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EcchiOli t1_izsfurf wrote

That said, I'll mention it just in case, that's not an issue at all if you were thinking of the "stock" of available oxygen.

A few months after that Avengers movie with the Thanos snap, there was this interesting reddit discussion, in which "what would happen if that snap also wiped half of the oxygen-producing plants and plankton" was asked. And the fascinating answer is that the atmosphere contains centuries of oxygen in stock before a risk to run out is even foreseeable. So, we're cool ;)

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Mammoth-Mud-9609 t1_izsmler wrote

In addition the production of oxygen by cyanobacteria led to the first great extinction event and then to the longest ice age in the history of Earth. The Huronian glaciation saw the Earth turn into a gigantic snowball for 300 million years and could have seen the end evolution of advanced life on Earth. https://youtu.be/qx5VaEaNtKo

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EcchiOli t1_izsudpd wrote

Pretty fascinating in its own right, that those microorganisms to whom we owe our oxygen supply initiated a worldscale genocide of the formerly dominating lifeforms, and almost wiped themselves in the process, hehe.

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Game_Minds t1_izuf795 wrote

Also, plants and algae are mostly limited ecologically by direct proximal competition for light and other static resources, and half of them being gone randomly presumably just means literally twice as much room to grow in the next generation-- which could be a matter of months. Trees are harder to replace etc., but not impossible

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Chlorophilia t1_izwli4h wrote

Additionally, most primary productivity occurs in the ocean by phytoplankton, which have a turnover time on the order of days. They are generally limited by light and/or nutrient availability rather than growth or reproductive rate, so it would be a matter of days before the marine system recovered.

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