What If the World Lost Oxygen for 60 Seconds

Imagine walking down the street, minding your own business, when suddenly you realize that something is terribly wrong. You try to take a breath, but it feels like your lungs are on fire. At the same time, buildings start crumbling around you, and the sky becomes dark. Is this the end of the world? You wonder. But before you can get an answer, you vaporize into a puff of hydrogen gas. This is what would happen if the world lost oxygen for 60 seconds.

There are two very different scenarios that would unfold depending on what happened to the oxygen on Earth. If all the oxygen, including the oxygen already bound to other molecules like in water, rocks, and pretty much everything else on our planet, disappeared, the destruction of Earth would be almost instantaneous. On the other hand, if only the oxygen in the atmosphere disappeared, things would turn out very differently. There would be less death and destruction, and there would be a chance you'd survive.

Scenario 1: All oxygen in the atmosphere disappears.

1 second after all oxygen in the atmosphere disappears: You are standing on the surface of the Earth, looking up at the sky, daydreaming of a better world. The moment the oxygen disappears from the atmosphere, you notice that the sky seems to change slightly. It's the gases and small dust particles within our atmosphere that cause the sky to look blue. The loss of oxygen in the atmosphere will cause a slight change in this process as the sun's light now has less gas to travel through. However, even though the sky may be changing before your very eyes, you have bigger problems to focus on at the moment.

Your inner ear explodes from the instantaneous change in air pressure from the lack of oxygen. Our atmosphere is made up of around 21 percent oxygen. If all of these molecules suddenly disappear, it will drastically change the atmospheric pressure pushing on your body. The change in pressure isn't what's dangerous but how quickly this change happens. Like with scuba diving to deeper depths, your body and inner ear can adjust, but only if the pressure changes gradually over time. If the oxygen in our atmosphere were to disappear all at once, it would be like going from sea level to around 6,500 feet above sea level instantaneously. This change in air pressure causes your eardrum to rupture and capillaries in your body to burst. Blood pours out of your ear as you look around the new oxygenless world in terror. And still, the worst is yet to come.

3 seconds after all oxygen in the atmosphere disappears: You gasp for air in horror as people around you begin to panic. And even though you can still feel air going into your lungs, it is not satisfying your body's need for oxygen. This element is vitally important for many life processes, but the main one is that your cells need it for cellular respiration to create energy. Without oxygen, this process cannot occur, and your cells will eventually start to die.

As you inhale the gases that remain in the air, the ones your body can't use circulate around your bloodstream and are released back out of your body as you exhale. However, without oxygen in the air, this whole process becomes somewhat pointless. You are just breathing in waste, and you begin to asphyxiate.

5 seconds after all oxygen in the atmosphere disappears: Even though there is no oxygen for you to breathe, you will not instantly die. If by some miracle, all of the oxygen returns within the next 60 seconds and your lungs are still working, you will likely be fine. On average, a person can last a minute or two without oxygen before permanent damage occurs to the brain. You still continuously suck in.