Why is most of the atmosphere nitrogen?
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The two major sources of atmospheric nitrogen on Earth are volcanoes and bottom-dwelling denitrifying bacteria.
Venus used to be more like Earth, but as the Sun grew hotter, Venus’s oceans evaporated, temperatures spiraled upward, plate tectonics shut off, and massive amounts of carbon dioxide were dumped into the atmosphere. Venus still has a lot of nitrogen in its atmosphere, in fact it has four times as much as Earth’s atmosphere. That’s the product of a long history of volcanic activity. But it’s a much smaller percentage of the whole, because the atmosphere is now extremely dense and most of it is CO2.
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