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Minnakht t1_j9yvnbx wrote

Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. There's not exactly a constant amount of these, because for instance radiation can convert nitrogen atoms into oxygen at some very slow pace, but it doesn't change very much even over a long time. Chemical reactions generally can't change what element an atom is, but they can take particles apart to build something else out of them. So as long as water particles have their hydrogens taken off to build hydrocarbons out of them, that reduces the amount of water, but the amount of hydrogens and oxygens remains the same.

And, contrarywise, when a hydrocarbon burns, the hydrogens from it rejoin with oxygen to make water again.

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[deleted] t1_ja03pa2 wrote

[removed]

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Blissful_Altruism t1_ja0e8sn wrote

> Rutherford had found out that the nucleus of the nitrogen atom could be disintegrated by firing fast alpha particles into nitrogen. He asked Blackett to use a cloud chamber to find visible tracks of this disintegration, and by 1925, he had taken 23,000 photographs showing 415,000 tracks of ionized particles. Eight of these were forked, and this showed that the nitrogen atom-alpha particle combination had formed an atom of fluorine, which then disintegrated into an isotope of oxygen 17 and a proton.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Blackett

It is 100% possible but is an extremely, very very rare occurrence.

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ArcherofFire t1_ja01csg wrote

Excuse me, exactly which nuclear reaction do you think is taking place to convert nitrogen into oxygen?

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Minnakht t1_ja04jp5 wrote

Uhh, being hit with an alpha particle randomly somewhere where something radioactive is exposed to air? I think Patrick Blackett proved that's what happens when that happens, back in 1925 or so.

It absolutely is an incredibly insignificant amount, but I didn't want to say "the number of oxygens on Earth is perfectly fixed and they're just cycled through being part of different particles", because even the number of oxygen atoms on Earth goes up or down. Probably more down as we send it into space? I don't know.

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vasopressin334 t1_ja0dqt3 wrote

Yes, in fact about a hundred tons of atmosphere are lost to space every day, mostly on the trailing side as earth moves through space. https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-loses-hundreds-of-tons-atmosphere-to-space-every-day/amp

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Blissful_Altruism t1_ja0fp3o wrote

This is one of those things that sounds concerning until you remember it’s been happening for billions of years so clearly it’s not an issue

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mfb- t1_ja2bm7b wrote

Oxygen isn't a relevant process (although technically possible: Nitrogen-15 + neutron can become nitrogen-16 which decays to oxygen-16), but carbon is: Nitrogen-14 + neutron -> carbon-14 + proton. That's the dominant way carbon-14 is produced. It decays back to nitrogen over thousands of years, and we use that process for radiocarbon dating.

/u/Minnakht /u/ArcherofFire

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