Question: what would we do without our atmosphere

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 14 Nov 2014:

We wouldn’t do much, ‘cos we’d be dead 🙂

Without wind to cause waves, the ocean currents would slow down or stop, which would halt the flow of nutrients into the water that marine bacteria and algae need to live. As soon as they died out, the bigger creatures that feed on them would starve. There are a lot of people in the world who mostly live on fish, they’d probably starve to death if they didn’t find food somewhere else.

But they’d be too busy suffocating to death to worry about their next meal! The atmosphere contains the oxygen we need to power the chemical reactions that go on in our body, and it contains nitrogen, which we don’t need to breathe, but we do need it for other things. If you know any farmers or gardeners they night tell you about the nitrogen content of fertilisers that help plants grow. Soil needs nitrogen in it for plants to grow and all of that comes from the nitrogen in our atmosphere. We get a lot of our nitrogen from eating plants, and if we’ve no plants, we’re in trouble.

That’s not even mentioning the fact that the atmosphere is a powerful shield against the sun’s radiation. You might feel really hot in summer but that’s just peanuts to the amount of heat you’d be getting if the sunlight didn’t have to pass through our atmosphere first. Without the atmosphere’s shielding and pressure, the oceans would likely boil away into space. We’d probably boil to death with them. The atmosphere also filters out some really harmful forms of radiation too so even if you were set up in a little bubble with oxygen and air conditioning, you’d quickly get skin cancer or radiation poisoning. Neither of them are any fun at all.

So yeah, our atmosphere is really important, and we need it to live. 🙂