suddenly disappeared beneath your feet!
But don’t worry, this is just a fun “what if” scenario. In real life, we will always have enough oxygen to breathe and stay safe. So, take a nice deep breath and enjoy the fact that oxygen is always there for us.
