Humans need oxygen to breathe. Plants produce oxygen. How do places (like a desert) with no plants for miles on miles have any life or oxygen?

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Title says it all. Just curious as to how there is anything living if there is no plants to give off oxygen. Does other stuff give off oxygen? Is there just enough on the planet in general for it to flow everywhere?

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7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most of the atmosphere’s oxygen actually comes from plankton. The oxygen appears there and expands across it until you or something else breaths it and exhales it. You don’t need to have a plant nearby to be able to breath.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The atmosphere is well mixed enough from wind, rain, thermals, storms, etc. so that you won’t have pockets of low- or high-oxygen air, unless you’re inside a building or underground. Forests and algae all over the world are essentially reverse lungs, generating oxygen for the entire world.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If I take a glass of water and drop some red food colouring in it, it mixes around a bit on its own. Over time, the liquids will mix together on their own a bit. Even more if I stir it a single time with a spoon.

Gasses are the same way. As other posters have said, there’s actually so much oxygen elsewhere that over time, it and other gasses will mix together. Add the wind into the equation, and it mixes that much faster, even over vast distances.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because there is a lot of air in the atmosphere, and some 21% of it is oxygen.

That oxygen its cycled around the world by the complex air currents that make up the weather. So in a desert, you are breathing oxygen that is carried over there by winds from hundreds of miles away.

A majority of oxygen in the atmosphere is made by plankton in the ocean. But if you were to remove all plants and plankton from the earth, we would have enough oxygen to supply 7.5 billion people and the remaining animals for about 370 years. It would be centuries before people would start suffocating and dropping dead just walking around. But nothing would be left alive in the first place by that point because of food chain collapse.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because the (solid part of the) planet rotates, and because the Sun warms up different areas as they are exposed to sunlight, you end up with a lot of wind moving the atmosphere around. [Prevailing Winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_winds) is what they’re called, and as you can see the air is “thoroughly circulated” pretty much everywhere.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Winds and air disturbance basically circulates oxygen around the planet. While humans breathe oxygen the air is about 20% oxygen, but the air humans breathe out is 16% oxygen, we don’t need a great deal of oxygen to survive.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I thought you said the titles says it all?

0 views

Title says it all. Just curious as to how there is anything living if there is no plants to give off oxygen. Does other stuff give off oxygen? Is there just enough on the planet in general for it to flow everywhere?

In: 0

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most of the atmosphere’s oxygen actually comes from plankton. The oxygen appears there and expands across it until you or something else breaths it and exhales it. You don’t need to have a plant nearby to be able to breath.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The atmosphere is well mixed enough from wind, rain, thermals, storms, etc. so that you won’t have pockets of low- or high-oxygen air, unless you’re inside a building or underground. Forests and algae all over the world are essentially reverse lungs, generating oxygen for the entire world.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If I take a glass of water and drop some red food colouring in it, it mixes around a bit on its own. Over time, the liquids will mix together on their own a bit. Even more if I stir it a single time with a spoon.

Gasses are the same way. As other posters have said, there’s actually so much oxygen elsewhere that over time, it and other gasses will mix together. Add the wind into the equation, and it mixes that much faster, even over vast distances.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because there is a lot of air in the atmosphere, and some 21% of it is oxygen.

That oxygen its cycled around the world by the complex air currents that make up the weather. So in a desert, you are breathing oxygen that is carried over there by winds from hundreds of miles away.

A majority of oxygen in the atmosphere is made by plankton in the ocean. But if you were to remove all plants and plankton from the earth, we would have enough oxygen to supply 7.5 billion people and the remaining animals for about 370 years. It would be centuries before people would start suffocating and dropping dead just walking around. But nothing would be left alive in the first place by that point because of food chain collapse.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because the (solid part of the) planet rotates, and because the Sun warms up different areas as they are exposed to sunlight, you end up with a lot of wind moving the atmosphere around. [Prevailing Winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_winds) is what they’re called, and as you can see the air is “thoroughly circulated” pretty much everywhere.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Winds and air disturbance basically circulates oxygen around the planet. While humans breathe oxygen the air is about 20% oxygen, but the air humans breathe out is 16% oxygen, we don’t need a great deal of oxygen to survive.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I thought you said the titles says it all?