The loss may be slow, but over millions of years wouldn't this add up to a measurable loss in Earth's total mass? Or does that get offset by the introduction of new mass from meteors? We know our moon is slowly drifting away and I just wonder if that could be partly due to the Earth losing mass and therefore its gravitational effect?
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
3 points (80.0% liked)
Space, the final frontier
2276 readers
6 users here now
c/space Rules
- Submissions must be related to Space
- No sensationalist/ misleading/ unscientific content
- No spam
- No low-effort or meme images
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
I mean you could just read the article before commenting
But we’re not in danger of losing all our air, or even most of it the way Mars did in its ancient past. Even with the polar wind blowing at full strength, Earth is losing hydrogen just a little at a time. Meanwhile, things happening on our planet’s surface and deep underground keep pouring new gases into the atmosphere: volcanoes and photosynthesis do most of that work.
Well I did in fact read the article, and that doesn't answer my question about MASS. The new oxygen is being created from materials that are already on this planet, while some mass is slowly being lost into space. Lost mass means the planet as a whole has a lower gravitational pull. So is that cumulative mass over millions of years enough to account for the moon slowly pulling away, or is that entirely due to the moon's orbit being just slightly faster than the Earth's gravity pulls it back? Which comes back to the original question of whether the accumulation of meteor strikes makes up for the mass of oxygen being lost to space, or if the Earth actually weighs less now than it did say 100 million years ago?
The mass that's being lost through this process is infinitesimal in the great scheme of things.