Air and Water Topics

Let's talk about air and water today.

Air: 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% argon.

We can say that nitrogen is the main element of the chemical compounds used in fertilizers. Argon is the gas we use to weld stainless steel. We probably all know about oxygen. It's the gas that burns everything, it's dangerous, but it's also essential. One of the building blocks of life.

The thickness of the atmosphere also varies depending on the location, at the poles it's around 7 km, but above the equator it increases up to 17 km. In other words, the atmosphere is bulging over the equator. This is because of the rotation of the earth around itself. Centrifugal force, you know. We all learned about it at school. Of course, there's also the effect of the moon on the atmosphere, I don't know how much thicker it is where the moon coincides. Maybe this effect was taken into account in these 17 km. 

There is also water vapor and some other gases like carbon dioxide, hydrogen, methane in small amounts in the atmosphere, in the air we breathe.

Because these other gases are usually in very small amounts, they are measured in ppm, which means parts per million. For example, carbon dioxide was measured at about 391 ppm in 2021, which is 0.0391%. Some sources mention that this value has exceeded 400 ppm these days.

If carbon dioxide is this low, then it seems like there is nothing to be afraid of. Imagine, oxygen 21%, carbon dioxide 0.04%.

Interesting, the fuel for us living things is the food we take in. We get our life energy by burning this food in our cells. We expel the smoke, carbon dioxide, through our lungs. 

How much carbon dioxide do we release as we breathe in and out of our lungs?

After a lot of searching, I found this rate in a source.  The rate of carbon dioxide was about 4%-5% of our breath. Still, this rate seemed very low to me, I was thinking it couldn't be less than 20%. 

This ratio is called the RQ value. Actually, it is not very well known yet, but it is possible to get information about how much we burn the nutrients we take and how healthy our body is by evaluating this ratio. 

In the laboratory, they measure this value in great detail with a 20-minute breath test and it is possible to learn about some diseases with breath analysis. As far as I can see, they have even produced a simple device that can analyze and give information about the carbon dioxide ratio with a single breath. Although experts probably know better what the normal level of this value should be, the results should be evaluated by experts, but it is good that they have produced a device that can do such a test quickly. 

In other countries they can actually work and produce something. I wish we could do it too.

There are also various other breath tests, especially breath tests for stomach ailments. 

But health is not our topic now. Today we decided to talk about air and water.

Yes, if the rate of carbon dioxide in the air is so low, it means that the efforts of all those plants to produce oxygen are really insufficient despite all their efforts. There must have once been huge forests for all that oxygen in the atmosphere, otherwise how else would you produce up to 21% oxygen! 

These values are really interesting. However, I was expecting the oxygen obtained from photosynthesis to be much higher. 

Think about it, plants use all that solar energy, break down carbon dioxide in the air, accumulate carbon in their bodies and release oxygen into the air. But the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is not even 1%, not even a thousandth! 

Even though carbon dioxide is so little in the air, it still seems to be a lot!

Think of all those forests, how many m3 of trees are there in the world, can you imagine? 

Those trees grow every year. Even though their growth rate is not very fast, almost all of them grow new leaves in the spring and shed their leaves in the fall. The main substance of all these leaves is carbon! The carbon collected from the air through photosynthesis first becomes leaves, then turns yellow, dries up and falls into the soil. 

By the way, algae in the seas are much more effective in cleaning the air from carbon dioxide than forests. This issue should not be ignored either. 

It is said that 70-80% of the oxygen production from carbon dioxide in the world is done by algae, algae, that is, seaweeds!

All other plants produce the remaining 20%. So it's not just forests, even the lettuce you eat produces oxygen, think how many plants there are in the world. While all these plants are struggling, algae release four times more oxygen into the atmosphere. 

There are floating islands of algae in the oceans. But mostly algae are found spread out on the surface of the water. It is a good food source for fish.

Is that enough about the weather?

Enough. Let's look at water. When I say water, of course I will talk about drinking water. We will talk about the salty water in the seas in another article.

Water (drinking water): We usually say H2O, but drinking water contains a lot of salt minerals. In milligrams per liter of water 

Sodium (Na) 175 mg

Potassium (K) 12 mg

Chloride (Cl) 250 mg

Calcium (Ca) 200 mg

Sulfate (SO4) 250 mg

Fluoride (F) 1.5 mg

Copper (Cu) 2 mg

There are many minerals and elements. These are the ones that are at least over 1 mg.

These values are the maximum values written in Turkish standards. Drinking water contains many more minerals such as iron, selenium, zinc, boron, but the rates of these minerals in the rest of the list are now very low.

So maybe we actually get a lot of the minerals we need from drinking water. Maybe not, that's for sure! 

The human body, or living things, is made up of a lot of minerals. Mostly carbon compounds, of course, but also water, a little bit of calcium for our bones, but other elements are also quite diverse.

Even our blood contains iron, as you know. I mean, without iron, how would we be able to transmit the carbon dioxide from our cells to our lungs, would we be able to live if the smoke from the chimney stayed inside us? Likewise, it is the red blood cells in our blood that carry and distribute the needed oxygen to the cells, that is iron. 

As I mentioned in my article the other day, many enzymes secreted by your body contain manganese (Mn) and magnesium (Mg). Who knows what other interesting elements are in our bodies? If I tried to count them, they would not fit here. But they are very few, in milligrams, maybe even less.

In essence, what I am trying to say in this article is this. If you have noticed, both the carbon dioxide content in the air and the mineral content in water are very low. The ratios of various elements in our bodies are also very low.

However, life has come to a balance with such low ratios of minerals or carbon dioxide. In other words, I can say that our life actually depends on cotton threads in a sense. 

Our life balance is built with very fine balances!

Looking at these very low values, I occasionally notice commentators who minimize the environmental problems brought to the agenda as global warming. 

However, I think those who minimize this problem are very wrong. As I said, life is really hanging by a thread. And we are blatantly destroying the world.

Since even huge forests cannot clean the air sufficiently, it would be a much more logical solution for us to prevent the factors that pollute the air. 

Think about it, even if we doubled the amount of forests in the world, it wouldn't do that much good. After all, all those forests don't produce as much work as algae.

We haven't found another habitable planet yet, and I don't think we will for a long time. 

So I say let's take care of our beautiful Earth, the only habitable planet we have.

Love and respect to everyone from Moscow