Maybe the scarier idea is that there just isn't as much gas in the atmosphere as there has been in the past in general. Most people don't know this, but during the hadean period there were 22 atmospheres of CO2 in the early atmosphere by pressure. A good chunk of that ended up getting locked up in rocks. A lot of the sedimentary rock that we see is carbonates, which came about from life-forming shells out of the CO2 and calcium in the water.
It's crazy to think that there's entire mountains of the stuff now, and those processes do continue today, but on the other hand look at Mars. Now a lot more of its atmosphere went away due to lack of a magnetic field, but the future of Earth could look a lot like the present of Mars.
It's crazy to think that there's entire mountains of the stuff now, and those processes do continue today, but on the other hand look at Mars. Now a lot more of its atmosphere went away due to lack of a magnetic field, but the future of Earth could look a lot like the present of Mars.
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