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Clean Air

Did you know?

Many countries are becoming increasingly concerned about the amount of harmful chemicals in the air of their cities, this is true about Athens and Beijing

Clean Air is made up out of:

Nitrogen

Oxygen

Carbon Dioxide

Water Vapour

Noble Gases (Non reactive)

Levels of different Gases in the air depend on:

Combustion

Respiration

Photosynthesis

Evolution of the Atmosphere

Believe it or not the atmosphere has not always been the way we find it today with the same proportion of nitrogen to oxygen, like most things on Earth it has evolved over millions and millions of years. This is what happened to give us the atmosphere we know and love today.

We start in an atmosphere filled with mainly ammonia and carbon dioxide

Next volcanoes containing a massive range of gases coming from the centre of Earth itself, when the volcanoes erupted all these gases were thrown out of the Earth into its atmosphere resulting in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide and water

Ammonia in the air begins to react with the rocks to create nitrogen and even more water

Then as the Earth began to cool down a bit, the water vapour condensates to form the massive oceans that we have on Earth today.

With the oceans being created levels of carbon dioxide begin to fall as it is dissolved in the sea waters

Nitrogen just wouldn't go away because it is so nonreactive.

At this moment there was hardly any life on earth, but then life, and life that was able to photosynthesize began to evolve converting carbon dioxide into oxygen and oxygen levels go up

Now oxygen levels are just about steady as respiration/ combustion and photosynthesis cancel each other out, however with an increasing population and larger amounts of combustion carbon dioxide levels are beginning to increase.

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