Life Sustaining Oxygen

It’s time to talk about the air we breath, the oxygen we need at every minute of our lives with a fresh eye, as if it were a brand new topic, a gift that I am just unwrapping for the first time!

We are homo sapiens, supposedly wise people, who are on the road to intelligence. We don’t just want to know what we are supposed to do anymore but we are curious to find out all the reasons why and all the ways of how we can get it done. That way we will be able to find our own reasons, our own methods, how we can fit them into our lives. This is how we become individuals. Yes, we all need to breathe, eat and sleep but we actually all do it a bit differently. 

The one thing nobody ever taught us is breathing itself. The midwife, the doctor and our parents were all relieved when they heard us crying out for the first time and took our first breath in, and assumed we did that naturally. But there is the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS, when the baby stops breathing and it can happen without any warning in the first year of life. It still puzzles doctors today.

When you look at a child breathing naturally, you see the stomach rising and the full lungs are getting filled up. As we grow older we tend to forget to breathe fully. Shallow, shorter breaths become more common, that signals our body that something is not going right. Women usually take shallower breaths than men, only from the upper lungs so their waistline shows up narrower. 

I hope from today on you will remember Oxygen with a capital O, something special that we have the privilege to breathe in, to sustain us, to get to each  of our cells.

I am inviting you to marvel at oxygen. The first stars in the universe just 250 million years after the Big Bang produced oxygen and when they exploded something like half a billion years after the Big Bang, oxygen spread into space. So we have evidence that 13.28 billion years ago we already had oxygen in our universe! Stars have been producing it ever since but  It is a gift that has only existed in the atmosphere for half of earth’s life. For the first half of the 4.5 billion years there was barely any oxygen in the atmosphere and no life was sustainable outside of oceans and seas. Mars could have had an atmosphere with oxygen but this element could not be kept there, oxygen escaped and life could not be sustained there.

So what happened on our Earth? We think we need trees and plants to supply us with oxygen, but the fact is that they need oxygen to start growing on land. So no, 2.5 billion years ago there was nothing on land, just rocks. No plants, no trees and no animals.

What about water-life? Life on Earth began about 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, and the first life forms were single-celled organisms similar to bacteria.

As long as 3 billion years ago oxygen appeared in the oceans as a byproduct of cyanobacterial photosynthesis but at that time it would have instantly been sucked up” by hungry microbes, ferrous iron, and other sinks, keeping it from escaping into the atmosphere.

“It’s the start of a very long interval that culminated in complex life,” says Roger Summons, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT. “It took another roughly 1.7 billion years for animals similar to those we have today to evolve. But the presence of molecular oxygen in the ocean and the atmosphere means that organisms that respire oxygen could thrive.”

Estimates have placed the start of the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), a period that scientists believe marked the beginning of oxygen’s permanent presence in the atmosphere  at around 2.3 billion years ago, 

Since its first appearance 2.33 billion years ago, oxygen accumulated in high enough concentrations to have a weathering effect on rocks just 10 million years later. 

“Complex life couldn’t really get a decent hold on the planet until oxygen was prevalent in the deep ocean,” Summons says. “And that took a long, long time. But this is the first step in a cascade of processes.” 

600 Ma

The accumulation of atmospheric oxygen allowed the formation of an ozone layer. What is ozone? It is an inorganic molecule consisting of 3 oxygen atoms  that will easily break down to a molecule of two oxygens in lower levels. When we used to tan at home, we did smell ozone and I kind of liked it!

Plants appeared about 500 million years ago. 

So eighth ninth of earth’s life there was no plant life on land! To carbon based life Oxygen is the fuel!

Oxygen! Take a deep breath in, feel your stomach rise and imagine all your cells receiving life!

When you open your shoulders, lift your chest up and keep your head straight you can breathe in fully filling the lower part of your lungs first, then the upper part. Experience  your chest rising with a deep and slow breath. Hold it for a second and slowly exhale. You just did a mini meditative or mindful breathing when you focused on your present breathing here and now. See how easy it is? How do you feel? 

There are so many ways you can exercise your breathing!

There is aerobic breathing, when you take quick breaths about 120 times in a minute. In a standing position, bending forward, you can hold onto your knees, first you empty your lungs, and start to breathe in succession. It is not easy!

For calming yourself, you can use the box breathing. Imagine a square, decide how many counts you use on each side. Let’s say 4 counts. Go up on one side, inhale for 4 counts, go across the next side while holding your breath for 4, go down for four counts and exhale, complete the square and for four counts keep your lungs empty. Now start again to draw your square and inhale for four counts.

Please  check out our website to learn about more breathing exercises! 

For now however just keep experimenting and do not feel the need to commit to anything just yet!

As I said, we are learning the reasons why we are doing things, how we can do them and what is the best way for you.

I hope you will not think of chemistry lessons, more like the most abundant element on earth, O for Oxygen with the atomic number of 8 that makes up three fifths of your body!

So I might have said before that we are 50% banana but we are 66% oxygen!

This is why we probably need to talk about oxygen when we talk about food too.

But for now go outside, find trees and inhale the oxygen they produce. Think about their ancestors half a million years ago that made life on land possible by bringing photosynthesis onto land!