Why does the oxygen level in the air doesn’t change dramatically, when most of the trees shed their leaves in the winter?
In: Earth Science
The oxygen in the air isn’t really there because of the current trees, or any other current organism making oxygen via photosynthesis. Even if all the trees, algae, and bacteria that perform photosynthesis stopped suddenly, it would take a while to deplete the levels noticably. There’s a massive surplus of oxygen in the atmosphere. The larger northern hemisphere having a portion of its deciduous plants stop for a portion of a year winter is nothing.
How did the oxygen surplus get there? The oxygen is there from a couple billions years of photosynthesis, and then the organic matter not decaying or being burned. See fossil fuels, and what we are burning is just a tiny fraction of the organic molecules trapped that never turned back. Lot of carbon trapped in the ground, that never reunited back with the oxygen in the air.
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